MALDAENA

"Her dress was a silvery gown bordered with Velaryon teal, made of four layers, and yet she still felt distinctly cold as the shivering wind of night swept through the castle. It was the hour of the Bat, and she was up for the night for the second time. Her precious lord husband was still asleep, or at least so she thought. He was always so beautiful in his sleep, when his fine features were smoothened from his troubles and made into a marble figure of contentment. She did not know for how long he had waited for her to bring him a child, but together they had spoken of it for nigh on two years and six moons back. And yet the gods seemed to still be waiting with this final gift for them...

For all its volcanic activity and smoke, Dragonstone could be a dreary, sullen place when the rain and summer storms had been doing their battering as usual. She still preferred her own comfortable home at High Tide back on Driftmark, where the isolation was better, though she would never complain about it to anyone. She was pleased to be here and had grown accustomed to the place. Viserys had shown her all its crevaces and walkways, each stone dragon which held a lantern now had its own personality to her, each stone gargoyle muttering to her with the same grudging face as their castellan Lord Stannis as she walked past in the dark corridors, only lit by torchlight just now. The sun was a far foreign friend, a dream of yellow somewhere in a different world, on another side of each an ocean of sleep and dull dreams and nightly tears, and she would soon hope to dwell in that second wave of that ocean again, so that she might wake up. But she knew that those hour would come slowly, and so she went to the library again, as she had done and did almost every night of late.

The library was dark and empty, echoing of silence and ancient knowledge standing in tall rows between dark wooden beams and marble vaults. Noone was here at present moment, though the young maester's novice Pylos would sometimes peruse the shelves at this late hour as well as her, polite and quiet as ever, standing at his side of the room like a solemn shadow of scholarship and never asking her a word, taking notes of the collection and gathering some tomes for his own research, after first asking her lord husband or Lord Stannis, of course. He seemed mostly to be interested in the listings of the castle's shipments over the years, asking Maester Cressen and Lord Stannis about the trade routes and what they should do to counter the streams of ships stopping off at Gulltown and leaving their riches over there.

If she had to have a guess, the young man came from the Reach, most like, and she could hear it on his voice, if ever she had met a reachman before. Close to Oldtown itself perhaps, though she had never been there, nor even on the mainland of Westeros on the other side of Blackwater Bay. The Velaryons were always a sea people, and her father had travelled to many a port, but seldom stayed for more than two nights at each stop. He had gone to King's Landing more times than he could count, and been to Braavos, Pentos, Lys, Myr, Tyrosh, Gulltown and even White Harbor, but that was as far as he went. Her brothers [ ]

She went up closer to the bookshelves and stood at the beautifully sculpted dragon stand which ended in a platform upon which one could place one or several books. Her fingers felt the touch of the smooth grey stone as she leaned on the [stand/staple/pillar/[ ]]. I lean on you as I lean on my lord husband in this, she thought. If only he were still awake now and here to hold me in the dark and cold night, though I would not wish it for his sake. Viserys was always there to comfort her when she needed it, to hold her and warm her with his fiery blood and to kiss her so gently and with innermost devotion on her pale forehead and tell her that everything would be all right in her ever straining worries. He was the best husband she could ever have hoped for, and she longed for the embrace of his chest against hers, his calming words to soothe her fret and angst.

But now she raised her greenish turquoise eyes towards the ceiling of the library instead, wondering how many frightened wives of previous lords of Dragonstone had previously stood as she did now, contemplating her fate and future before herself and the gods. Many, she supposed. Most of them had finally gotten with child sooner or later, and some of them had died, and some of them lived. Some had met fates worse than death, such as Queen Rhaenyra when she was eaten up by her half-brother Aegon the second and his terrible dragon Sunfyre before the eyes of her son. No, that was much too terrible to think about just now. She had to stop herself from thinking such abhorrent thoughts in her anguish. They were all long gone now, along with their dragons. They could not be allowed to haunt her dreams or thoughts now, even as she stood thinking about them, seeing them as clear as day. If Rhaenyra had prayed to the gods, they should have helped her, and not have her killed before her own children's eyes. Aegon the third had never been the same again after seeing his mother get eaten alive. And so there were things in this world worse than never having children, she supposed, and tried telling herself that, all the while still feeling desperately alone.

