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She waits on a simple chair, brought out from the main hall, keeping the pressure off her ankles and spine. One hand braced on her belly, the other on the armrest. She wears no crown, the cold metal gives her headaches. She waits.
Dreamfyre sees them coming first, rumbling, the vast silver-blue bulk of her shifting to look. The stomp of boots, the boy's whimpers. Rhaenyra is silent and still; when Helaena blinks she sees walking amidst her own soldiers, Father's crown gleaming on her head.
She has no crown, now. Father's crown is gone, sold, and Rhaenyra's hair catches the light exactly the way Helaena does. She is a mirror when their eyes meet across the courtyard, haggard brittle edges that scrape and tear, dripping red.
"Sister," she calls. "I had hoped you were dead."
"After you," Helaena responds for consistency's sake. "You are the elder."
The words fall cool and flat; Aegon would have said them better. He had that special flair, that spark so often muffled with drink and misery; the people had loved him, once, had cheered for him. Burned, he would spat fire with every breath, would have made this quick and brutal. Helaena is different.
"I am pleased to know that you remember that." There is a cold in Rhaenyra's eyes that makes Helaena think of that day a few weeks before her own birth, when Rhaenyra came back from a hunt covered in blood, dripping fury from every step. "It would seem we are your prisoners, but do not think that you will hold us long. My leal lords will find me."
"If they search the seven hells, mayhaps," Helaena recites, and then nods to Ser Broome. He lunges and rips Aegon, Rhaenyra's Aegon, from his mother's arms. The boy screams, and Helaena tries not to flinch at the sound, the familiarity. He looks so very like Jaehaerys, up close.
"Take him into the castle," she orders. "Do not let him near the windows, do not let him see what comes next."
The boy cries for his Mother, shouting in High Valyrian, and Rhaenyra shouts back. Promises of vengeance, promises of love, a goodbye that Helaena was never permitted. Her men, her husband's men, hold Rhaenyra back as her son is carried off, vanishing into the towers of Dragonstone.
Jaehaera is already there, giggling with Morghul and Shrykos and an imaginary friend she calls Aerea, a ghost she chatters with cheerfully when she thinks no one is watching. She has grown to love Dragonstone as Aerea never did, loved its vast, quiet halls, loved the volcanic rumbles in the distance, loved perching on the window and waving her small hand into the void, reaching for history.
Young Aegon will despise this place, if he survives. Young Aegon will despise many things, including her. The only world where Helaena could have prevented that is filled with spikes kissing her skin, but the thought still stings.
After them, she dismisses her other men. Dreamfyre looms over them all, watching with her beautiful silver eyes, and Rhaenyra's dragon's scales have long since melted into the streets of King's Landing. The knights march off into the castle, leaving Helaena more alone with her sister than she has ever been in her entire life.
She rises from her chair, one hand braced on her belly. Rhaenyra's eyes narrow on it as she approaches, fingers tangled in her chest, fear tucked under a sharp-toothed current of fury.
"Which one is the father?" she asks, jerking her head at Helaena's stomach. "Do you even know?"
"No," Helaena answers, honestly. If she sorted through the threads long enough, she could probably discern which of her brothers had fathered her last child, whether it was Aegon as before or Aemond now. But why bother? They are both dead, the babe will resemble them both, pale hair and violet eyes and just enough Targaryen blood to see them through.
Rhaenyra chuckles bitterly. "Your mother would be proud."
Bringing up Mother is a blade drawn out at the last second, and they know it. Helaena can see Mother standing where Rhaenyra was, pleading, desperate. A ruin in blood, torn open by what Aegon and Aemond had become.
And she can hear her mother, too. Helaena, my love, open the gates. Helaena, my love, I had no choice. Helaena, my dearest, dearest love--
"She used to cry so, after I fucked her in your marriage bed." Rhaenyra's voice is meant to twist with cruelty, but it trembles at the last second. She still sees what she has done to Mother, breaking her beyond repair and pushing her fingers through the pieces, as liberation. She can't see it any other way.
"Did she cry when you beheaded her son?" Helaena asks lightly, so lightly. She'd cried, flying over the wilderness with her dragon, Jaehaera mumbling at her side, the hatchlings hissing in their bags, Dreamfyre rumbling beneath her. None of them could offer words of comfort, and it would have fallen flat anyway.
