The ravens went out on the Day of the Smith.
It was the fourth of the Seven, the day when the frantic energy of the week's beginning had been hammered into a steady, industrious rhythm. Otto Hightower had chosen the day with his usual care for the appearance of things. It was neither the day of the Father's judgment nor the Warrior's charge; those carried a scent of ultimatum. Instead, he chose the day of the forge—a middle day, measured and deliberate.
He had composed the invitations himself, as he composed most things of consequence, and reviewed each one before it was copied in the maester's hand. The language was warm without being effusive, formal without being cold. It named the occasion—the sixth nameday of Prince Daeron Targaryen, fourth-born son of His Grace Viserys the First—and it named the date, six weeks hence, time enough for even the most distant lords to arrange travel, but not so much time that the gathering would feel like a siege requiring months of preparation.
The list of recipients had taken him three evenings to finalize.
Not because the great houses were in question. Tully, Arryn, Lannister, Tyrell, Baratheon, Stark—these went without deliberation. A prince's nameday required the realm's attendance, and the realm's attendance required that those names appear on parchment. Otto had no particular anxiety about any of them. They would come or they would send sons and regrets in roughly equal measure, and either way their presence or absence would mean what it always meant—proximity to the throne calculated against the cost of travel and the demands of their own estates.
It was the other names that required thought.
He sat in his study on the second evening with the fire burning low and a list before him that contained, at its foot, three entries he had not yet decided how to handle.
Lord Corlys Velaryon, Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, Lady of Driftmark.
Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne, Lady of Dragonstone.
Prince Daemon Targaryen.
He considered them in that order, which was also the order of their tractability.
The Velaryons were the least complicated, in the sense that the complication was known and finite. The decree regarding Seasmoke had been issued. The insult had been given, absorbed, and—as far as anyone outside Driftmark could determine—swallowed. Corlys had not raised banners. He had not withdrawn ships. He had not sent a letter of protest to the Small Council or sought audience with the king to register grievance. He had accepted the Dragonkeepers with courtesy and housed them for the night and sent them on their way. Had even sent after them gifts of courtesy.
That silence was either genuine or strategic, and Otto suspected some mixture of both. Corlys was too old and too intelligent to make a scene over a decree that was already executed, and whatever he felt privately he had the discipline not to perform it publicly. An invitation to the feast of a royal prince was, in its way, the natural next step in the restoration of ordinary relations between crown and vassal. It offered Corlys something: the opportunity to appear before court as a man who had borne a slight with grace and been rewarded with continued inclusion. It offered Otto something too—the visible presence of the Velaryons in the hall would signal that whatever tension had attended the Seasmoke business had not curdled into open estrangement.
They would be invited with full honors. Corlys listed before all other lords save those of royal blood. Rhaenys addressed with her Targaryen title preceding the Velaryon one. A small signal, but Corlys would read it.
Otto made the notation and moved on.
Rhaenyra and Daemon were the difficulty he had been saving.
The names alone were sufficient to induce a certain weariness.
He rose from the table and walked to the window. Below, the city was dark except for the scattered lights of taverns and the distant flicker of the harbor torches. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, gaze unfixed on the city below, and thought.
The case for inviting them was obvious and did not require examination. They were—currently—the heir and her consort. Their exclusion from any significant royal gathering was an event in itself, commented upon, interpreted, magnified in the retelling.
If Rhaenyra and Daemon were not invited and did not attend Daeron's nameday feast, the empty chairs at the royal dais would be a vacuum that the court would fill with rumors of fracture, treason, and his own overreach. Worse, it would invite the King's scrutiny. Viserys wanted his family whole; Otto could not afford to be the man seen holding the knife that severed it.
The invitation was the shield he held before himself.
But if the invitation was a necessity, their presence was a wildfire he had no desire to host in an orderly room.
Because Rhaenyra and Daemon never came quietly.
Rhaenyra, when she chose to come at all, arrived with the energy of a woman who considered every gathering beneath her notice and intended to make that clear while complying with its requirements in technicality.
The less said of Daemon the better.
