The realm treated Aerion's first pregnancy as a triumph. Aerion treated it as an invasion, and would maintain to the end of his days, with some justice, that of the two of them the realm was wrong.

It began — as invasions do — with scouts.

Marra knew first. Of course Marra knew first; Marra had dressed him for six years and kept his ledgers of sleep and appetite better than any maester; and one grey morning some six weeks after the wedding, lacing him for the day with the ease of long practice, she stopped, and re-measured with her hands what her hands had already told her, and went very carefully blank in the way she went blank over large intelligence, and said, "My prince. When did you last—"

"Finish the lacing."

"My prince—"

"*Finish the lacing,* Marra," said Aerion, to the window, to the flat grey bay, in a voice that closed the matter for exactly four days, which was as long as the matter consented to stay closed — because he had, of course, already done the arithmetic himself. He had done it a week before she had. He had lain awake beside the great warm tide of his sleeping husband doing it and re-doing it, dates and moons and the traitorous new tenderness of his own body, and arriving each time at the same total, and each time locking the total in the deepest vault with the ceremony he reserved for things too large to look at before breakfast.

On the fifth day, the vault was opened by professionals.

The Grand Maester attended with two acolytes, a folding table of instruments, and the entire settled confidence of the Citadel, and conducted in the bridal apartments of Maegor's Holdfast an examination that Aerion would afterward describe, accurately, as the single most educational hour of his marriage — for it taught him the exact shape and depth of a hatred he had never before had occasion to chart.

He hated being handled. He had known that; the whole realm knew that; but he had not known — lying rigid as a drawn blade while grey hands pressed and measured and conferred over him in the third person — that there was a purer stratum beneath it: the hatred of being read. Of lying still while his own body was consulted over his head like a document, its testimony taken, its secrets — his secrets, the vault's secrets, the arithmetic he had not yet spoken aloud even to the man whose great warm bulk stood planted by the window radiating carefully leashed weather — extracted by strangers and announced.

"Conception is confirmed," the Grand Maester informed the room. Not him. The room — turning as he said it toward Lyonel, toward the window, toward the standing of houses and the future of the realm, the omega on the bed already filed and closed. "The Citadel's felicitations, my lord. The succession of two great houses is — if I may — most providentially served. We will wish to establish a regimen at once. The vessel's constitution is sound, though high-strung; confinement should be gentle but firm; I shall draw up—"

"The vessel," said Aerion.

He said it quietly. Later — years later, in the retellings that made it one of the founding legends of the household — Steffon Connington would swear you could hear the temperature of the room going down, degree by degree, like a tide withdrawing before the great wave; and the Grand Maester, seventy years old and armored in the invincible obliviousness of the learned, sailed straight on into it.

"—a schedule of the vessel's confinement, diet, and — yes, my prince? You wished to—"

"I wished to establish," said Aerion Baratheon, sitting up on the bed they had filed him to, unfolding to his full seated height with his loose hair down his back and his eyes gone to the flat shining calm of the kingswood meadow, "the correct form of address, before this regimen of yours proceeds one syllable further. You have examined me for an hour, Grand Maester, and reported your findings to my husband, the window, and the realm. Attend now to mine. I am not a vessel. Vessels are made by potters. I was made by Old Valyria, and what is in me was made by me, in lawful conquest, on ground of my own choosing — and the next man of your order who speaks of my body in the third person while I am in the room will discover that the blood of the dragon requires no instruments whatsoever to establish the constitution of a maester." A pause, letter-opener bright. "High-strung, was it?"

The Grand Maester had gone the color of his own parchments.

"You will draw up your regimen," Aerion continued, pleasantly, "and you will address it to me, in the second person, and I will read it, and I will adopt what is sound and burn what is insolent, and we shall get on famously. My lord husband—" without turning; he could feel the weather at the window changing, the leash easing, something enormous and warm beginning, disgracefully, to enjoy itself— "will see you out. Felicitations to the Citadel."

When the door had closed on the grey robes and the folding table, the room held its silence for a moment.

"'No instruments whatsoever,'" said Lyonel Baratheon, with the reverence of a man committing scripture to memory, and came away from the window.

"Don't."

"I'm not."

"You're beaming. I can hear it. I have asked you repeatedly to beam more quietly—" and then the great hands arrived, one at his jaw and one spread whole and warm over the small of his back, and the beaming was against his hair, and the leashed weather broke over him at last in the form he had spent five days both dreading and — the vault could admit it now; the vault was a ruin; the professionals had seen to that — starving for: not triumph, not dynasty, not the succession of two great houses providentially served.

