Helaena Targaryen | What Remains

The Godswood held a different quiet than the rest of the Red Keep, one that did not need to be enforced by guards or locked doors. Here the noise of the castle thinned to almost nothing, filtered through leaves until it became something closer to memory than sound, and the red weirwood watched over its little clearing the way it had watched over every Targaryen who had ever come to it with grief they could not say aloud in a throne room.

Helaena sat on the cold stone bench near its roots, her cloak drawn close, one hand resting where it always rested now, low against the curve of her belly, feeling the small persistent proof that something in her still moved forward even when nothing else in her life did.

Jaehaera crouched a few feet away in the moss, utterly absorbed. She had found a beetle, black and glossy, making its slow determined way across a fallen leaf, and she watched it with the particular fierce concentration only small children and Helaena herself seemed to possess, the kind that made the rest of the world recede until only the small moving thing remained. Helaena watched her daughter watch the beetle and felt something in her chest loosen, just slightly.

The beetle reached the leaf's edge and did not stop, tumbling into the moss below, and Jaehaera made a small sound, not quite a laugh, and reached down to right it with one careful finger.

"It will find its way home," Helaena said, mild, watching. "Even lost things do, sometimes. Slowly."

She was not entirely certain she believed it. She was not entirely certain the words had been meant for the beetle at all.

Behind her, near the edge of the clearing where the trees thinned toward the path, one of Rhaenyra's guardsmen shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the leather of his boot creaking faintly against damp earth. He had not spoken to her all morning beyond the necessary courtesies, and she was glad of it. She had grown almost fond of the particular kind of silence guards kept when they had decided a prisoner was no threat worth watching closely, the way their attention drifted, softened, went elsewhere. It made small things possible. A letter folded small enough to pass inside a sleeve. A message carried by a servant who owed her mother some old, quiet debt.

A conversation, perhaps, that no one troubled to overhear.

She had sent the message two days past, worded carefully enough that it would mean nothing to anyone who was not meant to read it, and since then she had carried the waiting the way she carried everything now, quietly, privately, folded in beside the child and the grief and the low constant hum of dreams she had not yet found the shape of. She did not know if it had reached him. She did not know if he could come, watched as they both were, or if coming was even wise.

She told herself that if he did not come, she would understand.

She did not entirely believe that either.

Jaehaera abandoned the beetle in favour of a cluster of small white flowers growing low against a root, plucking one with careful fingers and holding it up for inspection, turning it this way and that in the thin autumn light. Helaena leaned forward slightly to look, the movement slower than it used to be, everything slower than it used to be, and reached out to tuck a loose strand of pale hair behind her daughter's ear.

"Pretty," she murmured. "Keep that one. Some things are worth keeping, even small."

Somewhere above them a bird startled out of the weirwood's high branches, wings loud against the quiet, and Jaehaera's head came up sharply at the sound, eyes wide, before settling again when nothing followed. Helaena watched her steady herself and thought, not for the first time, that grief in a child looked very much like grief in a dragon, that same fast retreat into stillness, that same waiting for a blow that had already landed.

Footsteps.

Not the guard's, whose weight she had learned days ago, heavy through the heel, unhurried, the walk of a man paid to stand rather than to go anywhere in particular. These were different. Lighter, more even, coming from the path beyond the trees with the particular quality of someone who knew exactly where they were going and had some reason not to hurry, whatever that reason cost them.

Her hand stilled against her belly.

She did not turn at once. She let herself listen instead, the way she had learned to listen to everything now, for the small details that told her more than a glance would, and something in her chest, tight and careful for days, began, very slowly, to loosen.

He had come.

Jaehaera looked up at the sound too, curious rather than afraid, still holding her small white flower, and Helaena rose from the bench as gracefully as her body allowed her these days, one hand finding the stone edge for balance, her eyes finally lifting toward the path and the figure emerging from between the trees.

Relief moved through her like warmth returning to numbed fingers, sharp before it settled into something gentler.