They would attend if they attended at all as a disruption in formal dress, and the court would cluster around them the way it always clustered around the volatile and the beautiful, and whatever careful architecture Otto had constructed for the evening would have to accommodate the fact that his daughter's rival had entered the room.
If they were invited and chose to remain on Dragonstone, however....
Their absence, by their own hand, would do the work Otto could not. He would be the dutiful Hand who extended the olive branch, and they would be the bitter exiles who spat upon it. In the eyes of the realm—and more importantly, the eyes of the King—the fracture would finally have a clear author. And it would not be Otto.
Otto stood at the window for a long time.
He returned to the table and sat.
After a time, he made the notation.
Princess Rhaenyra and Prince Daemon—full invitation, with honors.
He set the list aside and permitted himself a single cup of wine before bed.
The king's letter was not something Otto had planned.
He became aware of it three days after the ravens had gone, when a maester mentioned in passing that His Grace had requested materials for personal correspondence the previous evening and had worked at it for some hours. Otto had noted this without immediate concern—Viserys wrote personal letters occasionally, to old friends and distant relations, in a mode that bypassed the official correspondence of his reign entirely. It was one of his more harmless habits.
It was only when he learned, two days after that, that a sealed letter bearing Viserys' personal mark had gone by fast rider to Dragonstone—not by raven, by rider, which meant it was long, or meant to be private, or both—that Otto paid it the attention it deserved.
He could not intercept it. It had already gone.
He could not ask Viserys directly what it contained, because asking Viserys what he had written to his daughter would produce either evasion or the particular mild stubbornness the king was capable of when he felt his personal sphere was being managed. Otto had learned over many years that there were rooms he could not enter with Viserys and the relationship between father and daughter was one of them. He could manage its political consequences. He could not enter it.
So, he waited.
The reply from Dragonstone came eight days later.
Not by rider this time. By raven, which meant it was short.
Otto did not see the reply. He only knew of its arrival because the maester mentioned it, and because later that day Viserys was in noticeably better spirits at supper than he had been in some weeks—eating with more appetite, speaking more freely, asking after the feast preparations with what appeared to be genuine interest rather than the polite attention of a man enduring a topic.
Otto watched him across the table and drew his inference.
She was coming.
His prayers had gone unanswered.
Alicent received the news from her husband directly, which was not how she usually received news of consequence. Viserys came to find her in the solar where she had been reading—genuinely reading, this time, a history of the early Targaryen kings that she had been working through slowly for the past several weeks, partly because she found she wanted to understand the dynasty she had spent her life inside, and partly because it gave her something to do with her mind that was entirely her own.
He knocked before entering, which he did not always do.
She looked up.
He was having a good day. She could tell from the quality of his movement, the relative ease in his face, the way he settled into the chair across from her without the careful lowering of a man managing pain. Good days came less often now and she had learned not to trust them as predictive of anything, but she was still glad of them when they came in the simple way that she was glad of clear weather.
"She is coming," he said.
Alicent did not ask who. There was only one she that carried that quality in his voice.
"Rhaenyra," she said.
"And Daemon. And the children." He smiled in the way of a man who has received something he did not entirely trust himself to ask for directly. "All of them."
Alicent kept her face composed in the expression of warm pleasure that occasions like this required.
"That is wonderful," she said. "Daeron will be glad of it."
Viserys nodded, already somewhat distant with some private satisfaction. "I wrote to her," he said, almost to himself. "I thought—with everything—I thought perhaps she might not come. But she has said yes."
He looked at Alicent then with a slightly searching expression, as though he wanted to say something further and was not certain how to say it or whether to say it at all.
He did not say it.
"I thought you would want to know," he said instead.
"Thank you," Alicent said. "I am glad you told me."
He rose, satisfied, and left her to her book.
She sat for some time without turning the page.
Rhaenyra was coming.
She had known, somewhere beneath calculation, that this was possible—had known it since she heard of his letter to Dragonstone and understood what kind of letter it must have been.
She had watched him write it in her mind, had imagined the careful dignity of it and the thing that leaked through the dignity, the plain, exhausted longing of a man who wanted his daughter at his table because the world had become, without his quite noticing how, a place where warmth was something to be sought rather than assumed.