At times she doubted that The Seven were truly in their favour, both her house and that of her husband's, as the Velaryons and Targaryens had seldom prospered from their prayers, only from their ships and dragons. But perhaps if I pray as a young child again, she thought, like I used to do when I was a little girl, and not as this arrogant calling for the continuation of our line. What if I pray again like I did when I was little, hoping for Viserys to choose me, and Lord Stannis to let him? Then yes, perhaps the gods would listen to the prayers and sounds of a lost little girl with silver white hair and a heart almost as pale in this seven-parted land of barbarians and violence, fire and blood...

There suddenly came a sound, like a crack of thunder from above. Could it still be the storm? She thought not so, but she could not be sure. Strange things happened with the sounds of the castle, though, and what had reached her ears as a [ ] might only have started from the sound of a cat or bird smacking into the side of one of the hundreds of smoke pipes meandering through rooms and rooves. The sound would multiply and grow, and then at last it would reach the inner confines of the Stone Drum, and all the other rooms, including their sleeping chambers, the corridors and the library.

"My lady?"

It was Pylos who spoke to her. Apparently she had jumped to, and flinched.

"Oh... Hello, Pylos. I must have heard a sound coming from the pipes again."

Pylos smiled.

"Perhaps only a cat", he said. "The twists and turns of the castle do play tricks on the sounds."

"Yes..." she agreed. Perhaps only a cat.

Pylos turned to his charts and parchments again, going over them with a small straight quill. She could not be sure whether he was actually scratching some lines on the parchments, or merely moving the pen over them to help him think. He was still standing some good thirty feet away from her, in the midst of the hallways, a blueish grey shadow with short-cropped hair shaded himself by the bookshelves to either side.

"Pylos?" She suddenly heard herself asking.

The young maester carefully angled his head back in the dark of the library corridor to look at her.

"Yes, my lady?" His eyes looked puzzled.

"I had a question that I thought I might ask you..."

"Certainly", Pylos said, bowing somewhat while at the same time straightening his back.

"It is only that... Viserys and I are so troubled by the... My... Our... attempts at childbearing... We have waited for more than a year now, and yet there has been no living child as of yet."

That was an understatement. It was more like a year and a half by this point, almost two perhaps.

"Have no fear, my lady. You are both very young and healthy, as far as I can tell. I am sure that you will come down with a child within time."

They were indeed young, of course. Viserys was twenty-and-two, and Maldaena herself [twenty-one? Twenty? Nineteen?]. So was Pylos. Very young but also very mature. Twenty-and-five perhaps, and with a healthy and spry pair of inquisitive blue eyes.

"I certainly hope so, but... Is there something more we could do? Perhaps regarding my eating... Or the way in which I and Viserys... lie with each other?"

Pylos seemed to become thoughtful at the suggestion, as he took his glass spectacles and put them back down into his maester's robe pocket.

"Hm... I suppose so, my lady. Although... Had not Cressen already tried such things? I heard so."

"Yes, we did", Maldaena confirmed. "My mother had lots of seafood before she had me, and they say that it is good for the woman's body and for child-growing, and so I try to eat as much raeykes and crayfish and crab as I can. Fish as well, although we always do of course..."

She felt so stupid talking about it aloud, and most of all in front of Pylos, who seemed so clever that he was entirely off in his own world of books most of the time, and yet she must certainly ask him. If not Pylos, he who seemed almost cleverer than to be in this world, to tell her what to do, then who? Her own maester back at Driftmark, [Ludeon? Valdyn? Veldyn? Valdaenon? ], who also happened to be her second cousin by her father's elder side, had given her and Viserys sage advice, just as he had for her mother when she herself had been born, and yet she [ ].