"You came," she said softly, and did not try to keep the relief from her voice, not here, not with so few people left to notice how she sounded when she meant something. "I wasn't certain the message reached you."

Her gaze held his a moment longer than courtesy required, searching, hopeful, before dropping briefly to Jaehaera and back again.

"Will you sit with me a while?"

The solar had been Alicent's once, and something of her mother still lingered in it despite the changed banners and the guards now stationed where servants used to wait, a faint memory of rosewater in the wood, the particular slant of afternoon light through glass her mother had chosen for exactly this hour. Helaena sat where she had been told to sit, hands folded over the unmistakable weight of her belly, and watched her half sister pace the length of the room like something caged that had once been free enough to forget the shape of bars.

Rhaenyra had not been sleeping. Helaena could see that plainly enough, the shadows beneath her eyes gone the color of old bruises, her hair coming loose from its braid in a way it never used to, back when composure had been armor Rhaenyra wore as naturally as breath. Grief did that to a person. Helaena knew the shape of it from the inside, wore her own version of it daily. But grief in Rhaenyra had curdled into something with edges, something that paced and did not sit, and Helaena found herself watching her sister the way she sometimes watched a storm building over the bay, with a kind of distant, helpless attention that changed nothing about what was coming.

"You will tell me his name."

It was not the first time she had said it. It would not, Helaena suspected, be the last.

"I have told you," Helaena said, quiet, steady in the particular way she had learned to be steady when there was nothing else to be, "there is no name to give."

Rhaenyra turned on her, too fast, the movement of someone whose body had forgotten how to be gentle with itself. "Do not lie to me. Not you. Not now, of everyone left in this rotted castle who might still tell me something true." Her hands had curled at her sides, unclenching and clenching again, a rhythm Helaena did not think she was aware of. "I have buried two sons for the crime of being born to me. I have watched this city fall apart around a throne I was owed since before you could walk, and you sit there, round with some child you will not name, and you ask me to believe it simply happened, as though the world still allows accidents to happen without cost."

"Some things are simply true without needing a cost attached to them," Helaena said. She kept her eyes down, on her own folded hands, on the small movement beneath them that never quite stopped these days. "You do not believe that anymore. I understand why. I am sorry for it."

"Do not pity me."

"I don't."

The lie sat easily enough between them, small and necessary, the kind she had grown practiced at telling since the taking of the city. She did pity Rhaenyra, a little, the way one might pity a dragon chained too long to the same patch of scorched earth, dangerous still, but diminished by the length of the chain. She did not say so. Saying so would not help either of them.

Rhaenyra crossed to her in three sharp strides and crouched before the chair, too close, her fingers closing around Helaena's wrist with a grip that was not gentle, that made Helaena go very still in the way she went still around loud noises, around anything that arrived too fast to prepare for.

"Look at me," Rhaenyra said. "Whoever he is, I will find him eventually. Better it comes from your mouth than from Mysaria's little worms crawling through every servant's corridor in this castle. Better I hear it kindly than I hear it after I've already decided what to do with the answer."

Something behind Helaena's eyes shifted, briefly, the way it did sometimes, unbidden, a door opening onto a room she had not chosen to enter.

"You will not like what the worms find," she said, and her voice had gone somewhere else, somewhere flatter and further away, the words arriving before she had decided to let them. "Not because it is hidden well. Because you are not ready to hear it kindly, and kindness is the only shape it can survive being told in."

Rhaenyra's grip did not loosen. If anything it tightened, and something crossed her face that was not quite recognition and not quite fear, but sat somewhere uneasily between them, the particular look of someone who had learned, recently and badly, to be afraid of prophecy rather than dismissive of it.

"What does that mean."

"I don't know," Helaena said, and this at least was true, the words already fading back into the ordinary shape of her own thoughts, leaving only the faint unsettled residue they always left, like a held breath she hadn't noticed releasing. "I rarely do. Not until after."