She did not resent the letter. That surprised her slightly—she had expected to resent it, had expected the old familiar compression in her chest when Rhaenyra moved back to the center of things. But what she felt instead was something more complicated and less comfortable.
She felt, obscurely, that she understood it.
Not as a queen. Not as a rival. But perhaps as one of its causes—the warmth that had gone quiet in that room without announcement or explanation, leaving him to reach for his daughter because he could not reach for her. She knew what that reaching looked like. She had watched it in herself: a book opened, a garden chosen, a cup of wine offered and declined, small acts in place of a thing that had no name.
She opened her book and found her interest had waned.
After a while she closed it again and went to oversee the household preparations for the feast, a task that would absorb the rest of her afternoon.
At Driftmark the invitation arrived on a morning of low grey cloud and a sea the color of old iron.
Rhaenys was in the dragon yard when the maester found her, watching Meleys pace the far wall of the enclosure in the particular restless way she had on days when the weather promised a change. She read the invitation where she stood, one hand still resting on the warm stone of the enclosure wall.
She brought it to Corlys at midday.
He read it at the table in the solar where he had been going over harbor accounts with his steward, who withdrew at Rhaenys' entrance with the trained discretion of a man who recognized a private conversation approaching. Corlys read the invitation twice, set it flat on the table beside the accounts, and looked at it for a moment.
"Well," he said.
"Yes," said Rhaenys.
He looked at her. "And?"
"I think we go."
Corlys leaned back. "On the strength of a royal invitation to a child's nameday."
"On the strength of twenty years of loyal service, a fleet the crown cannot replace, and the fact that declining a royal invitation six weeks after a decree that stripped us of a dragon would be read as exactly what it would be."
He was quiet a moment.
"We should not give Viserys the satisfaction," he said.
"We are not going for Viserys' satisfaction," Rhaenys said. "We are going for our own." She crossed to the table and sat. "There are lords who will attend that feast who have not seen us since the decree was issued. There are lords who have written to us with condolences and received careful replies and have no idea what our temper truly is. Our presence at that feast, composed and unbroken and exactly as formidable as we have always been, says more than any letter of protest."
Corlys turned his cup in his hand.
"You want them to see that it did not break us."
"I want them to see that we are unbreakable," Rhaenys said. "Which is different."
He looked at her for a moment with something between amusement and respect.
"You have been thinking about this."
"I told you I would."
He remembered. He had asked her, after Dragonstone, to think carefully about what should follow when he returned. She had said that was fair. She had apparently meant it.
"And the awkwardness?" he said. "Viserys will want to speak to me. There will be the business of the decree hanging in the air between us, and neither of us will name it, and the men around us will know it is there."
"Yes," Rhaenys said. "And you will be gracious and he will be grateful and the men around you will see a great lord who knows how to hold his dignity without requiring it acknowledged. That is not a poor position to be seen in, by men who matter."
Corlys was quiet again.
"And Daemon?" he said.
Rhaenys looked at him steadily. "What of Daemon?"
"He will be there. If they come."
"If they come," Rhaenys said, "we will greet them as family, as we always have." She paused. "Whatever else there is will keep for another occasion."
He heard the double meaning in that. He did not press it.
"Very well," he said.
He pulled the invitation back toward him, looked at it once more, and set it aside with the finality of a man who has made a decision and does not require further discussion.
"Tell them we accept," he said. "With full courtesies."
The letter had arrived at Dragonstone on a morning of clear cold light that made the black towers look sharp against a pale sky.
Jace had been in the yard practicing when he saw the rider come through the lower gate, and he had known from the royal livery that it was something from King's Landing, and he had thought little more of it. Royal correspondence arrived at Dragonstone regularly. He went back to his practice.
He did not learn of the letter's contents until that evening, when Rhaenyra sent for him.
She was in her solar, seated near the window with the letter on the table before her. Daemon was there too, standing near the hearth with a cup he was not drinking from, in the attitude of a man who has already had the argument and lost it and is now in the process of accepting the loss with what grace he can manage.
