Autumn came to King's Landing the way everything came to King's Landing — late, expensive, and smelling faintly of the river. The betrothal season settled in with it, long and formal, a slow bridge of feasts and ceremonies arching toward the new-year wedding, and somewhere in those first weeks of turning leaves, in the private counting-room where he kept his true ledgers, Lyonel Baratheon finally wrote the whole of it down.
Not on paper. Nothing about his prince went on paper; paper could be read. But he had it now, entire, the way he'd have a coastline after a season of sailing it — every reef marked, every sounding taken — and on the nights when the court's noise wore at him and he stood at his window over the flat tame bay, he would take the thing out and turn it over, testing it against each new day's weather, and each new day it held.
He doesn't want a cruel hand. Mark that first, because every fool at this court has it backwards — they see the venom and think he's begging to be matched venom for venom, broken to heel, and the man who tries it will make a monster and deserve one. He's had cruelty. Cruelty is his mother tongue and his father's whole grammar. What he wants —
— what he's been screaming for, in the only language they left him —
— is weather that doesn't break. Someone who doesn't dissolve when he blows, doesn't beg him sweet, doesn't run to the septons, doesn't flatter his temper by fearing it and doesn't insult his teeth by pretending they aren't sharp. He wants a wall to fly at. He wants to hit the wall with everything in him, every day if need be, and find it still standing, and know it will still be standing tomorrow, so that for once in his gilded starving life he can stop testing the ground before every step.
He wants to be terrible, and wanted anyway. He wants to be told when he's crossed the line — by someone with the strength to hold the line and the wit to know where it actually lies — and then he wants to look up from the crossing and find that he has not been thrown away.
Corrected, and kept. That's the whole of him, boy. six-and-ten years old and no one's ever once done him both in the same breath.
It read, Lyonel was aware, like madness. Ser Arstan would have called it madness, had Ser Arstan been given it to read, which was one of several reasons nothing about his prince went on paper. It also read like every haggard he had ever manned and every green destrier he had ever backed and, if he was honest — and at that window, over that ledger, he made himself be honest — like one or two men he had known, hard-mouthed marcher lords whose fathers had beaten them straight and left them crooked, who fought everything on two legs until the day someone finally stood in their storm without hitting back, and were leal as hounds ever after to that one man alone.
It read like something that would take years.
Well. He had years. He'd said as much on a stirrup cup in the kingswood, and meant it, and the wonder of the age had looked at him as though he'd spoken Ghiscari.
What Lyonel had not yet worked out — the one channel still unsounded — was where the line lay, and how it would go, the first time he had to hold it in earnest.
Ser Rolland Caron answered that for him, all unknowing, on a wet evening in the middle weeks of autumn, by bringing a harp to supper.
He was Lord Caron of Nightsong's third son, come up from the Marches with the wedding tallies — a big, transparent, ginger-whiskered lad of nineteen, so honored to be sat within pitch of the high table that his ears had been crimson since the soup. The Carons were singers; had been since Durran's day; the sword and the song of the Marches, their words ran, and when the king's own singer paused between sets and Prince Baelor, making gracious conversation, asked whether the young knight had the family gift, Ser Rolland went the color of his whiskers and allowed that he had brought his harp south, in case.
The hall, well fed and well wined, called for it. Lyonel, three seats down from his betrothed, felt something in the air sharpen a half-second before it happened — he was learning the weather-signs of him now, the pressure-drop before weather — and looked over in time to see Aerion Targaryen set down his cup, fold his beautiful hands, and compose his face into an expression of ravenous, luminous encouragement.
Ah, thought Lyonel. Here's tonight's sport, then.
The boy sang a marcher song, an old one — a soldier on the Dornish border singing his girl asleep across the mountains — and he sang it plainly and truly, in a good big untrained voice with the burr of home on every vowel, and the hall went kind and quiet the way halls do, and it was, in every way that mattered, a lovely thing.
Aerion applauded first. That should have warned somebody.
"Charming," he said, into the warm hush, in the silver register that carried to the walls. "Genuinely charming. Like being sung to by weather itself. Tell me, ser — the girl in the song, the one asleep over the mountains. Is she yours? You sang her so feelingly."
Crimson to the roots now, and glowing with it, the poor young ox: "I — yes, my prince. That is — I'm betrothed, my prince. Jeyne. Of Blackhaven. We wed in the spring."
"Jeyne of Blackhaven." Aerion tasted it like a sweet. "And there she waits, over the mountains, while you're away south singing to us. How brave of her." A pause, timed like a headsman's. "How brave of you, rather — no, I've muddled it. Which is it, do you think, that keeps a marcher girl faithful through a long betrothal, ser: the mountains, or the singing? Because I'll tell you plainly, having now heard the singing—"
The hall laughed. It couldn't help it; the timing was flawless; even Lyonel felt the pull of it at the corner of his own mouth, gods forgive him. And the boy laughed too, gamely, not yet understanding, and that was the blood in the water.
What followed took perhaps five minutes and was, in its way, a masterwork. Lyonel watched it the way a man watches a fire take a neighbor's roof: the accent first, that was the warm-up, say 'harp,' ser — say 'Jeyne' — extraordinary; then the song itself unstitched line by line, its rhymes held up to the light and found provincial, its dead soldier-poet exhumed and mocked; then the harp, the calluses, the earnestness — Aerion made earnestness itself into something you'd scrape from a boot — and the hall laughed and laughed, higher and thinner, and Ser Rolland Caron stopped laughing around minute three and sat with his big hands flat on the table taking it, because what else does a third son do when the king's grandson has decided to eat him; and then, at the last, when the boy had nothing left but his blush, Aerion tilted his head, sighted along the whole evening like a bowman, and said:
"But we're unkind, and I repent it. The song was heartfelt, and hearts must count for something, even in the Marches. Write to your Jeyne tonight, ser. Tell her the court was enchanted." The pause. The smile, letter-opener bright. "Only do have someone else read her replies to you first, going forward. Blackhaven's a long way off, spring's a long way off — and a girl who'd promise herself to the singing has already shown the world she'll settle for whatever's offered—"
The laughter died.
Not everywhere — a few flushed knights were too deep in their cups to feel the floor tilt — but the hall's warm center went out of it all at once, the way a fire goes when the door bangs open on winter, and into the sudden draught Ser Rolland Caron said, "My prince," in a small, steady, ruined voice, and looked down at his hands, and did not defend her, because he could not, because there was no her in the room to defend, only a boy's whole tender future held up by the scruff for the amusement of people who would not remember his name by morning.
Prince Baelor began, smoothly, to speak of the vintage.