"I didn't make her watch." A promise, a plea. Rhaenyra's eyes dart to Dragonstone, like she's afraid to see her son's small face peering out, eyes wide with horror. Truthfully, Helaena thinks she might be crueler than her husband ever could have been, forcing him to only imagine instead of see for himself.
"No, you just made the smallfolk look on instead. Truly, did you believe that would work?" Helaena keeps her voice distant, as if the question is a philosophical one. She burned out her rage and grief on her sister's armies a long time ago.
Rhaenyra's face works. Thinking, maybe, of the smallfolk's eyes when they dragged out their king, half burned, half dead, a mockery of any real threat. Shoving him to his knees in front of the block, making him slur out his confession in between whimpers for more poppy.
His burns came from defending his soldiers, whatever else might have sent him to the field that day. Defending them, avenging not just his own son, but the kin they'd lost when Meleys tore through a holy place. Defending them from the woman who called herself their queen, the woman who starved them and gifted them small comforts and starved them again.
She'd made a mistake, she'd compounded it by putting Aegon's scarred head up on a pike. She'd made a mistake and then Daemon had run off with poor Nettles and her dragonseed had turned on her and each other and the city fell with her sons and now, now here she stands.
"You've never been one to gloat, little sister." Rhaenyra has not called her that since Helaena was small, when she would sit Helaena on her lap and tell her stories of great Targaryen women, while Helaena stared up at her and saw only fire.
No, she wasn't one to gloat. She wasn't a killer, either. Helaena never wanted to kill anyone, that much was true.
But it's also true that she has never had much of a choice. Not in this world they share, the world their father gave them.
"Baela is alive, in case you were wondering," she tosses in. "My maesters are seeing to her now, but they're confident in her recovery. She's a fierce girl."
She had been. Even though Helaena cannot truly be surprised in battle, even though she had seen every arching crossbow bolt behind her eyes, the fight had still taken a lot out of her. A dragon of Dreamfyre's size could only dodge so quickly, and Baela had hesitated for a mere heartbeat when she saw her opponent's swollen belly, just as Helaena would have done in her place.
In the end, though, their battle was not the draw it could have been. Moondancer was too small, poor creature, and Dreamfyre bears none of Sunfyre's wounds, nor Helaena Aegon's. Baela will have to live and make sense of her new reality, same as the rest of them.
Rhaenyra shifts slightly, processing the news. She cares for Baela, in her own way, and Baela cares for her. If nothing else, she had tried not to repeat Mother's mistakes with her own stepdaughters, had fractured the wheel in some places while others ran her down.
Because of this, Helaena adds, "Viserys is alive, too. He is in Lys, unharmed."
Rhaenyra flinches at that, full-bodied. She doesn't ask how Helaena knows, same way she doesn't ask how Helaena knew the perfect places to pick off her armies, how Helaena knew to flee when she did, how Helaena knows all the many tangled things she knows.
"I will retrieve him, after. With gold if I have to, or with fire and blood if I must. I swear this to you, sister." And she means it. "He is my nephew, after all, and innocent as my son was."
Rhaenyra grits her teeth. "Daemon never wanted--"
"What Daemon wanted does not fucking matter." Wrath bubbles up, sharp and hissing; she is sister to Aegon the Burnt and Aemond One-Eyed, descendant of Visenya, and she is herself, living, breathed, wounded at the core. "You loosed your mad dog on us, and now he is dead. Now almost everyone we know is dead. A son for a son for a son, it means nothing, it save nothing. It never has."
Rhaenyra stiffens a little at the onslaught, pushing back to her feet. "And what happens to my sons, then? My last boys. When I am gone, will they follow?"
When I am gone. She says it so easily, like it's not even real to her. Helaena understands that; she has lived with spikes gleaming in the back of her head for longer than she can remember, since she first screamed terrified fury while her mother bounced her beside a window.
Even now, with the threads of that fate snapped off, she lives with it still. The impossibility of her own demise, the cold, permanent truth of it. The inescapable absence of one child, the desperate need to save another. To be sure, impossible as it is to ever be sure of everything, even for one who sees as much as Helaena does.
"What if they threaten that babe of yours?" Rhaenyra jerks her chin, teeth gritted. "You think yourself too pure for vengeance, now, sister, and when my supporters--"
"Then I will find Laenor." In Essos, last she checked. Just like Aegon would have gone, if he and Larys had been able to escape with their lives; like Daenerys and the third Viserys, in a distant future Helaena has long since snuffed out. "I will declare your last sons bastards in the eyes of the realm, if I must."
