The first thing Aemma knew was pain.
Not the shredding, butchering agony she had braced for, but a deep, resonant ache that hummed in her bones, as if her very soul had been unstrung and re-threaded. She awoke with a gasp, the world a smear of unfamiliar brown and grey. A rough woolen blanket chafed her skin. The air smelled of woodsmoke, damp stone, and something metallic and sharp, like the air after a lightning strike.
This was not her chamber. This was not the Red Keep.
Panic, cold and absolute, seized her. She was a prisoner. Had Daemon taken her? Hightower? Had they spirited her away to finish the grim work the maesters had started? She pushed herself up, her body screaming in protest, and her eyes darted around the room, cataloging threats. A crackling hearth. A shuttered window. A door. And a man, watching her from the shadows.
It was him. The stranger from her deathbed. The man with the impossible green eyes.
Her breath hitched. Before she could scream, a sound from the corner of the room pierced her terror. A small, mewling cry.
Her head snapped toward the sound. In a crude wooden cradle lay a bundle of cloth. Aemma's heart hammered against her ribs. It was a trick. A cruel jape. Her son was dead. She had felt him die. She had heard—
But the cry came again, stronger this time, insistent. Alive.
She threw the blanket aside and launched herself from the bed, ignoring the way the room tilted. She scrambled to the cradle, her hands shaking, and tore back the swaddling.
He was pink. He was breathing. He was perfect.
A single, ragged sob escaped her, a sound of pure, primal relief. But it died in her throat, strangled by a new wave of suspicion that was colder and sharper than her earlier fear. This changed nothing. This only deepened the horror.
She spun around, her body a shield before the cradle, her eyes blazing with a queen's fury. "Who are you?" she snarled, her voice a low, dangerous thing. "What sorcery is this? Is this some mummery for Daemon's pleasure? Did he hire you to torment me?"
The man, Harry, stepped calmly out of the shadows. His companion, the one with the hard grey eyes, stood silently by the door, his hand resting on something hidden in his coat. They were assassins. She was sure of it.
"Your uncle has nothing to do with this," Harry said, his voice level, betraying no reaction to her accusation. "Though I hear the King has banished him for his… celebratory remarks."
The casual confirmation of court gossip only fueled her rage. "Do not play games with me, sorcerer. You were in my rooms. You have stolen my son. For what purpose? What do you want? Gold? A title? Speak, before I find a way to make you." Even with no guards and no power, the threat was instinct.
"I want you to live," he said simply.
"Liar!" she spat. "No one does something like this for nothing."
"You're right," he agreed, and the admission wrong-footed her. "I did not do this for nothing. I did it because I needed your son to live, and you to be free."
"Needed him?" Her blood ran cold. He was not a savior. He was a vulture.
"The Targaryen dynasty is a disease," Harry said, his voice dropping, taking on a conspiratorial intensity that was more terrifying than any threat. "They are dragon-worshiping tyrants who burn all that is good in this world. My house… we are of the First Men. We remember the old ways. We have waited for generations for a sign, for a weapon to use against them."
He took a step closer. Aemma flinched, pulling the babe tighter to her chest.
"A prophecy in my bloodline speaks of a child born of eagle and dragon, a prince who dies but lives, who will be the key to undoing the fire and blood. That child is him," Harry said, his gaze locking onto the bundle in her arms. "For him to fulfill his destiny, his mother needed to be freed from her cage. Queen Aemma Arryn had to die so that you, and he, could live to fight another day."
The story was insane. Prophecy. Old blood. It was the talk of madmen and hedge knights. Yet… he had performed magic. He had stolen her from a locked room guarded by the Kingsguard. What was a mad prophecy compared to that? He wasn't offering her safety. He was offering her a role in a war she knew nothing about.
"So you are my new master," she said, her voice dripping with venom. "I have merely traded a king for a sorcerer."
"I am your only option," Harry countered, his voice like flint. "Go on. Scream. The Gold Cloaks patrol this street. Shall we hear what they say?"
As if summoned by his words, the heavy tramp of armored boots sounded on the cobblestones outside the window. A rough voice drifted through the shutters.
"...heard the King hasn't left the sept. Poor bastard. To lose the Queen and the boy on the same day…"
"Aye, a curse on the House of the Dragon, that is. Another stillborn prince and a dead queen…"
The voices faded. The silence they left behind was heavy, suffocating. Aemma stared at Harry, the truth of her situation crashing down on her. The world believed her dead. Viserys mourned. She was a ghost, and her only anchor to the world of the living was the man who claimed he needed her son as a weapon.
He had not saved her. He had taken her.
"You will leave King's Landing with us tonight," Harry stated, not as a request, but as a fact. "Or you can take your chances on the streets, a dead queen with a ghost for a son. See how long you survive."
She looked down at the tiny, sleeping face of her child. He was all she had left. This stranger, this sorcerer, offered a life of flight and conspiracy, using her son as a pawn in some ancient feud. But he also offered him a life. The alternative was a grave. A real one, this time.
Her choice was no choice at all.
She lifted her head, and the look in her eyes was not one of gratitude or trust. It was the hard, glittering look of a survivor who had just traded one gilded cage for another, made of shadows and sorcery. And she would learn its bars, test its locks, and one day, she would break free.
"Tell me where we are going," she commanded, her voice no longer pleading or accusing, but cold as a winter stone. It was the first move in a new game. And she would learn to play.