Aerion picked his cup back up, glittering, satisfied — and found, three seats down, storm-blue eyes already on him, and stopped glittering.
Lyonel did not glare. He would think about that afterward, examining his own conduct as he examined everything, and be able to swear it: no glare, no thunder, nothing the court could have collected. He only looked at his betrothed, steadily, the way he'd look at the sky when it had done something that changed the day's plans — and then he turned to young Caron and asked him, in his own broad carrying marcher voice, warm as a hearth, whether Blackhaven's pass would be snowed shut by the wedding month or whether a man might still get through with a good horse and better boots — your Jeyne will want to see you wed in spring wool, ser, not drowned rat; I came through that pass in a white gale in my father's day and I'll tell you the trick of it — and talked the boy back from the edge of the world one ordinary sentence at a time, pass-weather and horse-lines and the price of oats at Summerhall, until the crimson faded and the big hands unclenched and somewhere in it Ser Rolland even laughed once, wetly, at a story about a mule.
He felt Aerion watching the whole rescue. He did not look back once.
That, too, was aimed.
He came to the prince's door the next morning, early, alone, and was admitted by Marra into the outer chamber where Aerion sat at breakfast in a robe of white silk with his hair loose and his armor off, and for a moment — a long one — the sight ambushed him: the wonder of the age unstaged, morning-pale, a smudge of sleep still at the corner of one violet eye, ten-and-six years old and small inside the silk, and Lyonel had to stand in the doorway and remind himself with some firmness what he had come to do.
"My lord." Aerion did not rise. The chin came up; the walls went up behind it, course upon course, quick as masons in a siege. "To what do I owe— it's dawn. People are hanged at this hour."
"Some mornings they're only told the truth. May I sit?"
"No."
Lyonel sat. He took the chair across the little table, filled it entirely, poured himself the prince's own small beer uninvited, and drank it, all with the unhurried finality of tide coming in, while Aerion watched him with narrowing eyes and rising color.
"Last night," Lyonel said.
"Was a triumph. The Caron boy will dine on it for years — mocked by the blood of the dragon before the whole court; they'll buy him wine in every hall in the Marches just to hear him tell—"
"The girl," Lyonel said. "Jeyne of Blackhaven."
Silence. Outside, gulls were arguing over the bay.
"You'd flayed him a quarter hour by then and I'd not said a word, nor would have. He's a knight grown; a knight can stand weather; and you were—" the corner of Lyonel's mouth acknowledged it, because the ledger did not lie even when it would have liked to— "you were funny, gods help the boy. Right up until the end, it cost the world nothing. Then you reached across a hundred leagues and put your knife in a girl who's never seen your face. Sixteen and faithful and sitting at a window in Blackhaven this very morning, like as not, sewing her wedding shift — and every man in that hall heard the king's grandson call her a settler and a doubtful bargain, and some of them will carry it home, because filth travels faster than singers do. That's what you spent your last arrow on. Not the boy. Her."
"She is nothing to me—"
"Aye," said Lyonel. "That's the whole of the charge."
Aerion had gone very white, and very still, and the scent coming off him was smoke with the sweetness burnt out of it, wrath with a wrongness underneath — and Lyonel, reading it, kept his voice exactly where it had been, low and level and unhurried, a wall talking to weather.
"So here is what I'll have, my prince, and what I won't, and we'll say it once and own it after, the both of us." He set down the cup. "Sharpen yourself on me all you like. That's yours by right — you didn't choose me, the gods know you've reasons, and I'm built for it; I've been shouted at by the sea. My accent, my manners, my learning, my great thick head: fair game, dawn till dusk, and half the time you'll be right, which is what makes you worth listening to. Second: my dead stay out of your mouth. You know that one already; it's written where we both can see it. Third—" and here he leaned forward, slow, so the little table creaked and the morning light shifted, and the violet eyes, for all their fury, tracked the movement the way a compass tracks north— "no blood for sport from those who can't answer you back. Servants. Squires. Green boys with harps. Girls a hundred leagues off. Your brother when he's six cups down. If a man's earned your teeth — if he's cruel, or false, or lays a hand where it's not wanted — then gut him with my blessing and I'll hold your rings while you do it, and enjoy the show, for there's no blade in the Seven Kingdoms I'd sooner watch work. But earned, Aerion. That's the line. It doesn't move for your blood, it doesn't move for your temper, and it didn't move last night.
"And when you cross it — for you will; we're neither of us finished creatures — you'll make it right. Not to me. I'm not the injured party and I'll not pretend to be; hiding my rules behind my feelings is a trick for septas. To them."
The silence afterward had edges. Aerion sat rigid in his white silk with his breakfast cooling and his eyes burning, and when he spoke his voice came out soft and hissing, the register beneath the registers.
"You forget yourself. You are a storm lord. I am the blood of the dragon, the king's own grandson, and you sit there in my chamber drinking my beer and setting me rules like a — I could have you—"
"You could," Lyonel agreed. "Whipped from the keep, like as not, if you worked at it. And then you'd be exactly where you were two moons ago: the most beautiful creature in Westeros, alone in a court that flinches when you pass, waiting for the next man they sell you to — and he might be the kind who begs, or the kind who breaks, and either way you'd eat him inside a year and hate every bite." He stood, unhurried, righted the chair, and looked down at his betrothed a last moment — at the fury, and beneath the fury, at the thing that was listening. "Or you go and find Rolland Caron before the day's out, and put it right, and discover what I already know and you don't yet: that the world holds. Your choice, my prince. It always will be. That's the other half of the bargain, and the half that matters."
He bowed — correct in every degree — and left, and made himself not look back from the door, and stood afterward in the corridor for the space of ten heartbeats with his blood going like a drum, because there was command and there was gamble and no man living could always tell which he had just thrown.
Behind the door, distinctly, he heard a cup hit a wall.
Then — and he would hold the sound against every cold hour of the winter to come — he heard the prince's voice, imperious and furious and unmistakably moving, calling for Marra to dress him.
***
The apology took place in the east yard at midday, before witnesses, because Aerion Targaryen did nothing without witnesses, and because if he was going to be made to do a thing unprecedented in the annals of the realm, then by every god old and new it would at least be staged properly.
Ser Rolland Caron was at the pells with the other young knights when the wonder of the age descended upon the yard in charcoal and silver like a beautiful cloudburst, trailed by Marra and rumor in equal measure, and the practice swords faltered all down the line, and the boy turned, and blanched, and visibly considered the merits of vaulting the wall.
"Ser Rolland." Aerion arrived at conversational distance and stopped. He had rehearsed nothing. He had refused, with violence, to rehearse; rehearsal would have meant admitting in advance that his mouth was going to say it. "A word."
