Chapter 56: Chapter 56: A Year In Review
By the beginning of 115 AC, I still believed the year might be shaped by careful hands. By its end, I knew better.
The first defeat of the year came on paper.
It arrived in King’s Landing beneath two seals, one gold lion stamped in red wax, the other green rose pressed with courtly neatness. Both letters were polite, which made them worse. A blunt refusal at least had the decency to show its teeth, while courtesy let men place a knife carefully between your ribs and thank you for standing still while they found the angle.
Jason Lannister wrote that the Westerlands possessed ships, coin, levies, and loyal captains enough to answer Ironborn raiders without the assistance of foreign swords. Lord Tyrell wrote with softer phrases and the same meaning, speaking of Reach strength, local obligations, and the need to avoid unnecessary alarm among the great houses. Neither man insulted me, neither named Rhaenyra, and neither mentioned Otto Hightower, which only proved they had learned the lesson properly.
Vaeron read both letters twice, then laid them side by side on the table as if comparing accounts from two dishonest merchants. We were in a solar borrowed from the Red Keep, one level above the gardens, where the air smelled of warm stone, oranges, and the faint rot of court politics. Rhaenyra stood near the window with one hand resting beneath the swell of her early pregnancy, watching us over her shoulder while King’s Landing moved below like a city pretending it was not always hungry.
"They used different ink," Vaeron said.
"That is your conclusion?"
"No. That is my irritation." He tapped the Lannister letter with one finger, then the Tyrell one. "The conclusion is that two great lords, separated by coast, interest, pride, and habit, have suddenly decided with remarkable unity that hiring us would create alarm."
Rhaenyra’s mouth tightened. "Otto."
I looked down at the letters again.
The proposal had been simple. Ironborn raiders had grown bold along western waters, striking small ports, taking ships, burning storehouses, and vanishing before local levies could gather. The Dread Legion could have served cleanly there. Paid service against raiders, no quarrel with inheritance, no marching under Rhaenyra’s banner, and no threat to the Crown. A respectable contract in Westeros would have done more than fill our accounts; it would have made us useful in the eyes of men who preferred to call us dangerous.
Otto had understood that before I did.
"He has not forbidden anything," I said.
"No," Vaeron replied. "He is better than that."
Rhaenyra turned fully from the window. "He taught them to refuse."
Vaeron nodded once. "Lord Jason does not wish to seem dependent on the Princess’s foreign husband. Lord Tyrell does not wish to offend the Hand when the Reach lives beneath Oldtown’s shadow. Otto did not need to order either of them. He only needed to remind them what our usefulness would look like if it grew."
I sat back and let the anger settle before speaking. That had become a habit over the past year, and not always a welcome one. After Emeric, after Criston, after the funeral, rage no longer felt clean enough to trust. It still came quickly, but I had learned that quick feelings were often the ones Otto hoped I would obey.
"He is trying to starve us of legitimacy," I said.
Vaeron’s eyes sharpened. "Yes."
"Not coin."
"No. We have coin. Not forever, but enough. He means to deny us respectable purpose. If we sit on Dragonstone with eleven thousand men, we are a threat. If we serve the realm and protect its coasts, we become harder to name as one."
Rhaenyra crossed to the table and took up the Tyrell letter. She read only a few lines before setting it down with visible distaste. "My father will call this caution."
"Your father wants peace," I said.
"My father wants quiet."
That was crueller, and it was also truer.
A year had passed since Criston Cole’s head struck the basket in the Red Keep yard, and peace had not returned. It had only learned to lower its voice. Alicent moved through court in green more often than not, speaking softly, praying publicly, and withdrawing from Rhaenyra with a coldness that no apology could cross. Otto did not attack me openly. He asked after Dragonstone’s stores, praised discipline where others could hear, and wrote letters into places his hands never appeared.
Criston had died, but the cause he would have served had not. It had simply become quieter.
Vaeron folded the letters and placed them together. "Then we find another door."
"The West and Reach are closed."