She trusted Cressen, of course, yes, but Cressen was old, and she did not have any proof of his child-growing abilites, after all, since Lord Stannis and his wife Shireen had also only ever had stillborns, stillborn boys, the lot of them. And Shireen...

She shuddered at the thought, as she felt the cold winds of the castle sweeping in ever more now, that she stood and thought about it.

Pylos looked at her with a kind face and calming eyes.

"It is cold here, yes", he said. "Although it is still the summer. The season have been... Strange of late, I would say. And Cressen agrees as well. It is not every summer that we first have a massive heatwave and then a cold misty storm, he told me. I have looked at the record and confirmed what he said."

And so he does not trust the mere word of Cressen either, she thought, although surely it would have been Cressen himself who had written down the charts of it. How strange... How funny, she thought.

"I have tried my best to eat as much crayfish and other seafood as I can", she told him. "My mother did when she was pregnant with me. But so far, it has not helped."

Pylos stood still, thinking on what to say next, as he regarded her with quiet thoughtfulness.

"Do you and Prince Viserys lay often?"

She was taken aback.

"Often...? I... I do not know..." She flinched with her fingers, self-conscious now, trying to cover up herself with her hands in her slender/[ ] teal nightgown.

"More than once a moon?" Pylos asked.

"Oh, yes. Certainly. Almost once every three days, I should say. Oftentimes more."

She hindered herself, feeling somewhat abashed. "Sometimes... Much more."

"Hm." Pylos made a sound as he regarded her again. "Some maesters believe that a woman can only become with child when the full moon is out. Others believe that it is only once in a moon's time, but that it might as well fall on the day when the moon is gone, or only a sliver of crescent. I for one am of the opinion that fertilisation should well be possible at any time, so long as the woman is healthy. I can see no proof as to any otherwise. I believe it is only old peasant superstition, nothing more to thinkabout. But the frequency can wellbe of importance all the same."

Maldaena did not know what to say to that.

"So... as for the food, maester... "

It still felt strange to call the young man maester. He was close to her own age, surely, and he would not feel like a true maester in at least another ten years, she thought, regardless of how many books he had read and studied at the Citadel. But she knew not what else to call him, apart from his name, which she had already used several times, and so she went with his official title.

"As for the food... Do you think it matters? Are there any other foodstuffs which are good for women to become with child?"

"Yes, certainly. Hundreds, in fact. Each little keep seems to have its own special concoctions, from what I have seen. Some believe in blueberries, others in honey, nuts and dates... Salmon is certainly said to have good effects in preparing the mother for being with child, according to Maester Relys from the Riverlands."

Pylos continued on.

"Good Queen Alysanne attempted to bathe in Jonquil's Pool in Maidenpool when she was pregnant with her and King Jaehaerys's first child, but was set upon by assassins of the Faith who stopped her. She later said that had she been allowed the visit in its entirety, it would have healed the child."

Maldaena did know the story, but she had not considered it in a long time, being all far too obvious and tangible at her forefront to even think about on a deeper level. But now she was reminded.

"Yes... " she said. "I remember..." And remember she might well do, since Queen Alysanne was hear foremother, one of many from House Targaryen and Velaryon both. Perhaps the greatest of them all, who had had a full of thirteen children with her husband. Perhaps she knew what she was talking about after all.

But Maldaena did not have the power of a queen of the Seven Kingdoms to make such a voyage, and if not even the queen herself had managed to do so without it being ended or cut short by terrible troubles, Maldaena surely could not hope for a better visit herself. Besides, she did not particularly like to think about travelling to the mainland at all. It was a green land, yes, but a terrible, violent land filled with dirty, embroiled peasants, roaming thieves and robbers, sprawling with disease and filth and all else which her beloved island home was mostly spared from. After all, she was a Velaryon. Her home was here, in the heart of the sea. Not Maidenpool.

If she did not need any further reason, Viserys had also told her that Daenerys' captors had been found out by Lord Mooton at Maidenpool.

She went back in to the corridor, and then into the drawing room, which was placed to the side. She took out her staple[board ] and a large white sheet of fabric, as well as oil colors, and aquarelles, and her large old pensel brush, and began painting.