"My — my prince—"
"Don't speak. This will go faster." He drew a breath. The yard had gone quiet as a sept; somewhere up on the wall-walk, two guardsmen had stopped mid-patrol; he could feel the whole gallery of the Red Keep pressing at its windows, and he lifted his chin into the audience the way he lifted it into everything, and said, in a voice that carried, because if she was going to be knifed publicly then the poultice would be public too:
"Your song last night was well made and honestly sung, and I mocked it because mockery is easy for me the way the harp is easy for you, and a man ought to be ashamed of doing his easiest thing to someone doing his hardest. The remark about your lady was unworthy." A pause; a fractional, furious elevation of the chin. "Of me, which will tell you how far down it reached, since nothing is unworthy of me. Jeyne of Blackhaven is, by every account that matters — namely yours — faithful, and fortunate, and evidently deaf in exactly the right way, and any man who repeats my words of last night in her hearing or anyone else's will answer to the blood of the dragon for it, which I am given to understand is now a protection." He looked, briefly, as though the sentence had surprised him on its way out. "Sing at my wedding. The marcher song. That is not a request; the singers here are all Reachmen and I am drowning in roses. That is all. You may resume hitting things."
And he turned on his heel and swept out of the yard through a silence like deep snow, past the frozen knights and the gaping squires and one grinning, unforgivable, entirely-too-large Lord of Storm's End who had happened — happened — to be leaning against the armory door for the whole of it, and he did not stop, and he did not look at him, and his face was flawless marble every step of the way.
Inside, behind the marble, the fire raged at a pitch that frightened even him.
He made me. He made me — stood in my own chamber over my own breakfast and set his terms like a — and I went. sixteen years the whole pack of them couldn't drag an apology out of me with wild horses and holy writ, my father took a strap to me over the Dornish envoy's daughter and I bit through my own lip sooner than say the words, and this — this ox, this WALL, this jumped-up thunderhead says 'you'll make it right' and drinks my beer and I—
He reached his own corridor. Marra, wisely, had fallen back to a following distance suitable for weather.
And the boy's face. That was in the fire too, feeding it strangely, burning a different color. The Caron boy's face at 'well made and honestly sung' — stunned, blotchy, lit, as though the same mouth that gutted him had handed him back something he'd thought gone for good; the awful raw gratitude of it; the way the young knights' silence had not been mockery, he knew every timbre of mocking silence ever performed and that had not been one; it had been — he had no shelf for what it had been. Respect sat nearest it on the shelf and was wrong, and awe was wrong, and he was left holding the thing unshelved, which he despised, and could not put down, which was worse.
And under all of it, deepest, the coal that would not die no matter how he raked it:
The world held.
He had done the unthinkable — abased himself, in a public yard, before a third son of a marcher house — and the sky had not fallen, and the court had not devoured him, and his legend, he could already hear from the passing whispers, had not shrunk but changed shape, grown a new and unaccountable chamber — did you hear, the dragon apologized, stood in the yard bold as sunrise and armored the girl with his own name, gods, what is the storm lord feeding him — and Aerion Targaryen walked the last stretch to his rooms with his marble face on, six-and-ten years old, freshly humbled, utterly unharmed, trying with all his considerable might to locate the catastrophe.
There was no catastrophe. There was only, waiting in his antechamber with the afternoon light on it, a small plain parcel and no note.
Inside was an orange. A single perfect blood orange out of Dorne, the first of the season, worth its weight in silver this far north and this early — and he stood holding the absurd, fragrant, sun-warm weight of it, and understood with no possibility of error, from the size of the hand-span dent where some enormous careful thumb had tested its ripeness, exactly who had sent it, and exactly what it meant, being sent now, within the hour, before the yard's dust had even settled.
Not a reward. He'd have hurled a reward from the window; he was no dog to be given sweets for sitting.
It meant: seen. Kept. Nothing has been withdrawn.
It meant, in the only dialect the two of them yet shared — the tongue of gifts and rules and blood oranges, since every plainer word between them still came dressed as war — there you are.
Aerion ate it alone at his window with his back to the door, savagely, in sections, dripping red-gold down his wrist, furious the entire time; and if his eyes stung somewhere in the middle of it, that was the sharpness of the fruit, and he would have opened the throat of anyone who suggested otherwise; and when it was done he sat a long time in the failing light with the peel cupped in his hand like something rescued, and did not throw it away.
He kept the peel in the drawer with his mother's pearls. He was not, ever, going to examine why.
***
The court, that autumn, watched the strangest courtship in living memory and understood it not at all.
What the court saw was war. The wonder of the age remained, in public, a calamity in silk: he came to the sept ceremonies of the betrothal season dressed a half-shade off true mourning — charcoal, iron-grey, black-on-black with rubies like fresh wounds — until reading his wardrobe became the court's favored divination, entrails and augury, what is the dragon grieving today; and one holy day he arrived at the Sept of Baelor for the blessing of the banns in unrelieved funeral black, veiled, and stood through the whole rite like a beautiful widow at the tomb of his own future, and the septons nearly wept, and the ladies nearly died, and afterward on the steps his enormous betrothed looked him slowly up and down and said, in a voice of grave courtesy:
"Very fetching. Am I dead? Nobody told me. I'd have dressed."
"One lives in hope, my lord."
"One does," Lyonel agreed, offering his arm, which — the court noted; the court noted everything and understood nothing — the widow took.
The Stormlander customs fared no better. When Ser Arstan, in an unguarded fit of tradition, produced at a household supper the salt cup — seawater cut with wine, the old marcher rite, taking the weather of the house one married into, drunk by every Baratheon bride and consort since Durran's day — Aerion looked into it as into a chamber pot and slid it back across the boards with one finger.
"I am fire, ser. Fire does not water itself down; it makes the water leave. When Storm's End wishes to take my weather, send word, and I'll teach your hall to drink something warmer."
("He'll drink it on his own walls one day, or he won't," Lyonel said later, to his despairing household, entirely unbothered, "the sea's patient" — and Ser Arstan wrote to Storm's End that week that his lord had gone mad in the following specific way: he had begun collecting the insults, the way other men collected songs.)
And there was the matter of Valarr.
The court had marked from the first how the prince wielded his cousin — the match-that-was-meant-to-be trotted out whenever the storm lord wanted wounding, Valarr dances so, Valarr reads the Valyrian poets, Valarr, you understand, has breeding — and the court kept a book on when the stag would finally bleed from it, and lost money weekly, because he never did. Lyonel Baratheon received each deployment of the Young Prince with the placid interest of a man being told about the fine harvests of a country he had no plans to visit, and Aerion escalated the way he escalated everything: publicly, beautifully, and past the point of sense.
