65 AC — The Balcony, Red Keep, King's Landing
The night had deepened while I spoke, the moon high and indifferent over Blackwater Bay. Below, the city breathed its slow, sleeping breath — the cries of fishmongers long silenced, the taverns still. Up here, there was only wind, shadow, and the weight of words that could not be unsaid.
"Did you enjoy the show?" I asked the air.
Two shadows stepped forward from the colonnade. They had been there long enough. Perhaps from the moment I had begun with Alyssa. I had felt their presence, that peculiar warmth of family — and chosen to say everything anyway.
"That was…" Father paused, searching for the right word. He found none that satisfied him. "…unexpected," he settled on at last, as though the word were a shield.
Mother said nothing. She walked beside him, silent as carved stone, her face pale in the moonlight. She had heard every word I'd spoken to Alyssa. I could see it in the set of her jaw — the way she held herself very still, as though stillness might contain the thing my words had stirred loose.
"I had not thought," Father continued, coming closer, his voice carrying a careful wariness, "that a son of merely eleven name-days would think so deeply of blood and kin."
"But not untrue," I replied. I kept my eyes on the bay, on the distant shimmer of water. It was easier that way — easier to say hard things to the dark than to the faces of people you love.
"And not wholly true, either," he countered. His voice had changed. There was no anger in it — not yet. Only that particular unease a man carries when glimpsing something unexpected in his own child. Something he cannot name, and therefore cannot control.
He had watched me with Alyssa. Watched how I had spoken to her — not consoled her, not silenced her, but shaped her. And something in that had disturbed him, though he was too measured a man to say so plainly.
"These words, Baelon," Mother said, and her voice, for all its softness, carried the tension of held breath. "They are not toys for boys." Her anger lived beneath the worry, quiet but present. "You must not speak such things to your sister. She is still a child."
I turned to face her then. I owed her that much.
"I do not see this as play, Mother. I showed Alyssa what is — not the illusion you and Father cling to. You call it peace. I call it a cowardly veil, carefully sewn , refusing to look at the seams."
Father's face hardened the way stone hardens — slowly, from the inside out. "You will mind your tongue, Baelon. Show your mother respect."
"I meant no offense to you, Mother." I made sure she heard it — softened my voice, not from weakness, but because I needed them to hear me, and they could not hear me if they were only angry. "Then tell me, Father — which part did you find untrue?"
The silence that followed told me everything.
He couldn't. That was the thing about truth — it didn't require permission to stand.
"You sound distrustful of our subjects," Mother said, reaching for safer ground. "Hostile, even."
"And?"
"You speak of the Lords of Westeros not as bannermen," Father added. "But as foes. You call them 'greedy Andals.'"
A short, bitter sound escaped me — not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh.
"Do you truly believe they love us? Perhaps a few do. The rest bow only to our dragons. Remove the dragons, and half of them would test the sharpness of their swords within a generation."
"We know that, Baelon," Mother answered carefully. She always chose her words carefully, my mother — as though arranging them into a kind of armor. "But knowing does not make peace impossible."
"What is peace, if not the absence of open war? A breath between storms. We live in a cold war, Mother — cloaked in the shadow of Balerion's wings, made comfortable by the distance of memory. Let our grip loosen for a generation, and they will pounce. That is the way of ambitious men. Envy. Hunger. Old grievances with new pretexts."
"And what would you have us do?" Mother asked, her brow drawn. "Slay every noble house? Cut down every child who may one day grow dangerous?"
"No." The word came out cleanly. "What I want is for House Targaryen to become untouchable. Not feared — something deeper than fear. Inevitable. Let our name carry weight across continents. Let the smallfolk teach their children to kneel from the cradle — not from dread alone, but from the deep certainty that there is no Westeros without the dragon."
Father stared at me as though he was meeting someone new behind a familiar face. Perhaps he was. Perhaps that was always the risk — that the child you loved would one day say the thing you could not unfear.
"You speak dangerous words," he said slowly.
"Dangerous — yes. Especially to those drunk on the dream of peace. But which is more dangerous, Father? A boy who speaks uncomfortable truths, or a king who refuses to hear them until it is too late?"
He looked away. I pressed forward, because there was no kindness in stopping.
"You may silence me. May convince me with my love for you all. But how long before one of our blood is born again with fire in his heart — ambition greater than the Conqueror himself? One who cannot be leashed by your patience or Mother's love?"
The Conqueror. The name settled between us like a stone dropped into still water.
Father's jaw tightened. No Targaryen spoke of surpassing Aegon I lightly. He was the ceiling — the great unreachable height. But the thought of someone equal to that height, tempered not by glory but by grievance — that sent a chill through him that all his composure could not entirely conceal.
"Your peace is a fragile veil," I said. "You believe you can govern your children with dragons denied and chains of duty. But that breeds only resentment. A time will come when they will strike you where it hurts most — your precious peace. The more you suppress them, the colder they will grow."