"For now." His gaze moved to the map spread beneath our cups and accounts, toward the chain of broken islands between Westeros and Essos. "The sea is not."
Rhaenyra studied him. "You already have something."
"I have something Lord Corlys cannot afford to despise."
That almost made me smile, though not enough for it to reach my face.
Vaeron’s counter came first through Driftmark.
Corlys Velaryon did not love me. That had not changed simply because Rhaenyra had married me, because Criston had died, or because I had tried to stand with enough restraint not to become the foreign monster Otto wanted. Laenor’s death still lay between us like a drowned prince whose body had never been fully given back by the sea. Corlys could respect usefulness while refusing affection, and perhaps that was why Vaeron found him easier to negotiate with than men who smiled too much.
The Stepstones remained a wound in the Narrow Sea.
Pirates, broken Triarchy remnants, sellsails without employer or honour, and small kings of bare rocks had returned to the islands the moment great lords looked elsewhere. Ships paid more for escorts. Merchants cursed the old routes. Velaryon captains bled coin through delays, lost cargo, and bribes offered to men who would take them and raid anyway. Corlys had fleets, but fleets needed men ashore, disciplined foot, archers who could hold ridges, and officers who knew how to turn bad ground into a trap.
Vaeron offered him exactly that.
Not friendship. Terms.
By the third week after the Lannister and Tyrell letters, the Velaryon contract was signed. The Dread Legion would return to the Stepstones not as conquerors and not as Daemon’s companions in reckless glory, but as paid force under clear service: secure anchorages, clear pirate holds, protect Velaryon shipping lanes, and establish temporary fortified posts at agreed points. Corlys would provide ships, transport, local pilots, and naval command. Vaeron would command the land operations of the Dread Legion.
Storm’s End remained only a possibility then.
There had been letters from Lord Boremund Baratheon, blunt and practical, asking after the strength, discipline, and cost of Unsullied infantry should the Dornish Marches worsen. Nothing had been sealed. No contract had been accepted. No force had been promised to move. Vaeron kept the correspondence alive because he hated leaving doors shut, but the Unsullied remained on Dragonstone, drilling beneath black cliffs and hard weather, waiting for an order that had not yet been written.
That distinction mattered.
Otto had closed the West and the Reach without signing his name to the lock. Vaeron had opened a sea gate at Driftmark, but the storm gate was still barred, and until it opened by law, coin, and command, not one Unsullied spear would leave Dragonstone for the Stormlands.
"You should lead the Stepstones," I said.
Vaeron blinked once. "I expected an argument."
"You wanted one."
"A little; it is always fun arguing against you."
"You must be disappointed."
Vaeron leaned over the map, pale hair falling forward as he traced the island chain with a finger. "The cavalry stay on Dragonstone. Landrey will complain, but horses are worth more here than breaking legs on Stepstones rock. Jasper can command the infantry blocks, Rollis will keep the supply posts alive, and Dick will weep over transport numbers until the ships sail in proper order."
"Emeric would have hated the winds."
Vaeron’s finger stilled.
For a moment, the solar seemed to lose its warmth.
"Yes," he said. "He would have complained about every bowstring from Bloodstone to Grey Gallows."
Neither of us spoke after that for several breaths.
Emeric had become part of our silences. Not always grief fresh enough to bleed, but an absence that walked beside councils, drills, and maps. The archers had named one of their signal calls after him, though no one admitted it in official lists. Landrey still avoided the part of the training yard where the funeral pyre had stood. Jasper no longer mocked caution in the same way, and Rollis had begun checking bow stores with an irritability that fooled no one.
Vaeron looked up again. "The Dread Legion needs to serve away from Dragonstone."
"I know."
"So does the realm. Men fear what they only see sitting beside Rhaenyra’s castle."
"I know that too."
His expression softened by a fraction. "Then trust me with it."
That struck harder than it should have.
He had been vice-captain for years, quartermaster longer in spirit than in title, and the one man who saw both the numbers and the blood behind every order. Still, sending him away with the Dread Legion felt like cutting off my right hand and telling it to write letters from the sea. If I could not trust Vaeron to command without me, then every speech I had made about men standing as men, not tools, had been a lie dressed in better words.