It came to a head in the autumn gardens, at one of the queen-of-love-and-beauty nonsense gatherings the ladies held while the weather allowed — Aerion arriving on Valarr's arm, no less, having ambushed his cousin at the gate for the purpose; Aerion laughing his court laugh at Valarr's every third sentence, silver head inclining toward the brown one, one white hand resting on the black sleeve, the whole tableau angled with a stage-master's care toward the spot where the Lord of Storm's End stood talking pass-weather with two Marcher knights — and Valarr enduring it with the rigid misery of a man being used as a lance and knowing it, until at last, under the noise of the fountain, the Young Prince said quietly:
"Whatever it is you're doing, cousin, I'd thank you to do it with someone else's face."
Aerion's laugh stopped. "I haven't the least notion—"
"You have every notion. You've had me on your arm for an hour and looked at me twice, and both times to check where he was looking." Valarr detached his sleeve, not ungently, and there was something new in his careful voice, something that had been growing there since Tyrosh became a fixed star: the first grain of iron. "I was sorry for you at the announcement. I'm told sorry is unforgivable, so I've stopped. But I'll not be your whetstone, Aerion. Find another."
And he bowed, and left him by the fountain — left him, second abandonment of the season — and Aerion stood alone in the falling gold light with his weapon walking away and his audience of one still talking, maddeningly, about snow.
Lyonel came to him at dusk, at the garden's edge, when the ladies had gone in.
"Say it," Aerion said, to the fountain. "You've been carrying it about all afternoon like a stone in your boot. Say it and be done."
"All right." Lyonel set his forearms on the balustrade beside him, easy, huge, warm along Aerion's whole left side without touching him anywhere. "Speak of your cousin as much as you please. Morning to midnight. Tell me his virtues till the ravens learn them. If you think there's a wound in me there, you're welcome to go on prospecting — it's your time, and I'll not pretend the company's unpleasant." The storm-blue eyes came round, level in the last light. "But you'll not use him again. Not because of me. Because you took a man who has been nothing but gentle with you since the cradle and turned him into a tool for cutting, in front of half the court, without so much as asking him — and he hated every heartbeat of it, and any fool with eyes saw he hated it, and using the ones who can't fight you is the one—"
"—thing that is beneath me," Aerion finished, in vicious singsong, "yes, yes, the catechism, I have it by rote now, shall I embroider it on a cushion—" and then he heard himself; heard by rote; heard, in his own mouth, the shape of a rule received, lodged, load-bearing — and stopped, appalled.
Lyonel, mercifully, mercilessly, said nothing at all. He only stood there being warm along Aerion's left side while the fountain went on and the light died, and after a while — this was the part no chronicle would ever hold, the part the court never saw — the blood of the dragon said, low, to the water:
"He was the only one who ever brought me lemon cakes. After Mother. When the septas locked me in the Maidenvault over the — the business with the Dornish girl. Twelve years old, and he climbed the gods-damned garden wall with lemon cakes in a kerchief because the guards had their orders and he hadn't, and he never once told anyone, not even me — I heard it years after, from his fool of a squire." A silence. "And this afternoon I put him on my arm like a — you're right, is what I'm saying, gods rot you. Don't gloat."
"Wasn't going to."
"You're gloating internally. I can hear it. It has an accent."
"That'll be the wind."
Aerion made peace with Valarr in his own fashion — which is to say, he had a case of Tyroshi pear brandy delivered to his cousin's rooms with a note reading for the practicing of your palate — try not to marry the first bottle, and Valarr, who had known him all his life, correctly translated this from the original dragon and sent back a single lemon cake, and nothing further was ever said, and everything was.
But if the court thought — and the court did think, in its shallow soul — that the storm lord was sanding his dragon smooth, filing the creature down link by link into something biddable and dull, the court was disabused of it in one glorious evening at the feast of the autumn court, before witnesses, by Lord Renfred Rowan's second cousin.
The man was a Reach knight of the gilded, drawling sort, in his cups by the fish course, and he had spent the evening being witty at the expense of the serving girls — the slow-blooded northern sort of cruelty that hides in jests, a pinch dressed as clumsiness, a goblet held just out of a girl's reach while she bobbed and colored and the table laughed — and when at last he tired of that and cast about for larger game, his eye fell on the high table, and on the storm lord, and he pitched his drawl to carry:
"—only what I'd have given, sers, to see the treaty drawn. Item: one prince, slightly used, dragon-tempered, delivered to Storm's End with a dowry of apologies—"
He got precisely that far.
Afterward, men who were present disagreed on details — how long it lasted (under two minutes; it only felt geological), whether the phrase was 'a lineage of doorstops' or 'a dynasty of doorstops', whether the man actually wept or merely watered — but all accounts agreed on the essentials: that Aerion Targaryen set down his knife, turned in his seat with the unhurried pleasure of a cat presented with something slow, and took Ser Whatever-of-Rowan apart in public with such knife-fine, ecstatic, escalating precision — the drawl, the debts, the cousinship twice removed and audibly narrowing, the wit that punched only downstairs and only at girls carrying trays, tell me, ser, is it that courage shrinks in Reach water, or were you merely born to the exact size of your targets — that by the end the man's own table had physically leaned away from him, as from a struck tent, and the hall was roaring, and the serving girl he'd tormented was biting her lip white behind her tray, eyes shining; and that through the whole of it the Lord of Storm's End sat back in his chair with his cup on his chest and beamed — beamed like a man at a tourney watching his own champion ride, making not the smallest effort to hide it, storm-blue eyes brilliant with unashamed delight — and when the dragon finally sat back, flushed and glittering and satisfied, Lyonel Baratheon leaned over, refilled his wine with his own hand, and said, warmly, audibly, for the whole high table's benefit:
"*That* one you may keep."
And Aerion looked at him — and the court saw the look, and misread it entire, filed it under contempt and moved along to the sweet course — but Aerion looked at him, at the beaming, at the pride, open and enormous and pointed at him, at his sharpest and cruelest and most entirely himself, and something turned over in the deep keel of the blood of the dragon that would not right itself again that night, nor properly ever.
He is not filing me down, the thought went, later, in the dark, in the vaults where the true things were kept, turning and turning like the amber in candlelight. He likes the fire. He likes the teeth. He laughed at the doorstops — he'll be retelling the doorstops in his cups for a year. He wants every blade in the case.
He only minds where I put them.
It should not have mattered. He had been admired his whole life; admiration was air; he breathed it and thought no more of it than air.
He lay awake until the bells rang the hour of the wolf, breathing it.
***
Prince Maekar Targaryen kept ledgers of his own.