"And what do you believe they would do," Father asked, his voice dropping below anger into something colder, "in their rebellion?"
"They will become exactly what you feared. That is the tragedy of it." I leaned forward slightly. "Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor."
A dragon is not a slave.
Father's eyes widened. He recognized the words — not just the Valyrian, but the thing beneath them. He had seen the beginning of that particular cold in Alyssa already, and he knew it.
None before me had spoken this plainly to him. These truths lived in the buried places of his heart — not unrecognized, but unacknowledged. It is one thing to know a hard truth. It is another entirely to hear it from your eleven-year-old son on a moonlit balcony.
The irony, I thought, was exquisite and bitter in equal measure. Jaehaerys the Wise — the best of them in any telling of history — blind to this. Not from stupidity. Not from cruelty. But from the particular blindness of a man who has always been exceptional and has never had cause to doubt the sufficiency of his own vision.
'You cannot suppress that ambition, Father. You can only direct it. Shape it. That is what you should have done for Daemon, The Rogue Prince— a generational warrior, a sword without purpose, too proud to be leashed and too brilliant to be ignored. You will make the same mistake with Vaegon, if you are not careful.'
It was a hard thing for any parent to hear — their parenting critiqued, their choices examined, their blind spots named. For a king and queen, I suspected it was its own particular form of agony. I was honestly grateful, and faintly astonished, that they had let me speak this long.
I could see it in their eyes — bitterness, after everything they have achieved and still being questioned, yes. But beneath it, something else. Something reluctant and searching.
They were listening.
"It is in our blood," I said. "We burn hotter. We dream deeper. You cannot douse the fire of a dragon without killing the beast itself. In your quest to prevent another Maegor…"
The name fell into the silence like an ember into dry grass.
Father stiffened. "Mind your tongue. Do not speak of things you do not yet grasp."
Mother laid a hand against his arm — barely a touch, but enough. "There shall never be another Maegor in this family," she said, and the certainty in her voice was the certainty of a woman who has made herself believe something because the alternative is unbearable.
"No, Mother," I said. "You hope there won't be. But I fear there will be worse — men who will make Maegor seem gentle by comparison. Because Maegor was only cruel. What comes next will be cruel and clever both."
Her mouth opened. Closed again. As though the truth had physically weight, and was resting on her tongue, too heavy to speak around.
"Tell me, Father — was it not the Conqueror who first failed Maegor? He grieved Queen Rhaenys so deeply he could not see his sons. He made Aenys weak from neglect, and Maegor loveless from disregard. What did he imagine would grow from that soil?"
"You blame the Conqueror for the things Maegor did?" Mother asked, disbelief sharpening her voice.
"He was not a god, Mother. He was a man. A Targaryen. Why must he be the summit of what we can become? Why can we not climb higher?"
I leaned backwards and dropped my voice in a dreamy tone.
"Imagine a loved Maegor. Guided. A dragon tempered not by chains but by purpose. He would have crushed Dorne. Perhaps taken the Free Cities. He could have stood at Aenys's shoulder — not as a rival, but as a shield. Faith? Hah, they wouldn't dare do, what they did? He could have been a god among men."
Silence. The good kind — the kind that means something has landed.
"What then do you propose?" Father asked at last. The question was not a surrender. But it was something. "What would you have us do?"
"They are still young — Alyssa, Vaegon, the others. What must be done now — what must always be done — is to teach them love. Teach them unity. Teach them to be each other's shields, because only a dragon may slay a dragon. Peace is not made in denial. It is forged in preparation. In family."
Father turned to Mother. Something passed between them — the silent language of two people who have shared too many years to need words for the most important things.
"You speak as though you have known the hearts of men for decades," Mother said finally. There was wonder in it, and wariness, and something that might have been the first green shoot of acceptance. "I do agree we must raise our children better than our forebears did. But…"
"…then you understand," Father said, "why not all Targaryens should have dragons."
"Yes," I said. "To place a dragon beneath every child is to place a sword in every hand. But your decree does not merely deny them power — it denies them trust. You have decided, before they have done a single thing to earn it, that they cannot be guided true."
I let that settle. Then, carefully:
"You are making this decision on the assumption that we will fail as a family. That we will turn on each other. Tell me, Father — is that a plan for peace, or a plan for an inevitability you've already accepted?"
His jaw tightened. "It is not called an assumption when you know it to be true. It is called foresight."
"Then tell me, Mother," I said, turning to her, "when you deny my siblings their birthright — when you keep them from their dragons — what are you telling them? That no matter how good they become, they will always be a threat to their own blood?"
The breath she drew was sharp as broken glass.
"You are telling them that you expect betrayal from them. And if that is what they are told — if that is the message written into the stone of every decision made in their name — then why would they become anything other than what you fear?" I pressed, and I could feel the weariness in my own voice now, the old exhaustion of a man who has seen this story end badly before. "There is no doubt in my mind that you will struggle to teach them family love — not from lack of trying, but because you never fully trusted them. Or yourselves to guide them."