"I do," I said.
Vaeron searched my face, perhaps expecting the hesitation to reveal itself.
It did not, at least not where he could see.
The Dread Legion sailed within the month. Infantry, archers, engineers, supply officers, surgeons, smiths, cooks, clerks, and every piece of the company useful to rock, ship, and narrow landing went with Vaeron. Landrey remained on Dragonstone with the cavalry and reacted to the decision with such venom that several stable boys learned new curses before breakfast. He knew the sense of it, and that only made him angrier.
Grey Worm remained on Dragonstone with one thousand Unsullied.
Black Rat remained with the other six thousand.
The Unsullied did not move toward the Stormlands. They drilled, guarded, patrolled, and waited. Some men in King’s Landing called that waiting ominous, as if discipline became more threatening when it refused to hurry. I called it obedience. No contract had been accepted by Storm’s End, and until one was, the six thousand remained on Dragonstone beneath Black Rat’s command, ready but not unleashed.
The island changed again under the weight of division. It had become fortress after Emeric’s funeral, but now it became something more complicated: depot, harbour, home, military road, nursery of rumours, and the place from which too many different futures departed. Vaeron wrote from the Stepstones in clean script stained by salt, reporting fortified coves, burned pirate stores, three minor victories, one fever outbreak contained, and Rollis threatening to murder a shipmaster who thought water barrels were optional.
In the seventh month, a raven came from King’s Landing.
The Queen had given birth to twin sons: Aemond and Daeron Targaryen.
I read the words in Rhaenyra’s chamber while rain struck the windows and the sea beyond Dragonstone vanished behind grey. Rhaenyra was sewing slowly near the hearth because pregnancy had made her restless and proud enough to resent anyone saying so. She watched my face change before I could control it.
"What is it?" she asked.
I handed her the letter.
She read quickly. Her mouth tightened at Alicent’s name, softened briefly at the mention of children, then stilled when she reached the names. "Two sons."
"Yes."
"Aemond and Daeron."
The names sounded different in her mouth. Not wrong, exactly, but changed by the fact that they had arrived together.
She looked back at me. "This troubles you."
"It should."
"Because they are sons?"
"Because they are wrong."
Rhaenyra’s eyes narrowed, not in anger but concentration. She had learned the shape of my dread over the past year, just as she had learned the difference between future knowledge and the fear of trusting it too much. She did not understand every shadow in my head, but she knew when one had moved.
"Aemond was meant to come sooner," she said.
"Yes."
"And Daeron?"
"Later. Much later."
She looked down at the letter again. "But they are twins."
"They were not."
The fire popped softly.
Rain whispered against stone.
I felt the old map in my head tear along another fold.
Aemond had come late compared to the history I knew. His absence had already unsettled me in quiet ways, because I had been waiting for a child whose future shadow was too large to ignore. Daeron had come impossibly early, years before he should have entered the world, and now both had arrived together from the same birthbed, two sons where the old account had promised separation, delay, and order.
It was not one thread pulled out of place.
It was the weave changing beneath my hands.
Rhaenyra set the letter down carefully. "You have changed battles, marriages, deaths, alliances. Did you think births would remain untouched?"
"No."
The answer was too quick to be true.
She knew it.
I stood and went to the window because movement helped me lie less poorly. "I thought some things might hold. Not everything. I am not that much of a fool. But enough. Enough to know where the floor was beneath me."
"And now?"
"Now the floor moves."
Rhaenyra rose more slowly, one hand beneath her stomach. Our child had begun to make her balance different, subtle to others, obvious to me because I watched too often and pretended I did not. She came to my side and looked out at the rain, not touching me at first.
"Then we learn the movement," she said.
I looked at her.
She did not make it sound easy, which was why it helped. Rhaenyra did not offer comfort by denying the danger. She offered it by standing beside danger and refusing to kneel.