His were of the older kind — duty, garrison, grain, the iron arithmetic of Summerhall — and he trusted them because numbers did not perform. Men performed. His second son performed as the sun rose, daily, spectacularly, and Maekar had given up long ago trying to find the true figure under the performance, and had settled — he could admit this much, in the sleepless hours; he was a hard man but not, whatever his sons believed, a stupid one — for controlling what could not be counted.
That autumn, for the first time in sixteen years, the numbers began to move.
Item: nine days without an incident. Then a fortnight. His informants — a man kept informants on his own household or was a fool — had standing instructions to report Aerion's outrages within the hour, and the reports simply, eerily, thinned: no septa in tears since harvest-end, no page transferred at his mother's weeping request, no scalded—nothing. Twice his steward brought him the day's account and stood there afterward, uncertain, as though he had failed to deliver something and could not think what.
Item: two servants — two — had petitioned the understeward to be returned to the prince's service. Maekar had made the man repeat it. Servants schemed all their lives to get out of Aerion's orbit; there was a known traffic in bribes for it; and here was a laundry girl and a groom asking in, and when pressed the groom had shuffled and said only that the prince had spoken for him, m'lord, over the matter of the lamed courser that was never his fault, spoke for him to the master of horse, cold as you please and twice as final, and a man liked to serve where he was spoke for.
Item — and this one Maekar had made his informant say three times, and had then sat alone with for the better part of an evening — the yard. The Caron boy. The apology.
He had not believed it. He had gone, quietly, to men who had stood in that yard, hard-bitten master-at-arms sorts with no poetry in them, and had it confirmed in triplicate: his son, his Aerion, standing in the dust before the pells, publicly armoring some marcher child's betrothed in the protection of the blood of the dragon, by way of amends. Amends. Maekar had once held the boy's arm across a table while a septa waited with the strap, both of them white to the lips, and had watched him bite through his own lip and bleed down his chin sooner than shape the two words I'm sorry — eleven years old and mute as stone, eyes like a keep on fire — and Maekar had told himself for a decade since that the capacity was simply absent, left out of the boy at the forging, one more flaw in the blood.
The capacity was not absent.
It had merely been waiting, all these years, for a price it respected. And the price, it appeared, was the good opinion of a twenty-five-year-old storm lord with mud on his boots.
Maekar did not know what he felt about that. He was a man of few feelings and fewer names for them, and the thing that sat on his chest in the sleepless hours that autumn had no name he owned. It was not gratitude. It resembled anger the way the sea resembles a lake — same water, wrong scale, wrong weather — and it had, at its floor, where he never went, something that grieved.
He was standing at the council-chamber windows with his father when the last figure entered the ledger.
Below, in the fountain court, small with distance: his son, in his ridiculous half-mourning, and the Baratheon, crossing from the sept side. Even from three floors up the pattern read plain — Aerion's head turning, the quick silver flash of some cruelty delivered; the big man's shoulders moving in that easy landslide laugh; another sally; another. The old dance. And then the storm lord said something — brief, two words, three — and stopped walking.
And Aerion stopped.
Mid-stride. Mid-*strike*, by his posture. Stood a moment, chin up, visibly furious even at this range —
— and then fell in again at the man's side, unhanded, uncompelled, and walked on with him, close, matching the bigger stride, head angled slightly toward him, like — Maekar's mind supplied the comparison against every order he gave it — like a falcon riding a fist it had chosen.
"You saw that," he said.
"I see most things from this window," said Daeron the Good. "It's why I like it. One learns more from the tops of heads than the fronts of faces." The king had his lenses on and a report unread in his hand; he had not, Maekar noted, so much as glanced at the report since the pair entered the court below. "Nine weeks, and he has not broken a single thing that could not be mended. You have the same figures I have; your informants and mine drink at the same well. Say it, Maekar. It costs a king nothing to be told he was right; we hear it all day; the coin's debased."
"I don't know that you were right." It came out lower than he intended. "I know that something is — he is changed, and I cannot find the lever, and a change without a lever is a thing I have been trained my whole life to distrust. What is the man doing to him? Threats leave marks; I know every mark there is; there are none. Bribes leave a trail; there is none, unless you count—" a muscle worked in his jaw— "*oranges.* Is it a hold on him? Some hook? What does the stag have that—"
"Nothing," his father said.
Maekar turned from the window.
"That is the lever, I think." The king took off the lenses, folded them, and for a moment he looked every year of his age and every ounce of its weight. "I have watched too, Maekar; it is the one matter this season I have watched with both eyes. The man wants nothing from him. No — hear it out. Everyone that child has ever known has wanted something of him — his obedience, his silence, his beauty at their table, his blood in their line, his good behavior for the honor of the house. You wanted a son who did not shame you. I wanted a problem solved; I said as much in this room, and he heard me say it, I've concluded, but that is a debt for another day. Every hand ever extended to him had a want at the end of it, and he has spent a number years biting hands on principle, and who is to say the principle was unsound?
"And then the realm hands him, of all things, a storm lord. Who looks at the creature every soul in this keep has spent two decades wanting things from — and enjoys him. Merely that. Enjoys his company, laughs at his cruelties when they're clever, stands in the way of them when they're not, feeds him when he forgets to eat, and asks for nothing. Not sweetness, not obedience, not even courtesy. The boy has been sounding him for a hook since the ravens flew — you've watched him do it; that is what all the venom has been, Maekar, soundings — and every line comes up the same." The king turned back to the window, to the two small figures passing out of the court below, dark and silver, unhurried. "*No bottom found.* Can you imagine what that is, to a creature who has known the exact depth of every soul around him since he could talk? It is not a hold, my son. It is the first ground he has ever stood on that did not shift when he stamped."
Maekar looked out the window a long time. The court below was empty now, only the fountain going.
"He flinches from me," he said at last. It was not what he had meant to say. It was, he understood as it left him, the whole of what he had meant to say for several years. "He has flinched from me since he was six years old, and he walks toward that man's voice, and I am expected to stand at a window and call it statecraft."
His father was quiet for a moment.
"No," the king said, gently — always gently; the gentleness was the fist; Maekar had spent a lifetime learning it and had never once been able to make the glove fit his own hand. "You are expected to stand at a window and call it hope. The statecraft was mine; that sin's not for your ledger. Yours—" the old hand came to rest, briefly, on his hardest son's mailed shoulder, light as a page turning— "yours is only to decide, before the wedding, whether you can bear to be glad of a thing you did not cause. It is harder than it sounds. I recommend beginning early."
***
The dart, when it came, came gloved in sympathy, which was how Aerion knew it for a dart before it ever struck.