Rhaenyra stares. Shock maybe at what Helaena knows, shock maybe at the reminder she has a first husband at all. She had no doubt forgotten him, as so much of the realm has.
Why did she spare him, Helaena wonders. The last scraps of sentimentality? An apology to the ghost of Laena Velaryon, wronged beyond repair? Cruelty disguised as kindness, to break his bond with his dragon, to cast him from everything he has ever known?
Helaena doesn't know, because it doesn't matter. She truly does not wish to carry out her threat, if only because digging up Laenor and dragging him home might be a tiresome task of little value in the end. But she will, if Cregan's wolves are not stopped by other means, if the lords are not retaught how to bend the knee under Dreamfyre's maw.
Her elder sister laughs, high-pitched and hysterical. Her laugh is a beautiful one, it always was. Mother's laugh was a shadow throughout Helaena's childhood, glimpsed only in memories of two girls she never knew, but her sister's laugh is almost as familiar as Aegon's.
Aegon had a beautiful laugh, too. She and him, they never fit, not from the beginning, but he was still her brother, and she still loved her laugh as she loved Aemond's tender voice reading stories, loved Grandfather's rare smiles and Mother's rarer laugh, loved Criston's watchful faze, loved Daeron's bright and hopeful letters, loved Jae's bright eyes as he studied the ladybug on her palm.
And where they all stood, she has Rhaenyra. Rhaenyra, looking at her with something like hatred and something like recognition, unflinching, unforgiving, inescapable. Beautiful, even now, in the depths of fear and ruin. Beautiful especially now.
"It's you, wasn't it?" Her voice is soft and fragile, bitter in understanding. "The little dragon dreamer. I thought it possible, after you escaped us, but Daemon--"
"Thought I had too much Hightower blood." Too Andal for such a gift, too common. Even after he had glimpsed in Alys's vision, he would pushed the knowledge down the farther he got from Harrenhal, sliding back behind the walls of denial. A man like that cannot survive otherwise--although of course, he survives no longer.
Rhaenyra shakes her head. "Always with the squirmy little surprises, Hel."
Hel, look! C'mon, Hel, Aem's being a cunt. Get that out of my fucking face, Hel. I'll go slow, Hel, I promise. You really think there's two of them in there, Hel? You'll be a fine fucking queen, Hel, the people love you. Don't be stupid, Hel, Jae's not dead, he's not, he's not. Look after Haera, Hel, please. I'll never fucking understand you, Hel, and that's the best thing about you.
The knife slides out of her pocket and into her hand, cutting off Aegon's voice. Cutting off Aemond's breath on his shoulder, his hand in her hair. Cutting off the weight of her children in her arms. Slicing them all away, leaving her in silence.
"You've never called me that before." Her finger rubs slowly along the hilt. "You hated my name, you always have. You wanted Father to name me Visenya, like the sister Queen Aemma was supposed to give you. Like the dead daughter they pulled out of her womb."
Rhaenyra looks from the knife, then to her, then to Dreamfyre. She does not cry, she does not beg. Her spine stiffens, her head raised high, every inch the queen.
"I thought about sparing your life." Helaena takes a step forward, another. "My brother wasn't cruel enough for that, but I could be. To lock you up in a tower, away from your sons, to grow old and be forgotten with your ghosts. To die quietly and without glory, like Queen Rhaena before you. I could do that."
She adjusts the weight of the dagger in her palm, letting Rhaenyra see it. Her sister's eyes narrow, closing in on the blade, a shape she recognizes well. Aegon's dagger, the prophecies hidden, but the steel shining bright. Aegon's dagger, not just the Conqueror's, because Aegon was the one who held it until he fell and their brother took it instead.
Aemond hadn't noticed Helaena taking it, the night he begged her to fight with him, to die with him against far too many dragons. The night he begged her to come with him to Harrenhal, to step even deeper into Alicent's web than she already has, to let the God's Eye swallow her like every Targaryen who got too near.
"Aegon's prophecy didn't mean you." Helaena says, holding up the dagger. "Father wanted you to rule, I'm sure--you were always his favorite, after all. But the prophecy wasn't for you."
Rhaenyra holds still. If what Helaena says about her lack of destiny bothers her, she manages to choke it down. Perhaps she simply refuses to believe, hoping this to be a lie slipped in with Helaena's uncomfortable truths. Perhaps she has already seen enough children die that the revelation is not the surprise it should be.