"History has not vanished," she continued. "Alicent has sons. My father will love them. Otto will use them. Lords will look at Aegon and see what they wish to see. Those things remain, do they not?"
"Yes."
"Then your dreams are not useless."
"No."
"They are only less obedient than you wanted."
That time, the laugh escaped me.
It was small, bitter, and real.
She allowed herself a faint smile. "Good. I was beginning to fear I had married a man who expected history to behave."
"You married worse."
"I know."
Her hand found mine then and set it gently against the curve of her stomach. Beneath my palm, nothing moved at first. Then there was the smallest pressure, not strong enough to be called a kick by anyone but a father desperate to believe the world could still offer simple miracles.
The future moved beneath my hand, and I was too afraid to find it comforting.
By the year’s last turn, Rhaenyra returned to King’s Landing to give birth.
Viserys wanted it, and Rhaenyra agreed before I could decide whether I disliked the idea enough to argue. There was strategy in it. A child born under royal witness could not easily be called hidden. A son born in the Red Keep, beneath the eyes of maesters, midwives, court ladies, and the King himself waiting outside the chamber, would deny Otto certain whispers before they ripened. Rhaenyra understood that as well as I did.
Perhaps better.
King’s Landing received us with the same beauty and filth as always. The Red Keep seemed unchanged from the outside, but nothing in it felt the same after Criston’s death. Men still bowed. Women still curtsied. Servants still carried trays, candles, water, wine, and secrets. Yet every hall contained memory if I looked too long, and the throne room remained a place where music had once failed to notice murder until a scream taught it silence.
Alicent congratulated Rhaenyra with perfect courtesy.
Rhaenyra accepted with equal perfection.
Neither woman reached for the other.
Otto congratulated me on the coming birth with the mildness of a man praising good weather. He did not mention the Lannister letter, the Tyrell letter, the Stepstones, or Storm’s End. He asked after Vaeron’s success as though every report of the Dread Legion clearing pirate holds had not irritated him. He asked after Dragonstone’s health as if Grey Worm and seven thousand Unsullied did not make the island harder to frighten. He asked after my comfort in the capital as if Criston Cole’s blood had not dried inside its walls.
"My lord Hand," I said, because politeness was cheaper than honesty and sometimes more useful.
"Captain Galeris," he replied.
Neither of us smiled.
Rhaenyra’s labour began before dawn on a wet morning.
I was not in the birthing chamber. No man was, though royal blood had its own ways of bending rules when women wanted witnesses, and men wanted control. I waited in the adjoining solar with Viserys, Daemon, and two maesters who tried not to look frightened whenever Rhaenyra cried out through the stone. Alicent came once, stayed only long enough to ask if there was danger, then withdrew when Daemon’s presence made the room too sharp for false tenderness.
Viserys prayed under his breath.
Daemon drank wine and did not taste it.
I stood by the door until a midwife told me to stop blocking every useful path.
The hours lengthened in the cruel way hours do when the world narrows to pain behind a door. I had stood in shield walls, watched men die, crossed seas, bargained for armies, and seen a future full of dragonfire, yet nothing had ever made me feel so useless as hearing Rhaenyra suffer while everyone told me waiting was the only honourable thing available. Othorion’s body wanted action. Heinrich’s mind remembered hospitals, pain scales, fluorescent lights, the thin helplessness of illness, and the ancient terror of bodies doing what no will could command.
Then the child cried.
Everything stopped.
Not the room, perhaps. Not Viserys’s breathing, not Daemon setting down his cup, not the maesters rustling like dry leaves. But something in me halted so sharply it felt like pain. A child’s cry filled the chamber beyond the door, thin, furious, alive, and it cut through politics, history, contracts, maps, and fear with a simplicity I had no defence against.
The midwife opened the door.
"You may come in now, my prince," she said, then corrected herself with visible panic. "Captain."
Daemon laughed under his breath.
I did not hear him properly.
Rhaenyra looked exhausted, pale, damp with sweat, and more beautiful than any woman had a right to look after surviving pain men turned into songs because they never had to bear it. She held a small bundled shape against her chest. Her eyes found mine, and whatever pride she might have shown the court later was not what she gave me then. She gave me a look stripped of crown, claim, faction, and performance.