"And Vaegon," I said, and I had to fight to keep the laugh from my voice, because it was the laugh of grief, not mockery, "is the wisest of all of us. Perhaps more brilliant in mind than Aemon and I combined. He will see it plainest of all."
Silence.
"If you fear your children with dragons," I said, voice soft now, stripped of argument, "then you have already lost them. They will grow to be the threat, because that is all they were permitted to be."
Mother's breath caught.
Father's eyes narrowed — not with anger, but with the look of a man staring at a map he had believed complete, and finding new coastlines marked in ink he did not recognize.
"Sometimes," I said, "you must first take the leap. Trust must be given before it can be earned, or it will never exist at all."
A long pause. The wind off the bay moved through the colonnade, slow and salt-heavy.
I was tired. Bone-tired, in the way that had nothing to do with the lateness of the hour. I had carried these truths for years — not Baelon's years, but the years of another life, another world, where I had learned them at the cost of watching history repeat itself in slow, grinding cycles.
They didn't know. They couldn't know. But they were beginning to feel the shape of something, even if they could not name it yet. That's why I bothered to tell them, had it been any other Targaryen King like Aerys II or Aegon V for that another timeline, I wouldn't have even bothered to try to change them, as they are already too far gone, however the Father & Mother have the mental fortitude to change, see error in our way. And it is the time when the Targaryen rule was at its peak.
If we had been any other family, they would have sent for the Maester hours ago. A mad boy, speaking impossibilities on a cold balcony. Locked away. Forgotten. Given dream wine and quiet rooms and the careful silence of people who have decided not to see.
But they were not any other family.
And neither was I.
The moon had moved while we talked, the shadows on the stone grown longer and thinner. Below, Blackwater Bay lay dark and calm and utterly indifferent.
Mother looked at Father. Father looked at me.
"My sweet boy, you have either given us a gift," Mother said at last, her voice very quiet, "or a curse."
I held her gaze.
"Those two things," I replied, "are often the same."
The silence that followed was not the silence of an ending.
It was the silence of something beginning.
* * *
One Year Later — 66 AC, King's Landing
More than a name day had passed since that night on the balcony, and Alyssa was nearly ten now. ' How quickly they grow, ' I thought, reading her latest letter by the morning light — her handwriting was sharper than it had been a year ago, her sentences less wild. She had been practicing. She always practiced now.
Several things had changed since that heck of a night. Several things I had not expected.
Alyssa had apologized to Father and Mother at the morrow. Not the forced apology of a child performing contrition — she had meant it. I knew because she wrote to tell me so, in the same raven that asked me what she should read next to better understand the history of the Targaryens.
Father's response had surprised me more than hers. Rather than scolding her, he had told her he would consider her request to bond with a dragon — if she proved herself responsible enough. Worthy of being a princess of blood.
I had sat with that for a long moment when I first heard it. ' He didn't change in a single night. Men like Father do not. But he saw the error. Or at least, he saw the edge of it. ' That was more than I had honestly expected.
In the year I had spent mostly in the Crownlands managing the Blackroads project, the ravens told a story I could cross-reference against my own memory of the canon and find very different. Father had grown more present — not dramatically, not with great declarations, but in the quiet ways that matter. Sharing stories of family history with Vaegon. Asking Maegelle what she was reading. Teaching. Guiding, in ways he had not thought to before.
Mother had softened too. Not weakened — she was not a woman who weakened — but her patience for her children's mistakes had grown longer. As though something in that night had reminded her what the mistakes were actually for. What children needed them for.
And Alyssa.
Alyssa had changed most of all. From the very next morning after that night, the ravens had begun to arrive. Daily, in the early weeks. Questions. How do I be a better sister to Saera? Vaegon will not talk to me when I ask about his studies, how do I get through to him? Mother is occupied with the Small Council — should I sit with Maegelle this evening? She had taken responsibility in the way only someone truly frightened of what they almost lost can.
I had answered every one.
At least I had not needed to worry about my family while I was away. That was rarer than it sounded.
The letter in my hand was her latest — shorter than usual, which meant she was busy, which meant she was handling something herself rather than asking me first. That was its own kind of progress.
I set it down and looked out at King's Landing below, the morning haze still clinging to the rooftops of the Guildhall Row.
The Faith of the Seven was building toward something. I had been watching the signs for months — the sermons growing sharper, the collection plates heavier, the High Septon's correspondence with the great houses more frequent than any religious calendar demanded. Oldtown was stirring.
' The campaign in Oldtown, when it comes, will not be a simple one. And it will come. '
I folded Alyssa's letter and tucked it away, standing to pull on my riding gloves.
There was work to do. There always was. And for once — for this brief, improbable year — my family would not be the part I had to worry about.
That was enough to keep me moving.