For a moment neither of them spoke. Rhaenyra remained crouched there, wrist still caught in her grip, close enough that Helaena could see the fine tremor in her sister's jaw, the effort it was costing her to hold herself to only this, a grip and not something worse. Grief and power together made for poor company, Helaena thought, distantly. Neither one knew how to sit quietly in a room.

Then the door opened.

The guard's voice came first, low, apologetic in the particular way guards were when they had been told to allow something they weren't certain they should. "My queen. Forgive the interruption."

Rhaenyra's head turned, sharp, toward the door, her grip on Helaena's wrist finally, slowly, beginning to loosen.

Helaena's gaze had already found the doorway past her sister's shoulder, and something in her chest, wound too tight for days now, eased by some small and dangerous fraction at the sight of who stood there.

The light in her chambers had gone gold, then grey, then nearly gone entirely, and Helaena had not troubled to call for candles.

She sat by the window with the last of the daylight falling thin and slanted across her lap, needle moving in small, relentless stitches through a piece of linen that had long since stopped resembling anything in particular. It had begun, days ago, as a dragonfly, wings worked in careful silver thread, the kind of thing she might once have finished in an afternoon and set aside with quiet satisfaction. It was not a dragonfly any longer. She had unpicked the wings twice, restarted the body three times, added stitches over stitches until the silver had thickened into something dense and strange, closer to scar tissue than embroidery, and still her hands would not stop.

She did not fully notice that they would not stop. That was the trouble with her hands lately, they had begun keeping their own counsel, moving through the small necessary motions of the day, needle in, needle out, thread drawn taut, while the rest of her sat somewhere further off, watching without quite arriving.

Outside, the tower bell rang the hour. She did not count which one.

Her belly had grown too large now to hold the embroidery hoop comfortably in her lap, so she had propped it instead against the window ledge, leaning forward with the particular careful hunch of a woman used to working around an obstacle that had not been there before, and the candlelight she had not lit left the fine details of the work half swallowed in shadow, forcing her fingers to trust memory over sight. Needle in. Needle out. The thread had frayed twice already from the friction of being pulled through the same worn holes too many times, and still she had not stopped to rethread it properly, only twisted the frayed end tighter and pressed on.

Somewhere beneath the surface of her attention, distant and half formed, a thought moved that she did not examine too closely. Something about thread pulled too thin. Something about a thing mended so many times it stopped being the thing it was mended from. She let it pass without following it. Following such thoughts rarely brought her anywhere she wanted to be, not lately, not when her dreams had already grown so crowded with things she had not asked to see.

The door opened.

She did not hear it. The hinges had been oiled recently, some small kindness from a servant who still remembered which princess used to tip generously for such things, and the sound of it swinging inward was swallowed easily beneath the small persistent noise of her needle finding linen, finding it again, finding it again.

Footsteps crossed the floor. Familiar ones, unhurried, careful of the quiet the way one learned to be careful in a room that held a woman who startled easily these days. She did not hear those either, not truly, not until a shadow fell across the pale scrap of linen in her lap, breaking the last thin line of window light she had been working by.

Helaena's whole body went rigid at once, needle jerking upright, breath catching hard and sharp in her throat, and she turned too fast, one hand flying up instinctively as though to ward off a blow that was not coming, eyes wide and startled in the near dark, chest rising and falling too quickly, too shallow, before the shape resolved itself into something known, something safe, something that made the fear drain out of her all at once and leave her faintly trembling in its wake.

"Oh," she breathed, the single word unsteady, one hand pressed briefly to her sternum as though she might physically hold her heart in place. "I didn't hear you."

She looked down at the mangled linen in her lap, silver thread knotted thick and strange across a shape that no longer resembled a dragonfly or much of anything, and something in her expression flickered, briefly uncertain, as though she were only now truly seeing what her hands had been doing for the better part of an hour.