Just: "*Aerion,*" said into his hair, cracked clean down the middle, the whole storm coast of the man arriving in two syllables — and then, pulling back far enough to look at him, storm-eyes bright as sea-light and rimmed, unmistakably, unashamedly, red: "How long have you known?"

"...Twelve days."

"*Twelve*—"

"I was establishing certainty. I do not announce unverified—"

"Twelve days you sat on this. Twelve days of me wondering why you'd gone off your wine and taken against the smell of the fish course, twelve days of Marra looking like a woman carrying a lit candle through a hayloft—"

"You knew?"

"I hoped," said Lyonel, "which is worse; hope's heavier," and then he laughed — not the landslide; something lower and more helpless, half wrecked, pressing his forehead down to Aerion's — and stood there holding the whole future in his two hands in a room the maesters had just vacated, and Aerion stood in the hold of it and let himself, at last, at last, twelve days late, feel the thing the vault had been built around.

Not the fear. The fear was there — the fear had moved in on the first night of arithmetic and taken rooms, and would be dealt with in its season — but the fear was not the tenant that mattered.

It took.

That was the thing, blazing, sovereign, arriving now with all its banners: the wellspring had been proven. Not theory, not a drunkard's dream, not a conqueror's reframing performed at a wedding feast to keep from drowning — fact, now, confirmed by instruments and announced to windows: the oldest fire in the world had crossed into the strongest keep in Westeros and taken root. Everything he had built on Daeron's prophecy — the loosing, the vanguard, the annexation, the hall of crowned dark heads burning down the centuries — all of it had been, until this grey morning, a beautiful campaign map.

There was ground under it now.

One, thought the blood of the dragon, into his husband's collar, with his eyes shut and his hands full of storm-black hair and something hot and appalling sliding down his own cheek that he would deny to the Stranger's face. One, and landed, and mine.

"We go home," Lyonel said hoarsely, into his hair. "Soon as the roads dry. He's not being born in this stone maze with forty maesters filing him — he's born at Storm's End, in the sea air, with weather worth the—"

"*He?*"

"Or she. Or whatever the gods—"

"You said he. You've decided something. You great presumptuous ox, you've been down in that keel of yours deciding things—"

"Aye, well," said the Lord of Storm's End, entirely unrepentant, holding him tighter, "so have you. Twelve days. Tell me one of them."

And because it was that morning, and the vault was rubble, and the professionals were gone, and the fire in his head was quiet the particular way it was only ever quiet in this one hold in all the world, Aerion told him one.

Not the largest. The strangest — the one that had arrived on the third sleepless night and refused all eviction: "There's an old skull in the throne room," he said, muffled, imperial, mortified. "I want to say goodbye to it before we go. Don't ask. It's a — we have an understanding, the skull and I, it long predates you—"

"Balerion," said Lyonel.

A silence.

"...How do you—"

"You talk to him. Half the keep knows; the guards dice on which nights. My prince talks to the Black Dread the way marcher wives talk to the sea." No mockery anywhere in it — there had been none anywhere in him for a year and a half; Aerion had audited exhaustively — only the warm gravity of a man receiving a state secret he'd guarded before it was told to him. "We'll go tonight. Late, when the hall's empty. I'll stand at the door."

"You'll stand at the far door."

"I'll stand at the far door," Lyonel agreed, "with my back turned, hearing nothing," and pressed his mouth to the crown of the silver head, once, like a seal on a charter, and went off to shout for Ser Arstan about roads and wagons and sailing weather in a voice that brought half the River Wing out of its rooms — and that night, in the vast dark of the empty throne room, under jaws that had swallowed the light of centuries, the blood of the dragon stood alone in the shadow of Balerion the Black Dread for the last time as a resident of the Red Keep, and delivered his report.

"You'll have heard," he said, to the dark between the teeth. "You hear everything in this hall; you always did; it's why you were the only one worth telling." The candle he'd brought guttered in the great cold; he did not cup his hand around the flame; he had not needed the old trick in over a year, and noting that was its own strange grief and its own strange crown. "Two years ago I stood here and told you they'd sold me to a stag. Exile in bridal silk. I believed it — I built a war on believing it — and I stood in this exact shadow and promised you they could not make me less."

The dark kept its ancient counsel. Far off at the hall's other end, at the far door, with his back turned, hearing nothing, stood a shape like a piece of the wall.

