Blood of Old Valryia (Aemond Targaryen FF)

Chapter Nineteen

The King's Chambers' was shrouded in darkness. And spiders. And a rotting stench of something decaying.

Careful not to disturb anything in the would-be tomb of the King, Aesira treaded past his beloved stone model of Old Valyria, covered in dust and cobwebs. As forgotten and tossed aside as everything that wasn't shiny and new in King's Landing.

Across the room, the King sat upright in his bed, resting against the backboard of his large bed with the kindest smile Aesira had seen in a long, long time.

With hastened steps, Aesira grew closer to the King. But the closer she got to him, the harder it became to ignore how battered and bruised his sagging face had become. And that was of the side that she could see, for half his face was wrapped in linen.

The decay that coated the air thick enough to smother any living person, was coming from the King. Aesira wanted to cry at his feet and beg forgiveness for staying away as long as she had. She'd stayed away to avoid Aemond and the Queen's machinations, and unbeknownst to her, she'd also been missing out on time she would never get back with her uncle.

"My darling Aesira," He whispered as she sat atop the wooden stool beside his four-poster bed. "Where have you been?"

"Distracted, and selfish, uncle." She held his hands between her own as she choked back tears, "I won't make that mistake again."

"Never be ashamed of choosing yourself, little one. Your life will be hard enough as it is. Yours, and my Rhaenyra's."

Aesira frowned lightly. There was an urgency in his voice that she couldn't place, "Then why only call on me, uncle? Why not send a missive for Rhaenyra as well?"

"Mine daughter has a life of her own. Whatever wisdom I impart on her, will likely already have been given to her by mine own brother." The King's expression softened, despite the loud and crazy rats scratching at the walls. "I wish you to know that happiness. The happiness of love and a family of your creation. Have you found one?"

Aesira shook her head slowly, hoping not to look mournfully at a life she wasn't quite set on having just yet. "Uncle, what is this? What ails you and confines you to this bed, this Chamber, this state?"

"That is a question many a maester has asked for months, years and the answer alludes us all." The King leaned away from Aesira to cough into a kerchief that she had not noticed beside him on the bedding. The cough was wet and when he faced her once more, a thin line of blood surrounded his mouth. "Now, I cannot give you an inheritance as grand as the one I will pass to Rhaenyra and her children one day. But I do have something that I hope will bring you comfort, remind you of home and family."

The King gestured to a pinewood box beneath his bedside table. Aesira pulled it out before he could launch into another fit of coughs and noticed immediately that it smelled quite heavily salt and wet wood.

She passed the box to him and as the King unlatched it, he said, "I had hoped to give it to you on your sixteenth name day."

Her seventeenth name day had been two moons ago. She'd spent the day soaring through the skies with my cousins. Tyraxes was finally large enough to carry Joff on his back, and Rhaena still largely enjoyed being seated behind Aesira on Sakaris' back.

The King turned the box towards her and then opened it. Resting on a velvet cushion the colour was burnt red, sat the circlet Visenya Targaryen wore when she helped Aegon the Conqueror unite the Realm. Naerys, Aesira's mother, had been the last owner of the circlet.

The circlet blurred before the tears that lined her eyes, "My father told me he sold it to a merchant a week after she died."

"He might have. It took years of searching to find it, and then months of bartering before the merchant who had it finally traded it." The pride the King spoke with was in his selection of men who'd been chosen to return home with the prize he sought.