"I don't know who it means right now, actually," Helaena continues. "The more things I change, the blurrier my vision grows, and far enough ahead it's impossible to tell. All I know that my children and I are not safe, not as long as you are alive. We have all learned the cost of mercy."
They are almost close enough to touch, now. Rhaenyra's eyes narrow; Helaena had her searched for weapons, told them where to find the blade she keeps at her waist, but there are others she might have missed. A final burst of rage, taking them together.
"Alicent will not forgive you," is what she offers instead. It's not a form of pleading, just a matter-of-fact statement.
"No, she won't." For all the ripples she has made in the water, Helaena sees this sharp and clear. Alicent betrayed her sons for Helaena's sake, rejected everything she has ever stood for in Helaena's name, prayed to the gods that Helaena, at least, be allowed to stay pure, stay hers. She will not be able to bear the truth, she will not be able to bear Rhaenyra's loss.
"Is it worth the price?" Rhaenyra asks. Fists at her side, defiant, a queen standing against the dark. Helaena sees herself in the throne, asking her brother that mirrored question. She sees the answer in her own eyes, as she saw it in his.
It will be. It must be. There is nothing else.
She steps forward as quickly as she can, plunging the blade into her sister's stomach. Rhaenyra buckles, swaying, and Helaena steadies her with one hand. She leans forward to brush their lips together, just once, just for a heartbeat, just to see what brought Mother and all those others so close to the flame.
Rhaenyra's mouth is warm, soft, with a taste like brittle sunlight. Blood shines on her tongue, smeared across Helaena's lips as she leans in, kisses by.
Helaena steps away, pulling the knife out in a soft red gout. She feels more than hears herself say Dracarys.
Her sister goes up in a gout of silver flame, tinged with blue at its heart. There time for her to scream, just once, and then Dreamfyre's jaws close around her with a final crunch of bone. She makes quick work of Rhaenyra, quicker than Sunfyre would have.
When it's over, Helaena stands covered in blood, in a circle of ash. Embers hiss around her feet, sizzling gently, the smoke that used to be her sister twining around like a maiden's cloak. Dreamfyre settles down with a satisfied sigh, well pleased with her meal.
She hasn't lost her taste for human flesh since Androw Fairman, Helaena thinks. And then she thinks the embers are sizzling rather differently than they had a second earlier, as water drips between her legs and spatters across the ground.
"Oh." Her knees buckle beneath her, and there is no one to catch her, no one to keep her from sinking to her knees amidst the stinking deathground. "Oh, look at that. Look at you."
She sinks to her knees, hands skidding through her sister's ashes, Rhaenyra skittering up her skirt. Rhaenyra was not there when the twins were born, was not there when Helaena herself was born, but she is here now. She is the only one left.
"Come on." She could scream for help, if she tried, but she focuses on breathing and pushing, breathing and pushing. Head bowed, ash clotted in her air, her sister's pyre folding around her and holding her tight.
Breathe, in the birthing bed, with the midwife holding one hand and Mother holding the other. Push, with Criston guarding her door, with Aemond dragging Aegon back from the brothel, her brothers stumbling in to huddle at her side.
Breathe, Hel, come on. It's time.
He's fast, this one, more eager than either of the twins. By the time they hear her cries and come running, he's already crowning, and she gathers her shaking, bloodied hands beneath her own body to catch. Her blood mixing with her sister's for the last time, sizzling across the ground like an oath.
She fumbles for the Conqueror's dagger to cut the cord, to carefully slice the caul draped across his face. Dreamfyre lowers her head and Helaena gratefully braces against it, heaving for air, cuddling her son close to her chest.
They are shouting for her as they approach, your Grace, your Grace. Maelor cries louder, sharp and piercing, demanding for love as both his fathers had been. His tiny fist tangles in her hair, Rhaenyra's ashes slipping through his fingers, and he cries even louder.
His tiny eyes are screwed tight, but Helaena knows that they look just like hers, just like her sister's. She cups the back of his head and breathes in his scent, fresh life mixing with fresh death into a cocktail that makes her head ring.
The wind sweeps around them, gathering scraps of ash into the air. Helaena holds her son tight and watches her sister soar above their heads, flying on gray wings, arching towards the horizon disappearing into the vast, glittering water.