Our son lay in her arms.
Silver hair.
Soft, pale, unmistakable.
When his eyes opened, they were dark at first in the way newborn eyes are dark, but the shade beneath was there, a violet promise waiting to sharpen with time. His features were small and red and wrinkled, not the sculpted perfection court painters would later invent, but the blood was plain enough for any fool with eyes. Valyrian. Targaryen. Galeris. The names did not matter in that first breath, and mattered too much in every breath after it.
Rhaenyra watched me take him in.
"Jacaerys," she said.
The name struck through two worlds.
In another history, that name had belonged to a boy with brown hair, a dragon, courage, and a death too early over cold northern water. In this one, Jacaerys opened his mouth and cried again beneath silver hair inherited from both sides of his blood, and one of the sharpest knives history had given Rhaenyra’s enemies vanished before they could draw it.
No brown hair.
No easy whispers.
No Strong features turned into court entertainment.
No child forced from birth to carry proof men would pretend not to see until hatred made them brave.
I reached for him when Rhaenyra allowed it, and the moment he was placed in my arms I understood that every speech I had ever made about the future had been smaller than this weight. He was warm. Too warm, too fragile, too real. I had changed history in battles, contracts, and executions, but this was the first change that looked up at me as if I owed it a world.
Viserys wept openly when he saw him.
"My grandson," he said.
Not my daughter’s son. Not the boy. My grandson, spoken with the joy of a king who had forgotten politics for one dangerous, beautiful moment.
Daemon looked over my shoulder and gave the child a considering stare, as if judging whether newborns were usually this unimpressed with their own importance. "Looks like a dragon."
"He looks like a red prune," Rhaenyra said weakly.
Daemon smiled. "A Valyrian red prune."
I might have laughed if my throat had not closed.
Alicent came later, summoned by duty, curiosity, or some terrible mixture of both. She looked at Jacaerys in Rhaenyra’s arms, and I saw the blow land behind her eyes. Not because she hated an infant. Not then. But because she understood what his appearance meant. The old weapon would not exist. Whatever arguments the Greens would one day build, they would not build them easily on the colour of my son’s hair.
"He is beautiful," Alicent said.
Rhaenyra’s face softened by a fraction. "Thank you."
For a heartbeat, the room remembered two girls who had once loved each other.
Then Jacaerys stirred, Viserys praised the gods again, Otto entered behind the Queen with his careful face, and the heartbeat passed.
Otto looked at the child.
He saw the silver hair.
He saw the line of the face, the Valyrian promise, the politics removed before birth could become scandal.
His expression did not change.
That frightened me more than anger would have.
"A strong son," Otto said.
"Yes," I replied.
"May he bring peace to the realm."
Rhaenyra looked at him then. "He has only just arrived, Lord Hand. Give him a day before placing the realm upon him."
Viserys chuckled, too happy to hear the edge.
Otto bowed his head. "Of course, Princess."
He left soon after, and the air felt cleaner when he was gone, which meant he had done exactly what he intended by entering.
The Stormlands contract was accepted three days after Jacaerys’s birth.
It came formally through the Crown, sealed by Storm’s End and approved by Viserys before the ink had fully dried. Lord Boremund Baratheon requested Unsullied strength to gather at Storm’s End and await further instruction for service along the Dornish Marches. The wording was careful enough for court and direct enough for soldiers: disciplined infantry, temporary service, clear pay, no claim to lands, no interference with marcher command unless battle required it.
Only then did the storm gate open.
Vaeron had not forced it. He was still in the Stepstones, writing orders among salt, stone, and pirate smoke. He had prepared the road, but Lord Boremund had chosen the hour, perhaps because the Marches had worsened, perhaps because the sight of my Valyrian son had changed the weight of my name, perhaps because even Otto could not make every lord prefer fear over useful spears.
I read the contract in the same borrowed solar where the Lannister and Tyrell refusals had first taught me the shape of Otto’s quiet war.
