The lull in Otto Hightower's scheming was a palpable thing, a held breath in the court of King's Landing. Rhaenyra felt it as a brief, welcome respite, but she knew it was only the quiet before a new storm. She found her opening in the palace gardens, where her father was watching his daughter Helaena.
The girl sat alone on the grass, her back to them, seemingly lost in a world of her own. While other children chased and shrieked, Helaena would spend hours watching a line of ants march across a stone, her head tilted, whispering to them in a soft, musical language only she understood. The court saw an odd, dreamy child. Rhaenyra saw a piece she could place on the board.
"She has such a gentle spirit, Father," Rhaenyra said, sitting beside the King on the stone bench. Her voice was filled with a carefully crafted warmth. "This place… the court… it is so loud. I worry it will bruise her."
Viserys sighed, his gaze full of a father's helpless love. "She is a strange little flower. Her mother worries she will not thrive here."
"Then perhaps she shouldn't," Rhaenyra suggested, her tone soft and thoughtful. "Perhaps she needs a gentler garden to grow in. Aegon is thriving on Skagos. He writes of clean air and a simple, sturdy life. Imagine Helaena there, with her brother to protect her. Away from all this." She gestured vaguely at the castle, at the weight of their lives. "It might allow her to blossom, truly."
The King looked at his elder daughter, his eyes shining with gratitude for her thoughtfulness. He saw a loving sister, not a master tactician. He did not hear the cold, brilliant calculation that lay beneath her words.
For Helaena, the journey north was not a shock; it was a homecoming. The dizzying, silent passage between worlds that had terrified others felt, to her, like returning to a familiar song. When she stepped from the dark, silent ship onto the docks of Skagos, she did not shiver from the cold. She took a deep breath, and for the first time, the air didn't feel like an assault of noise and scent. It felt… quiet. It hummed with a deep, slow music that matched the one inside her own head.
While Aegon had seen a primitive island, Helaena saw a world alive with secrets. She saw the glowing moss in the citadel's grottos as clusters of sleeping stars. She saw the great dragons not as beasts of flesh and blood, but as living songs of fire and sky. This place was not strange to her. It was sane.
Aegon, to his own surprise, found himself becoming her shadow. One afternoon, he found her by a tide pool, her fingers gently tracing the shell of a crab as she whispered about its journey. A visiting page, a boy from the Westerlands, snickered behind them. "The princess is mad," he sneered. "Talking to shellfish."
Aegon, who a year ago would have led the mockery, felt a hot, unfamiliar surge of anger. He stepped between the boy and his sister. "She is Helaena of House Targaryen," he said, his voice low and steady with an authority he didn't know he possessed. "And she will do as she pleases. Go find a different game to play." The boy, stunned by the prince's cold command, scurried away. Helaena looked up at Aegon, a faint, knowing smile on her face, and for the first time, he felt like more than a fosterling. He felt like a shield.
Harry had recognized her gift the moment she arrived. He saw the way her eyes would unfocus, the way her nonsensical mutterings would align with events a day or a week later. Where others saw a disconnected child, he saw a priceless, untapped well of foresight. He had a glass-walled conservatory built for her within the citadel, a lush, vibrant garden filled with impossible plants and docile, jewel-toned insects he had shaped from his own imagination. It was a place where the world was as beautiful and strange as her own mind.
He was sitting with her there one afternoon, the air warm and sweet with the scent of alien blossoms. She was watching a centipede with iridescent legs make its careful way across a leaf. She did not look up, but her soft, childish voice suddenly became as clear and dispassionate as glass.
"The green hand closes," she whispered, her gaze fixed on the creature. "It offers a cup. But the wine inside is a snake with no fangs."
Harry's calm expression didn't flicker, but inside his mind, the words slotted into place with perfect, chilling clarity. The green hand of House Hightower closes in a gesture of peace. An offer—a cup. But the offer, the wine, is a trap with no real threat. A fangless snake.
Otto was planning a false truce. A generous-seeming offer designed to lure them into a political snare, but one that held no real danger if its nature was understood beforehand.
He looked at the small, quiet girl who was now gently nudging the centipede with her finger, guiding it to a juicier leaf. The lords of Westeros schemed in their castles, the maesters studied their dusty scrolls, and the septons prayed to their silent gods. And here, in a hidden garden at the edge of the world, a little girl talking to a bug had just given him the key to the entire kingdom.