It came at Lady Rowan's music evening, in the lull between singers, from Alysanne Fossoway — the apple knight's daughter, the one he had made cry with a single adjective at the leave-taking feast, who had spent the season since being exquisitely, patiently pleasant to him, which he ought to have read for what it was, because he of all living creatures knew what patience in an injured party was for.
"—and I think it so gallant," she was saying, fan moving, voice pitched sweet and small for their corner alone, "how devoted your lord shows himself. All these long moons at court, so far from his own hall, and never a — well." The fan paused. "*Almost* never."
"Almost, my lady?"
"Oh — you'll laugh." Her eyes were bright as pips. "It's only servants' silliness. My maid has it from a girl whose sister works the lanes off Eel Alley, and you know how they embroider — that there's a house down toward Flea Bottom, quite a low one, that keeps a Lyseni these days they've taken to calling the Little Dragon. Silver to the waist, they say. Eyes near purple, in lamplight, if a man's paid enough to squint. Triple price since summer's end, and worth it, the sister says, for she's asked for — most particular, the gentleman, though ever so discreet, and such a big man to be so quiet on the stair—" the fan resumed, lazy as a cat's tail— "but there. Embroidery, as I said. What would a Lord Paramount want in Flea Bottom? Your Grace has gone quite pale — the heat of the room, I expect. Shall I fetch you a—"
"You mistake pallor for boredom, my lady; the two are forever confused in the Reach." His voice came out of him level and amused and belonged to someone else entirely; he heard it from a distance, from a high window, from three floors up. "But how diligent of you, to inventory Flea Bottom's stock so thoroughly. Visiting the family orchards? They say the Fossoway apple grows truest nearest its roots." He rose, unhurried, gathered his skirts, inclined his head the precise depth owed a knight's daughter and not one hair more. "Do stay for the singers. Music is said to soothe even injured things."
He won the exchange. He always won the exchange. She colored to her collar and her fan stopped and every soul in their corner marked that the dragon had scorched her twice now and would presumably keep doing so annually, like a name day.
He was in the corridor before the next singer struck a chord, and he had no memory at all of leaving the room.
Marra found the truth of it in two days, through the laundry-court, which knew everything, which had always known everything, which had — this was one of the coals he would rake over in the nights that followed — known this, evidently, for moons, and simply never carried it to him, because who carries a torch to a wildfire; and she stood in front of him twisting her apron with her eyes down and gave her report in the flat recitation-voice she used when she wished with all her heart to be dead, and the report ran, in its essentials, thus.
That it was true. A house in Flea Bottom, off the Street of Flour, low-beamed and lower-famed, chosen — even Aerion's fury conceded the logic — for being precisely the last door in the city anyone would watch for a Lord Paramount. That the visits had begun in late summer — after the kingswood, the ledger-keeping sliver of him noted, and filed, and would not say why — and came seldom, a night here, a fortnight nothing, a night again. That he asked, always, for the silver ones. Lyseni if they had them; there was the one they'd taken to calling the Little Dragon, and before her another; pale hair was the whole of the requirement and lilac eyes fetched the highest price. That he paid — here Marra's recitation had faltered — paid mad, m'prince, triple and past triple, paid like a man buying silence and forgiveness in the same purse; and that the girls spoke — she had made her cousin swear it twice — well of him. Courteous. Gentle, even. A little sad, the one had said. Never any roughness, never a mark, never a cruel word; only the coin, and the quiet, and the — the request.
"That will do," Aerion said, in a voice like the skin of ice on a bucket, and Marra fled.
He stood at his window for a long time after. The bay lay flat and grey. Somewhere below him in the city — southwest, down the falling terraces of roofs, past the Street of Flour, in some sagging lamplit room that smelled of tallow and river — there was a Lysene whore with silver hair who had been him, in the dark, for coin. Who had worn his colors like a stolen crown for a man who—
The pane cracked under his palm before he knew his hand had moved.
He looked at the fine bright line in the glass, at the thin red one opening across his own palm — the same palm, some far-off clerk in him observed, that he had burned at Balerion's candle a season ago; he was collecting a little archive there — and he waited for the familiar fire to come up in him, the good clean rage he had drawn on all his life the way other men drew on faith.
What came up instead had no name he owned.
Oh, he knew jealousy. He wished to be exact with himself, standing there dripping thinly onto the window seat, because exactness was all he had left: he knew jealousy, knew it as a native country, had been born in it — second child of six, in a house where attention was rationed like siege-bread. Daeron had the heirship and the dreams and Father's despair, which was still a kind of gaze; Aemon had the books, the maesters cooing over his letters before he was five; Egg was the baby, worshipped for the accomplishment of existing; the girls had had Mother while Mother lived, and the whole sanctified treasury of her ghost after. And Aerion had had beauty, and the scraps, and had learned before he could read to take what was not guarded and to guard what he took — hoarding attention the way his ancestors hoarded gold, biting any hand that reached toward his little pile, cultivating outrage because outrage at least was looking at him. Covetousness was his oldest possession. He knew its every weight and vintage.
This was not that. This was to that as wildfire is to the hearth.
This burned in the bones. It was in his teeth, in the roots of his hair, under his sternum like a swallowed coal; he would think, in the days after, that he finally understood the old accounts of dragonfire, how the maesters wrote that it did not consume flesh so much as inhabit it, took up residence and burned outward from the marrow — because that was where it lived, this thing, in the marrow, and no drafting could reach it, and no chronicle could be constructed around it, and it did not bank at night. He lay in the dark with his hand on the pearl hilt and it burned. He heard the landslide laugh down a corridor and it burned. He composed, and discarded, and re-composed the confrontation forty times — glacial, surgical, devastating, he would be devastating — and underneath every draft it just went on burning, artless as a lit house, and the worst of it, the very coal-heart of the worst of it, was this:
They have had what I have not taken.
Some hired counterfeit in a Flea Bottom crib had had the storm-scent close, the lamplight, the huge careful hands, the whole weather of him that Aerion had been circling for a season like a fool circling a fire in winter, too proud to admit he was cold — some forgery had had it, was perhaps having it tonight, while the original, the true coin, the blood of the actual dragon, lay in Maegor's Holdfast with a stolen knife and a hoarded orange peel and a cracked windowpane, receiving the news last, secondhand, through a Fossoway's fan.
Second of six. Even in this. Even his own wanting had been enjoyed by other people, in another room, before anyone thought to tell him it was his.
He was moving before the thought finished. He heard Marra call something about a cloak, and he had one — his hand had taken the dark one from the peg with the hood, some cold rearguard of his mind still garrisoning the proprieties — and he had the dagger, he discovered on the stairs, sheathed and riding his forearm under the sleeve where he had taken to wearing it when the corridors were long; and the Red Keep at night parted around him the way it always parted, guards straightening, torches leaning, and it was not until the River Wing rose up in front of him that any part of Aerion Targaryen consented to know where he was going.
