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alicentive · 1 year

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Author's Note: this is my very first fic for House of the Dragon! I hope you'll enjoy this little canon alteration that has lived in my head for a good little while now. 💕 Rating: Teen & Up Audiences for this first part, but potentially rating-upped in any other parts that may follow. Warnings: none for this part. Wordcount: 2.1k Summary: Rhea Royce lives. It makes all the difference.

Weddings are rather sorry affairs.

In truth, they have become rather complicated since the Andals came to Westeros. Since a new faith supplanted the old, growing like a fast weed that would prove impossible to eradicate from one’s land. There is proof of being usurped at every marriage ceremony, of having one’s own sensibilities replaced by that of another, of having one’s traditions changed so irrevocably that one can scarcely recognize them in the new rigid rules.

Rhea Royce does not set much stock in the order of things. As a child, she was merely willful – a matter that was greeted with exasperation and amusement alike – and as a woman grown she is double that and judgmental to boot. Grew up on Runestone, that one, she hears at times when she goes out riding in the Vale, as though it can explain her being how she is. Grew up in that old seat of kings.

The outlanders have never understood this. They came here first with boats, wresting lands away from the First Men and causing generations of clan strife where they went. The Royces had resisted more fiercely than most. We were kings, once, her father always said, and the land remembers us. Yet there is no resisting what came after the first outlanders.

There is no resisting dragons.

She supposes this may yet be why her own wedding was the sorriest of all weddings she has attended in her life. Why it had felt rather like a longknife pressed to her throat at all hours of that day, no matter how many vows she had spoken (too many) or how swiftly she had bitten her tongue to halt the worst of her remarks. Why there was a bedding ceremony that had gone as it did – her husband’s eyes fixated on the sky, her resolve crumbling in the face of such laughable weaknesses as his – and why she’d all but managed to chase her dear lord husband out of the Vale altogether since.

There had been a moment then, too long and too sharp to be mistaken for anything else, when they had looked at one another and found naught but things to hate.

Rhea had not pressed for an annulment in the first years, though she knows her husband had and was denied at every turn. It had been comfortable to not need think of other betrothals, or of another wedding to one who would wish to ride her as though she’s little more than a common brood mare. To not need to suffer a man’s hands on her, least of all a dragonrider’s, had been the blessing that had halted her tongue.

It is different now, with her father gone and her taking the Runestone Seat. There are matters to consider now that were not pressing before – a question of succession, for she’ll be damned before she delivers her family seat to the Arryns, first and foremost – and she knows these are not the concerns of dragons.

My lord husband does not care one whit about any of these matters, she had said to the Council of Faith, and often he has spoken of me in ill terms that have put my seat and standing at greater risk than ever before.

King Viserys had taken a long look at her that had rather felt like an old dragon sizing her up to determine how much fire would burn her and leave nothing but ashes in its wake. He had always refused her husband the annulment. She’d feared he’d do the same with her, no matter the Council of Faith’s decision on the matter, but it had only taken a few choice words about her husband – his brother – to make him relent.

Only five days have passed since Rhea first understood that dragons can signify freedom, too.

She still thinks weddings are rather sorry affairs, though of course she will not state as such to present company. The Red Keep has ears where walls should be. Eyes where there should be windows and doors. Secrets where there should be laughter.

Even her lord husband, now at last lord husband no more, moves through this space as if someone has rammed the end of a spear up his arse.

Rhea knows better than to allow herself the liberties of the Vale here, though she does not quite manage to perfect the stiff motions and turns of court as well as the capital-born or Lannister-raised do. (Gods save her from Jason Lannister and his belief that Casterly Rock could be home to her, even though he has so far only managed to describe her as Daemon Targaryen’s spurned wife.)

Sometimes, the Red Keep’s eyes and ears are put on display right before her nose.

“I must admit to some surprise,” says the Strongs’s youngest, eyeing her up and down in much the same way Daemon used to, “when I heard of your marriage annulment, Lady Royce. The King always was so very adamant to keep his brother tied to the Vale.”

“There are only so many cords with which one can manage to tether a dragon,” she smiles back, only belatedly remembering that she shows too many teeth in doing so. “I think the sheep in the Vale would thank me for cutting it loose at last.”

His responding laughter is as brittle as that foot he drags around. Rhea cannot help but place it in her memory to observe again later. It was so immediate that he was for certain in a position to have heard Daemon pontificate about how he would rather fuck all the Vale’s sheep than bed her. Moreover, there was not a single attempt to hide it.

“–ay in the Red Keep long?”

“Mm? My apologies, Lord Strong,” she offers to the elder Strong, tearing her gaze away from the point just above his youngest son’s shoulders, “the greater noise on my side of the table is not conducive to lengthy conversation.”

The portly man’s answering chuckle is thankfully not unkind as she leans over the table as much as decorum allows her. “I merely had an old man’s curiosity about whether you will be staying in the Red Keep long, Lady Royce.”

“Oh, I daresay I shall be out of the city once the wedding celebrations have come to a close. I am not one to miss a tourney, truth be told, though it of course does not become me to partake.”