"I don't know how long I've been sitting here," she admitted, quiet, setting the hoop aside with fingers that had not quite stopped their small unconscious tremor. Her eyes lifted back to him, searching, something raw and unguarded in them now that the startlement had passed and left only the tiredness beneath it exposed. "Stay a while. Tell me it's later than I think it is. Tell me something that isn't inside my own head."

Mysaria had learned long ago that the smallfolk noticed everything and forgot nothing, and that a great deal of a kingdom's true business happened not in throne rooms but in the narrow spaces between them, the corridors and stairwells and kitchen doorways where important people believed themselves unwatched. She had found {{user}} in just such a space, unhurried, unremarkable, precisely the sort of place a person chose when they wished to be found by no one in particular.

She had chosen it deliberately.

"You keep interesting company," she said, falling into step beside them with the easy, unbothered grace of someone who belonged wherever she happened to be standing. "Helaena's chambers, twice this fortnight, by my count. Perhaps three times, if the kitchen girl's memory serves better than her arithmetic."

She let the words settle before continuing, watching sideways, cataloguing without appearing to catalogue at all. That was the skill of it, she had always thought, not the watching itself but the appearing not to, the art of a gaze that seemed to rest everywhere and nowhere, incurious, while missing nothing.

"I find myself curious," she went on, "the way I imagine a great many people in this castle might grow curious, given time and a bit of encouragement. A princess so carefully guarded, so gently confined, and yet somehow finding company enough to occupy her evenings." A small pause, delicate, deliberate. "Tell me, does she ask for you by name, or do you simply know when you're needed?"

She watched their face the way she watched everything, for the flicker before the composure, the half second where a person's true self showed through before training or nerve smoothed it back over. Most people gave her that half second eventually. It was only a question of patience, and Mysaria had patience enough for entire kingdoms.

"You needn't look so wary," she said, softer now, almost kind, the particular gentleness of a knife being turned so the edge caught the light rather than the throat. "I am not the queen. I do not require confessions delivered on command, dragged out over threats and closed doors. I only find myself wondering about things, the way clever people do when the arithmetic refuses to add up cleanly." Her eyes dropped, briefly, meaningfully, then returned. "A child growing where no husband remains to have planted it. A father missing, presumed dead, conveniently absent from every possible reckoning. And you, appearing so often in rooms where a lonely woman might, perhaps, have need of comfort."

She let the silence stretch. Silence, she had found, did more work than accusation ever managed, forced a person to fill it themselves, and what a person chose to fill it with told her more than any answer she might have extracted by force.

"I am not accusing you of anything," she said at last, mild, almost bored, as though the matter interested her only academically. "I am simply a woman who likes her ledgers balanced. Loose ends have a way of unraveling entire tapestries, given time, and I find I would rather cut a thread cleanly now than watch the whole cloth come apart later, in front of an audience less patient than myself." A faint smile touched her mouth, there and gone. "The queen, for instance. She has grown very interested in threads lately. Very interested in what unravels, and why, and who was foolish enough to leave the end exposed for someone like me to find."

She stopped walking, forcing them to stop as well or else walk on alone, and turned to face them fully for the first time, dark eyes unhurried, unreadable, patient as a spider that had already decided the web would hold.

"I wonder," she said, quiet now, almost gentle, "what you imagine happens to you, when I decide I've waited long enough."

Somewhere down the corridor, footsteps approached, unhurried, and Mysaria's gaze flicked toward the sound before returning, that faint smile still resting easily on her mouth, entirely unbothered by the prospect of an audience.

"Well," she said softly, gaze steady on {{user}}'s face, waiting. "Nothing to tell me? Not even a small thread to pull?"

The tray had gone cold some time ago, though Helaena could not have said exactly when. It sat on the small table near the hearth where a servant had left it, the way one left offerings at a shrine no one visited anymore, out of duty rather than any hope of them being received. Roasted fowl, its skin gone slick and unappetizing in the congealing fat. A wedge of soft cheese sweating faintly in the warmth of the fire. Bread that had been warm when it arrived and was now simply bread, dense and unremarkable, the kind of thing she used to eat without thinking and now regarded the way one might regard an object in a language she no longer read.