Steffon Connington opened to his knock, took one look, and lost the power of speech.
"My — my lord's at his—"
"*Move.*"
The boy moved. Behind him, rising from a chair by the fire with a wedding-ledger still in one hand and his grey brows at his hairline, Ser Arstan Selmy got as far as "My prince, the hour—" and received the look, the full inheritance, twenty generations of it, and closed his mouth, and Aerion swept past them both into the inner chamber where the Lord of Storm's End sat in his shirtsleeves at a table of maps and tallies with a candle burning down, and said, to the room at large, in a voice he did not recognize:
"Out."
Lyonel looked up. Whatever he saw — the hood fallen back, the hectic color, the thin red line across the palm, the scent, gods, the scent, Aerion could smell himself, smoke gone bitter, a burning with no sweetness in it anywhere — he set down his pen, and said, without taking his eyes from his betrothed, "Ser Arstan. Steffon. Go to bed," in a voice that emptied the room in four heartbeats and shut the door soft behind it.
The candle fluttered and steadied.
"You're bleeding," Lyonel said.
"The Little Dragon," Aerion said.
He had drafted forty openings. Glacial ones, knife-fine ones. That was the one that came, and it came out low and shaking, and he watched it land — watched the storm-blue eyes register, and know, instantly, no flicker of confusion to hide behind, no what can you mean; watched the big shoulders settle, of all things, the way a man settles to carry weight; and the confirmation, the sheer undodging openness of the confirmation, took the last mooring off the fire.
"Silver to the waist," Aerion said. "Eyes near purple, in lamplight, if a man's paid enough to squint. Triple price since summer's end — since the kingswood, though I don't suppose the house keeps its accounts by season — most particular, the gentleman, ever so discreet, such a big man to be so quiet on the stair — did you think—" his voice was climbing; he let it; let the whole River Wing wake and be damned— "did you truly think, in this city, in this court, where the laundry knows a lord's sins before his septon does, that I would not—? Or was that the sport of it, my lord — the whole exchange named for me, priced for me, a little counterfeit court down by the Street of Flour where the dragon comes when whistled and never says a cruel word—"
"No," said Lyonel.
Just that. Not loudly. But it came out of the keel of him, bass and final, and it stopped the climb the way the wall stops weather, and in the ringing pause after it he rose — slowly, palms open, no step forward, a man declining to loom — and said:
"I'll not insult you with denials; you've the truth of it and I can hear you have. It's true. Since late summer. A house off the Street of Flour, and aye — I asked for silver. Every time." A muscle moved along the great jaw; he did not look away; that, Aerion would think later, was the unforgivable, unrepayable heart of it, that he never once looked away. "You're owed the why, and I'd rather give it than have you build a worse one, so here it is, plain, and you may do what you like with me after.
"Since the kingswood I have wanted you the way the sea wants the shore. There. It's said. Not your face — your face I managed a full fortnight, I'm not a boy — you. The temper and the teeth and the wit and the walk and the way you go still when the world finally stands, all of it, wanting like weather, day upon day, and you not mine to touch. Not mine even to speak it to — you'd asked me nothing, and I swore myself an oath at that window the week of the kingswood: nothing gets answered that hasn't been asked in words. I'll keep that oath if it kills me, and there've been evenings this season it made a fair attempt.
"So I took the wanting down the hill, where wanting is honest trade, and I paid too much to women who were kind about it, and I asked for silver hair because I am, it turns out, exactly the fool the songs warn of, and I will tell you the whole of the shame since you've come for it: it didn't help. Counterfeit never does; ask any mint. I climbed that stair a half-dozen times in a season and came down it every time with the wanting untouched and my coin gone and one more lie told to my own blood, and if you've come tonight to name it an insult to you — then you've named it truer than I managed, and I'm sorry for it. Not for the wanting. I'll not repent weather. For where I carried it."
The candle burned. Somewhere down in the city a dog was barking at the moon, on and on, at the whole indifferent night.
Aerion stood in the middle of the room with his heart going like a forge-bellows, in the wreckage of forty drafted confrontations, every one of them built for a man who would deny, or excuse, or counter — every unwed lord in the realm, my prince; betrothal is not marriage; you refuse even my gifts, what would you have had me — he had armed for all of those, could have fought all of those for a year. He had not armed for the truth, given whole, first asking, with the throat bared. He never learned to arm for that; no one in the Red Keep had ever once required it of him.
And the fire in his bones, which had come all this way to burn the man down, stood in him roaring with nowhere to go — because half of it, he understood at last, in that candlelit room that smelled of rain on hot stone, half of that marrow-deep unbearable burning had never been rage at all. It was the other thing. It had been the other thing since the Fossoway girl's fan first paused, and he had carried it up the hill and through the guards and past the gaping Connington boy because it was the only fire he had a name for, and now it stood in him with its true name half-said and he could either speak or burst into actual flame, and the histories suggested his line found the second option genuinely available.
"No one," he said.
His voice came out very strange. Low, and shaking, and imperial, all three at once.
"Do you hear me, storm lord. From this hour. You will lie with no one — not through this courtship, not in this marriage, not in Flea Bottom or Lys or the far side of the Sunset Sea, not with silver hair nor gold nor any counterfeit of anything, not ever — no whores, no ladies, no lonely widowed marcher wives with tragic weather, no one — no one but—"
The word stood in his mouth like a drawn blade he could not put down and could not swing. He heard it not come out. The silence where it should have been was the loudest thing that had ever happened in any room he had occupied.
Lyonel Baratheon did not make him finish.
That was the mercy that broke the siege — that the man crossed no distance, claimed no victory, did not so much as smile; he only bowed his dark head, slow and grave, the way lords bow to kings at coronations, the way men bow to the altar and not the septon, and said:
"Done."
"—*done?*" It came out cracked. "That's — you great ox, that is not how — I have just forbidden you every bed in the known world, sight unseen, for the rest of your natural life, and you say done like I've asked you to pass the salt—"
"Aye, well." The grave bow was over; the warmth was coming up under the gravity now, terrible, inexorable, the sun through storm-rack. "You've had lighter salt off me. Shall I dress it up? I can do the words." And he put his right hand flat over his own heart, and the warmth stood down for one moment and let the oath through bare: "Before whatever gods are awake at this hour: no one, Aerion. Not through the courtship, not in the marriage, not ever, in any city or any darkness, for so long as there is breath in me. On my father's grave I swear it — and if that's not iron enough for a dragon—" the storm-blue eyes did not waver— "then some night fetch down the knife you keep under your bolster, and I'll set my hand on the pearl and swear it over again on steel of my own giving."