Her laughter’s too loud for this table. Her armor gleams in the soft candlelight as if to belie her every word, though it is true that she has not ridden any tourneys and would not think to start now. She is altogether too much for the Red Keep, which she sees reflected in the stares of women most of all, but she is still Viserys Targaryen’s honored guest by the end of it. Marriage or no marriage to a dragon, it seems as though the Vale’s bonds to the usurpers still need to hold.

“Ah, my days of partaking are done as well,” laughs Lord Strong, “though I did say to the King that I have half a mind to act as though I am but nine-and-ten again. It was my son, Harwin, who reminded me of my duties.”

“Reminded you of the costly duties of a maester if you should be jousted off your horse,” corrects the man seated directly across from her. His words are clearly offered in jest, for his eyes sparkle with ill-concealed mirth above the rim of his cup, “It is bad enough for me to run such chances.”

“Good fortune to you, ser Harwin,” she nods, knowing the man’s reputation only from hearsay. “I believe I heard it said you are one of the finest contenders for the tourney.”

His bark of laughter is even louder than hers. “So it is gossiped,” he allows, nodding at her, “and I pray to our gods it holds true. There are, of course, a number of fine contenders. I believe the Velaryons have brought some knights with them as well.”

“And they all look like they are attending a funeral.”

“You do not believe this to be a happy match?” interjects the youngest Strong, wheedling voice raising the hairs on the back of her neck with no great effort.

“I believe the match to be a fine one. Dragon and serpent understand one another, surely, better than dragon and sheep ever have,” she remarks idly, once again casting herself in the mummers’s role of harmless first wife. She leans back in her seat, allowing the cacophony of other conversations to wash over her a moment. “Princess Rhaenyra and Ser Laenor suit one another”– she announces –“though their knights must be very bored by the lack of wedding brawls.”

Again the elder of the Strong brothers, Harwin, booms out a laugh in reply. Mirth crinkles the corners of his eyes and sets his teeth glittering in the light. Rhea finds herself liking him in the same manner with which she detests his brother; an immediate feeling loops in the pit of her belly, where all her misgivings and dreams reside in equal measure, at the piercing gaze he fixes her with.

“All weddings should feature at least one brawl,” he concedes, to the exasperated headshake of his lord father. “I have even heard it tell that the horselords of the plains believe that a marriage bond shall be most fortuitous the more people fight and die at the wedding in question.”

“The Queen may start.”

“Do you really think so, ser Larys?” asks Rhea, twisting her hands in her lap a moment as she almost wishes she could take her curiosity back again for the appraisal he gives her now. “I hardly think Alicent Hightower the type of woman to leap across a table and kick a man in the sack”– she remarks, ignoring the scandalized gasp from the woman seated beside her –“though I could of course be mistaken.”

“Tell me, Lady Royce,” asks Larys Strong conspiratorially, leaning across the table ever so slightly, “do you know which color the beacon on the Hightower glows when Oldtown calls all its banners to war?”

Rhea raises a single eyebrow as she slowly turns to look at the dais from whence Lord Strong already descended early this eve. The young royals are there, of course, dragon and serpent both, and it takes her a time to tear her gaze away from the strikingly white-haired Velaryons. There is the King, looking as though he is torn between enjoying himself and retiring to bed exhausted by the day’s events, and…

“Green, hm?” she asks aloud, eyeing the still-young Queen in the dress that had quite halted conversations a little earlier this eve. “What cause has Oldtown to wage war in these halls?”

“What cause indeed.”

“The cause of something desperate,” she finds herself saying once her gaze comes to rest on her erstwhile husband, who’s seated on the very edge of the dais and looking for all the world like he wishes to tear a man limb from limb. “Whatever it is looms like a cloud over them all.” She snorts as Daemon turns bodily away from her too-obvious scrutiny. “Though, it must be said, the dragon usurpers have always carried this with them since they first set foot on these lands.”

“I was not aware the Vale still refers to the Targaryens as usurpers,” remarks Lord Strong, meeting her gaze head-on as she turns back to the table. “Your father did, of course, but I had…”

“It is not the Vale as a whole,” she corrects, “but rather the view of Runestone. I seat in a place that is older than any living dragon by far, as you well know, and I was raised with the knowledge that my kin was here before and will be here long after.”

“Aye.”

She blinks in surprise as Harwin Strong seems to agree. His father briefly closes his eyes before casting them skyward, while his younger brother seems rather content to focus on his food and only lend his ears to the conversation for now.

“We have spoken of this,” hisses Lord Strong.

“And it holds true,” murmurs Harwin Strong, expression strangely light as he raises his cup to her once again. “We are descendants of the First Men, just as Lady Royce is. I find myself longing to drink to such a rediscovered kinship.”

She does not know if it is the play of light across his face or the rough edge of longing in his voice that makes her raise her cup to him in turn. Does not think it matters greatly, though perhaps it shall begin to matter a lot in the long stretch of time still to come.

“To rediscovered kinship,” she nods, and drains her cup dry.

#house of the dragon #hotd #hotd fic #rhea royce #harwin strong #larys strong #lyonel strong #killyfic

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