Jace looked between them.
"We are going to King's Landing," Rhaenyra said. "For Prince Daeron's nameday feast."
Jace was quiet a moment, reading the room.
"All of us?" he said.
"Yes."
"When did you decide?"
Rhaenyra glanced at Daemon, who said nothing.
"This afternoon," she said. "Your grandfather—the king—wrote to us." She touched the letter but did not offer it to Jace. "He asked that we come."
Jace looked at his mother's face. He had learned to read it over years—the particular quality of what was present in it now was not political calculation. It was something older and more personal. It was a similar expression to when she'd learned about his letter to Corlys.
"Will we take the children?" he asked.
"Yes," said Rhaenyra. "All of you."
Jace nodded slowly.
He looked at Daemon. Daemon met his gaze with the flat, measuring look he wore when he had decided something and was watching to see how others received it.
"It will be a long journey," Jace said. Not as protest. As statement.
"So is patience," Daemon said.
There was something in the way he said it that closed the subject. Jace understood. For even Daemon to be this way, then the matter must be of some import.
"Is there anything you need me to do?" Jace asked his mother.
Rhaenyra looked at him with an expression that was briefly and entirely unguarded.
"Not tonight," she said.
Jace withdrew.
In the corridor outside he stood for a moment, listening to the wind find the gaps in the stone, thinking about a feast in King's Landing, about Corlys and Rhaenys who would likely also be in attendance.
"Something for all of us," Baela had said.
It seemed the realm intended to oblige. Not at his request, but the king's. He supposed that would suffice all the same. He went to find her now and tell her to start thinking about what to pack.
They had a nameday to attend.
In the Maiden's Garden, on a morning three days before the first guests were expected to begin arriving, Otto Hightower sat opposite his daughter on the bench where he had found her seven weeks before and watched her work through the household accounts with a precision that satisfied him.
The preparations were in order. The hall would accommodate two hundred at table. The kitchens had been working since the week prior. The guest chambers had been aired and appointed. The order of precedence had been settled after two revisions, one of which had required a quiet conversation with the Master of Ceremonies about the relative placement of Velaryon and Dragonstone banners that Otto had resolved in Velaryon's favor, for reasons he did not explain.
"The Velaryons are set to arrive on the fourth day," Alicent said, without looking up.
"I know," Otto said.
"And Rhaenyra and Daemon on the fifth day, if the weather holds."
"Then we may pray for rain," Otto answered.
Alicent turned a page. The fountain made its sound between them, patient and unchanged.
"Are you worried?" she asked.
Otto considered the question seriously, which she had not entirely expected.
"I am not worried," he said at last. "I am attentive."
Alicent almost smiled. "Is there a difference?"
"Worry is unproductive. Attention is preparation."
She looked at him then. He met her gaze with the expression she had known since childhood—controlled, watchful, already three moves ahead of whatever she was thinking.
"And if something goes wrong?" she asked.
"Something will go wrong," Otto said. "Something always goes wrong at large gatherings of people with competing interests. The question is not whether but which, and whether the which can be managed."
"And if it cannot be managed?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"Then we observe carefully," he said, "and we determine what it means, and we act accordingly."
Alicent returned to her accounts.
"I have a meeting with the septa about Daeron's garment this afternoon," she said. "He has grown since the last fitting."
"Yes," said Otto. "Children tend to."
He rose, smoothed his robe, and left her to her business.
Alicent sat alone in the garden for a little while after he was gone. The fountain ran on. Above her the pale autumn sky held a thin, high cloud that moved slowly westward as she watched it.
Six days.
In six days, the hall would be full of people who had not been in the same room since Driftmark, and who carried between them enough accumulated debt and unspoken history to fill a library. And at the center of all of it, on a carved chair with his youngest son beside him, her husband the king would sit and receive his guests and believe, in the way he had always believed things that comforted him, that what he had assembled was his family.
She hoped, for his sake, that it felt that way.
She rose, collected the accounts, and went inside to find the septa.
There was a great deal still to be done.