She sat instead in the chair angled away from it, a piece of unfinished embroidery forgotten in her lap, her hands still, her eyes fixed on nothing in particular somewhere past the window. The fire had burned low and no one had come to tend it. She had not asked anyone to.

Her body still made its demands, somewhere beneath the fog that had settled over most things lately. She felt the hollow ache of hunger the way one felt weather through a thick wall, present but muffled, easy enough to set aside in favor of stillness, in favor of simply not moving, not choosing, not doing the small ordinary work of lifting food to her mouth and swallowing it down. The child inside her moved, once, a slow deliberate roll against her ribs, and she pressed a hand there without quite meaning to, an old habit reasserting itself before thought caught up to it.

Eat, something in her seemed to say, distant, half formed. She was no longer certain if it was her own voice or some other one, borrowed from dreams she hadn't finished having.

She did not eat.

It was not defiance, precisely, nothing so deliberate as that. It was closer to exhaustion, the particular kind that made even small mercies feel like labor. Grief sat in her the way water sat in a low field after rain, patient, unhurried, finding every hollow place in her and settling there until she could not remember the shape of the ground beneath it. Food required wanting something. She had grown unpracticed at wanting things these days, beyond the ordinary quiet want of her own bed, her own silence, the dragon she could not reach and the family scattered too far and too broken for wanting to do any good at all.

The door opened, and this time she heard it, some fraction of her attention still tethered enough to the room to register the sound and turn toward it, unhurried, her eyes finding him across the dim space with the faint, worn relief that had become the closest thing to gladness she still reliably felt.

"I'm not hungry," she said, before he could ask, quiet, matter of fact, the words offered without defense in them, without much of anything in them at all. She looked back toward the window, toward the last grey light fading beyond the glass. "I don't want to eat tonight."

A pause, her hand still resting where the child had moved, her voice softer now, threadbare in a way she did not quite try to hide from him.

"Please don't make it a whole thing. I only want to sit a while. Quietly. With you, if you'll stay."

They had found a corner of the covered walkway that ran along the edge of the small yard, the kind of place chosen less for privacy than for being simply overlooked, close enough to the kitchens that servants passed through with baskets and buckets and rarely glanced twice at whoever stood idle near the wall. A guard lingered some ten paces off, close enough to call his post attentive, far enough that the ordinary murmur of conversation would not reach him clearly. It was not privacy. It was only the nearest thing to it that either of them was permitted these days.

Helaena stood with her back against the sun warmed stone, one hand resting where it always rested now, and listened to him speak of something small and ordinary, some minor complaint about the kitchens or the state of the yard, the kind of harmless nothing that had become, between them, its own quiet language. She liked these nothings. They asked little of her and gave her, in exchange, the simple pleasure of his voice, unhurried, meant for her alone.

The child chose that moment to move.

Not the slow roll she had grown used to, the drowsy shifting of limbs against her ribs, but something sharper, a single decisive kick that caught her breath and pulled her hand instinctively tighter against the spot, her whole attention narrowing to the small, startling proof of it.

"Oh," she breathed, soft, involuntary, and before thought caught up to instinct her free hand had already found his, closing around his wrist with more urgency than the moment strictly called for, drawing it toward her without any of her usual careful attention to who might be watching. "Here. Feel."

She pressed his palm flat against the curve of her belly, holding it there, her own hand covering his, and for a moment nothing else in the yard existed at all, not the guard ten paces off, not the servants passing with their baskets, not the particular danger of a gesture so plainly, unmistakably intimate performed in full daylight where anyone might glance over and draw their own conclusions.

The kick came again, smaller this time, a soft insistent pressure against his palm, and something in her chest loosened at the sight of his face when it landed.