The floor of the world tilted very slightly.
"...The mule," Aerion said, faintly.
"Came back light. I can count to five, my prince, whatever you've put about regarding my education." Nothing in his face was mockery. Nothing in his face had been mockery for a season, over a knife he could have laid on any supper table in the realm and collected the court's laughter like a tax — and had not, had folded it away instead into whatever vault the man kept, and guarded it there, all this while, the way — the comparison arrived unbidden and would not leave — the way Aerion guarded an orange peel in a drawer of pearls. "It's the finest thing I own, knowing you kept it. I wasn't going to spend it. I'm not spending it now — I'm offering it, which is different, as you taught me at a gifting once."
Aerion sat down.
There was, fortunately, a chair; there had not needed to be. He sat in the storm lord's chamber in his midnight cloak with his cut palm stinging and the dagger a familiar bar of cold along his forearm, and looked at the candle, and said, at length, with what dignity the evening had left him, which was a surprising amount, because the man across the table kept somehow handing his dignity back:
"You don't ask it of me."
"Ask what?"
"The same. The — mirror of it. You've been given rules all season; here I arrive at midnight and issue a decree that would make the High Septon faint, and you swear it away like a man ordering ale, and you don't so much as—" his hand described the enormity— "*Faith for faith* is how these bargains go. Even in the Marches. I know it; I looked into your customs so as to refuse them more precisely. So?"
"No," said Lyonel.
"...No?"
"I'll take no oath off you tonight. You came up that hill on fire; a vow sworn on fire is worth the ash it's written in, and I want none of that between us. And besides—" and here, at last, the grin arrived, the whole storm-coast of it, and Aerion realized he had been waiting for it the way farmers wait for rain— "I've no need. You'd sooner burn the bed than share it, my prince, and every soul who's ever met you knows it. A man doesn't ask the tide to be wet."
"I despise you."
"Aye."
"This changes nothing. I am still — you are still an enormous storm ox with mud in your vowels, and I am still going to make your life a legend of suffering, and the wedding will be a catastrophe, I've planned it—"
"I'd hope so."
"—and you will keep your oath, and you will keep it invisibly, no long-suffering looks across halls, no fasting-saint performances, if the court ever learns I cared I will have you fed to something — and — and the Lysene." He heard this one arrive with no warning at all, from the marrow directly, bypassing every government he had. "The Little Dragon. You'll send her out of that house. Coin enough to buy the house, if it wants that. She'll not stay in Flea Bottom wearing my colors for lesser men to squint at, it's — the counterfeit offends, not the girl, the girl was civil about the whole disaster, Marra says, and none of it was her doing, and there is such a thing as — as—" royal grammar failed; he abandoned it, glaring. "See it done."
Something moved through the storm lord's face then that Aerion declined to examine — it was adjacent to the beaming from the doorstops evening, and pointed at him, and if he examined it he would have to feel it land.
"See it done," Lyonel agreed, softly. "First thing in the morning." A pause; the candle guttering low now, their shadows enormous on the map-hung walls. "Do you know — and I say this in wonder, not in keeping-score, so sheathe whatever you're reaching for — that's the first thing you've ever asked of me? Two things, in the one night. A season of no, and tonight the dam gives and out comes—"
"I did not ask. I decreed. There was no asking of any kind—"
"Decreed, then. Better still. It suits you." The Lord of Storm's End rose, and came around the table at last — unhurried, telegraphed, giving him every long moment to object — and took the cut hand, and turned it palm up to the light with a gentleness that was frankly insulting in something that size, and studied the thin red line and the older silvery kiss of the candle-burn beside it with a face like a man reading a ledger written in a hand he loved. "You're a catastrophe," he said, conversationally. "You crack windows. You steal knives. You come up my stair at midnight breathing fire, decree me celibate for life, ruin a whore's custom and then pension her like a dowager in the same breath, and you'll stand in the yard tomorrow telling the world you never set foot here. Seven save me." He raised the hand, and pressed his mouth — warm, brief, chaste as a septon and about as survivable — to the unhurt heel of it, below the cut, and Aerion's traitor scent broke over the candlelight like a struck match falling into resin, announcing to the room, to the wing, to the world, everything he had spent a season not saying. "As my brat prince decrees."
The silence lasted three heartbeats.
"*What,*" said Aerion Targaryen, "did you call me."
"You heard it."
"You cannot — I am a prince of the blood of Old Valyria, I am the — brat—"
"Aye. And a prince. The realm's foremost of both, and I'd not trade a hair of either." He released the hand, stepped back, correct again, the whole coastline withdrawing to its proper charted distance, storm-eyes bright as sea-light. "Good night, my prince. Mind the guards on the second stair; they wake at the turning. I'd send Steffon to see you back, but you've frightened him into next week, and besides—" the grin, one last time, incorrigible, delighted, his — "you're armed."
Aerion swept out with his hood up and his chin high and the kissed place on his palm burning steadily all the way down the second stair, past the guards, who woke, and saw nothing, because they were paid in dragons and wise in proportion.
Behind him, through the door, he heard the enormous idiot begin, very softly, contentedly, tunelessly, to hum.
***
The report went down the hill within the sennight, through the laundry-court, traveling the same channels the wound had come up by, which was its own kind of cautery: that the Little Dragon of the house off the Street of Flour had been bought out — not her night; her contract, her debts, the whole ledger of her, paid off in one staggering sum by an unnamed party — and had left Flea Bottom entire, gone upriver, they said, or home to Lys, with coin enough to open a house of her own or never open a door again as she pleased; and that the establishment's best custom had ceased on the same day, entirely, without explanation, and never came again.
The court, which knew everything and understood nothing, never connected the two at all.
And in Maegor's Holdfast, in the black hours, the blood of the dragon lay awake with a pearl hilt in his fist and an orange peel in a drawer of pearls and a vow lying over him like a cloak he would not admit to wearing, and took out the word — the unsaid one, the drawn blade from the storm lord's chamber — and turned it in the dark the way he had once turned a piece of amber to a candle, looking at the small fierce winged thing caught burning at the heart of it.
No one but—
He did not say it. Not that night; not aloud; he was the blood of the dragon, and dragons do not surrender their hoards on demand, not even to themselves.
But he moved the dagger, that night, from under the pillow to under his hand.
Nearer, was all. A few inches of linen. Nothing any chronicle would record.
The fire in his bones banked low and warm, like a hearth in a keep built to stand weather, and the wonder of the age slept the whole night through, holding what was his.