Rhaenyra sat nearby with Jacaerys asleep against her, one small fist curled against the edge of her gown. She looked stronger than she had any right to look three days after birth, though I had learned by then that Rhaenyra’s pride often stood guard over her weakness before anyone else could reach it.
"You will go," she said.
"Yes, someone needs to command during this contract."
"And the Unsullied?"
"They remain on Dragonstone until my order reaches them. Black Rat will await my return, and we will bring six thousand to Storm’s End. Grey Worm keeps one thousand on Dragonstone with Landrey and Casper."
She looked down at our son. "So you leave first."
"Unfortunately, I have to."
"I know the sense of it."
"That does not make it kinder."
"No," she said. "It does not."
I wrote the letter myself.
Not because scribes could not be trusted with orders, but because some commands should carry the weight of the hand that gave them. The message was addressed to Black Rat, with copies to Grey Worm, Landrey, and Ser Casper Ryndoon. Six thousand Unsullied were to depart Dragonstone in ordered transport as soon as ships were provisioned, sail for the Stormlands under escort, and meet me at Storm’s End. Grey Worm would retain one thousand Unsullied for Dragonstone’s defence. Landrey’s cavalry would remain on the island. Casper’s garrison would be informed of all movements so no fool mistook discipline for sudden abandonment.
I sealed the letter in purple wax.
Then I held it too long.
Rhaenyra watched me from beside the cradle. "You are thinking of the future."
"I am always thinking of the future."
"No. You are thinking of the one that no longer obeys you."
I looked at Jacaerys. Silver hair rested against the blanket like moonlight caught in thread. He had come near the time history remembered, but with a face history had never given him. Aemond had come late. Daeron had come early. They had come together. The future had not shattered cleanly, which would have been easier. Broken things could be swept aside, cursed, mourned, and replaced with whatever strength remained.
This was worse.
The future still breathed. It still kept some names, some births, some grudges, and some roads. But it wore new faces now. It moved dates beneath my feet and allowed old dangers to survive in forms I did not know how to name.
"I thought changing history would make it safer," I said.
Rhaenyra rose carefully and came to me, placing one hand over mine where the sealed letter rested. "Then make this one safer."
It was such a simple answer that it almost angered me.
Then it steadied me.
I bent and kissed her, softly at first, then harder because I was leaving and because softness alone could not hold everything we had become. When I pulled away, she did not let go at once. Her forehead rested against mine, and for a moment there was no court, no Otto, no Storm’s End, no Stepstones, no old history moving like a snake beneath new stones.
Only her.
Only our son breathing nearby.
Then the moment ended because all moments did.
"You will write," she said.
"Yes."
"You will come back."
"Yes."
"Say it properly."
I closed my eyes. "I will come back to you. And to him."
She nodded once, and that was all she allowed herself.
I left King’s Landing before the week ended.
The city watched me ride out with a smaller escort than rumour would have preferred. No six thousand spears marched behind me. No wall of black shields turned the streets into a river of disciplined fear. The Unsullied remained on Dragonstone, waiting for the letter already flying across the water by raven and ship. They would come when ordered, not before, and that obedience mattered as much as any victory.
Behind me, Rhaenyra remained in the Red Keep with our newborn son beneath royal witness and royal danger. Across the sea, Vaeron fought through the Stepstones with the Dread Legion, proving usefulness where Otto had wanted suspicion. On Dragonstone, Black Rat would receive my seal, Grey Worm would hold the island, Landrey would curse the lack of movement, and six thousand Unsullied would begin preparing for my return.
Aemond had come late. Daeron had come early. Jacaerys had come with silver hair and violet promise, taking one of history’s sharpest knives from our enemies before they could draw it.
The future had changed, and that no longer comforted me.
As King’s Landing fell behind and the road bent south beneath a grey morning sky, I rode toward Storm’s End with no army at my back yet, only a sealed contract, a divided host, and the knowledge that every step I took now carried me deeper into a world no dream had fully warned me how to survive.
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