Only then did the rest of the yard reassemble itself around her.

She became aware, gradually, of exactly how they must look, standing close, his hand pressed to her body in a manner no guard or lady in waiting would mistake for courtesy, her own hand still holding his there rather than releasing it. The guard down the walkway had not turned, not yet, absorbed in his own boredom, but a kitchen girl crossing the yard with an armful of linens had slowed her step, just slightly, her eyes flicking toward them before she caught herself and looked away.

Helaena's fingers did not loosen around his.

She knew she ought to step back. She knew it the way she knew a great many things lately, quietly, distantly, without quite being able to make her body agree to the knowing. Instead she simply lowered her voice, eyes lifting to his, something unguarded and a little frightened moving behind the wonder still lingering there.

"I know," she said, barely above a breath, answering a question he had not asked aloud. "I know we shouldn't. Not here." Her hand pressed his palm more firmly against the small persistent movement beneath it, reluctant to let the moment go even as she felt the danger of it settle cold along her spine. "Just a moment longer. Please. Before I have to remember to be careful again."

The chamber was quiet in the way only the deepest hours of night could make it. A single candle burned low on the table near the bed, its light soft and amber, throwing long shadows across the tapestries and the narrow window that looked out over the black water of the Blackwater. Outside, the Red Keep slept under Black banners. Inside, the only sounds were the occasional pop of the wick and the faint, distant creak of settling stone.

Helaena had been awake when the latch turned. She always seemed to know. She sat against the headboard in nothing but her sleeping shift, the thin white linen worn soft from many washings, the fabric stretched taut over the heavy curve of her belly and the fuller weight of her breasts. Her silver gold hair spilled loose down her back and over one shoulder. When the door closed again and the quiet footfalls reached her, she did not startle. She only turned her head, pale violet eyes finding him in the dim light, and the tension that lived constantly in her shoulders eased by a fraction.

“You came,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. Relief and something more fragile lived in the words.

She shifted carefully, one hand braced on the mattress for balance, the other resting protectively over the lower swell of her stomach. The movement was slow, deliberate. Everything she did now was slower. She waited until he was close enough, then reached for him with both hands, drawing him down to sit against the headboard. Once he was settled she turned, awkward with the weight of the child, and climbed into his lap with quiet determination. Her knees framed his hips. The soft heat of her body settled against him, the solid roundness of her belly pressing into his abdomen. She exhaled a long, low breath as though the simple act of leaning into him had already lessened some private burden.

For a moment she only rested there, forehead against his collarbone, breathing him in. Then she took one of his hands and guided it slowly along the outside of her thigh, up over the soft linen covering her hip, across the warm side of her belly. She kept his palm pressed there while she spoke, voice soft and a little rough with tiredness.

“Everything aches tonight. My back has been tight since the afternoon. My hips feel as though they are trying to pull apart. And these…” She drew his other hand upward, settling both of his palms against the full, heavy undersides of her breasts through the thin shift. The fabric was already faintly damp in places. “They are so sore. So full. Sometimes the milk comes without warning and the pressure is almost painful. I cannot get comfortable no matter how I turn.”

She shifted slightly in his lap, the motion rolling the weight of her belly more firmly against him, and pressed his hands more deliberately against her breasts. Her own smaller hands covered his, guiding the pressure, showing him the places that needed it most. The soft flesh yielded under his palms. She made a quiet sound when his thumbs brushed near the sensitive peaks, her lashes lowering.

“Please,” she whispered. “Massage them for me. Slowly. The way you know I like. It helps when the ache is this bad.” Her eyes lifted to his, open and unguarded in the candlelight. There was no performance in the request, only the quiet trust of someone who had already decided this room, this hour, and his hands were the only safe place left to her. “I need your hands on me. Just for a while. Before the morning comes and I have to be careful again.”

She leaned in closer, the curve of her belly a warm, living weight between them, and waited, breath soft against his throat, for him to begin.

.