She let the paint brush lap in shades of grey and shades of blue over the fabric, as the waves swept by and thrushed in the water outside. The moon was up, making it easier to see, and all of the blue colours of the sea were throwing themselves in waves all around. Dark blue, grey, blackish grey, slowly waning storm clouds above, turquoise and aquamarine waves, and the white of the foams...

The seagulls were circulating above as well, and she saw the flying fish swintering by in their flittering flocks. That was a rare enough sight, moving across the water as swiftly and trickly as raindrops smattering on the surface, but they were gone almost as soon as they came, heading west for a short while before most like returning out again in a day or two. They came from the Narrow Sea to the east, occasionally wandering their way in across the Gullet to the northeastern parts of Blackwater Bay, and passing by Driftmark and Dragonstone on their way, but they almost never made it far further than the Gullet, and certainly not down to King's Landing, or at least so as far as she had heard.

She swept her pensel around the [sheet/duke/board], painting blue waves and wonderful lines that enveloped in each other in the blue of night... To paint was not a woman's chore among most of the Andals on land, but the Velaryons had always let their women take part in the artistic activities, ever since Old Valyria. Her father and uncle had encouraged her to do it, and she was a child prodigy, and soon as good of an artist that she might have been hailed for it, if anyone had seen it other than her family. But they certainly loved her paintings as well, and her father had several of her best works put up, adorning the walls back home at Driftmark. Viserys too was preciously fond of her gifts and talents, and at times he would simply stand, watching her paint with fascination, all the while sneaking up behind her and kissing her and holding her close. Sometimes, she loved it. Sometimes, it was annoying. But she would smile, and giggle nonetheless. He was a sweet man, her Viserys, when he was not angry, and with her, he seldom was. She sensed that he did his best to protect herself from that side of his. And just now, whatever the case, he could neither be angry nor appreciative, neither look at her paintings nor come up to kiss and hold her from behind as she painted, as he was still lying asleep in their shared bed.

...

After having stayed painting for what must have surely been close to an hour, or perhaps even more, as the sky outside turned ever darker and the great grey-blue wax candle next to her burned down, she finally accepted to paint finished the painting some other time. She had gotten far. Maybe a quarter of it was done. That was well. And so, she put her painting things down at the table close by, told one of the night-servants standing guard to have them taken to her handmaidens and have them wash it and clean the pensel brushes and else in the morning. The servant, a young man, nodded, as she slid past the tired, poor, dark and hollow-eyed guards, Maekon, a lithe blonde man who looked somewhat like her own Viserys, but without his intelligence in his light blue flickering eyes, and the great strong [Strong /Dark Valdyn], six feet, close perhaps to seven almost, with his eyes a deep purple, as purple as the sagging lines beneath his eyes, but his stubble on his enormously broad chin dark, and so she supposed that his hair would have been also, if he was not almost bald, and had the dark edges of his hair close to covered up by his helm. She passed them by, pitying them for having to stand there, as she knew they had had a particularly long pass today, as she bid them a good night and then she went and slid back into her and Viserys's bedchamber.

She walked back up to the bed, lifted the heavy coverlets of duck, eyjder and geese down, and snuggled her way down again, right next to the side of Viserys's still sleeping form. As she kissed him slightly on his neck and forehead, he barely moved, and she thought that he truly looked like a sleeping dragon as he lay there, and she did her best to try and get to sleep again. It was close to being the darkest point of night, and so there must be another three or four hours before the sun began to rise, but still... She had to go to sleep as soon as possible, and so she tried, and did her best, as she eased her way next to him, and prayed for sleep.

...

Please, Gods, make me sleep, make me find my peace, and make me sleep good and well, and to wake again well-rested with my husband still at my side, and then when you find it goodly enough, in some time, please at last find your peace to go and plant a child deep within me. Viserys's child. For we have waited for a long time alreday. Thankyou. Thankyou, dear Gods, thankyou so much in advance, and please."