"I was wrong about the sale," Aerion told the Black Dread. "Not about the rest. Hear the amended report, old man, and file it with the others: I was not sold. I was loosed. And there is a dragon coming now that will never bear our name — storm-dark or silver, stag-marked, salt-born, I don't yet know his colors — and he will burn all the same. They all will. I mean to fill that coast with fire until the years run out of hall to walk down, and no chronicle will ever call it a Targaryen victory, and it will be the greatest one since the Field of Fire, and only you and I and a drunkard will ever have known the campaign existed." He looked up, one last time, into eye sockets deep enough to drown in, and the candlelight moved in the dark of them like something turning over in its sleep. "Keep the hall for me. Frighten the maesters. I'll send word when the count is worth your hearing."

He set the candle down on the plinth, burning — an offering, a lamp left for the dead, entirely against fire-discipline and every steward's rule, and let them dare — and walked the long ringing dark to the far door, and took his husband's arm, and did not look back.

Three days later, in a mild grey dawn with the first spring rain making the banners heavy, the Storm's End column rode out of the King's Gate for home — and if one small light burned unexplained in the empty throne room until a frightened underservant found it at noon, the Red Keep, which knew everything and understood nothing, filed it with the rest.

***

The court, naturally, was told before the column left — the king's peace did not permit an heir of two great houses to slip out a gate unannounced — and the three days between the telling and the leaving taught Aerion the full breadth of the invasion to come.

The realm was delighted. That was the horror of it. He had spent a lifetime being feared, envied, desired, deplored — he had fluency in every hostile attention the court could offer and armor fitted to each — and nothing, nothing in six-and-ten years of that education, had prepared him for three days of being cooed at. Ladies who had spent a season sharpening their fans on him now materialized at his elbow with sweet certainties about ginger root and sea air. Lords who owed him scars toasted his health with wet eyes. The septons — the septons, who had drafted formal protests over his wedding gown — issued a blessing. Even the servants had gone soft-footed and glowing around him, as though he had performed some virtue, as though the entire enterprise were not precisely the campaign of conquest he had privately declared it — and worst of all, crowning all of it, was the king.

His grandsire summoned him on the last evening, to the same warm small solar with the same three books in attendance, and Daeron the Good looked at him across the fire with a pleasure so profound, so layered, that Aerion spent the whole audience trying to strip it down to its components and failing, which was the precise reason he hated it.

Because he could not tell. That was the old wound in its newest dress: the king's face held a grandfather's joy and a statesman's satisfaction fused past all parsing — the great-grandchild and the guaranteed peace, the babe and the border, love and arithmetic in one untangleable glow — and Aerion sat there receiving it and could not, with all his craft, determine which of the two he was being given, or in what proportion, and his skin crawled with the not-knowing the way it had crawled on a dark stair three years before.

"You are looking at me," said the king at length, mildly, "the way you look at documents you suspect of a forged seal."

"Your Grace is pleased."

"Your Grace is very pleased."

"Yes," said Aerion. "I find I cannot tell with what."

The lenses came off. The old king polished them on his sleeve for a moment, unhurried, and when he looked up the layered glow had rearranged itself into something plainer and more tired and much harder to hate, which Aerion resented separately.

"Neither can I," said Daeron the Good. "I have been king too long to unbraid it, and I am too old to lie to you, and you are too much yourself to be lied to profitably. So take the braid whole, grandson, and this with it: of all the arithmetic I have done in a long reign of it, you are the sum I am gladdest to have gotten wrong." He put the lenses back on. "I priced you as a problem. You have compounded into a treasury. Go home, be insufferable to the Stormlands, and send me ravens — and Aerion." At the door, this last, mild as ever, lethal as ever. "The child will be watched its whole life, by the realm, by history, by men not yet born. It cannot be helped; it is the tax on the blood. But it need not be priced. You will know the difference better than any parent living. See that you remember it at three in the morning, when remembering is hardest."

His father's farewell was conducted entirely in logistics, which was its own dialect and Aerion had, at long last, a working translation. Maekar reviewed the escort's numbers, doubled them, inspected the wheelhouse Aerion had no intention of riding in, and on the final morning appeared in the outer yard with a straight-backed, iron-eyed Dornishwoman of sixty in travel leathers and presented her with all the ceremony of a man handing over a siege engine.

"Wylla of the Tor. She attended your mother. All of you — all six. She is the only person in the Seven Kingdoms your mother permitted in the room, and the only one I trust to—" The jaw worked. The sentence, as ever, went unfinished; the sentences that mattered always did. "She goes with you. That is not a request."

"Father—"

"The maesters," said Prince Maekar, staring at the middle distance, delivering the longest personal speech of their shared lives, "will speak to you of vessels and confinements. They spoke so to your mother. Wylla threw the Grand Maester of that day out of the birthing chamber bodily, with his own instruments, and your mother laughed for a week, and you were born by sunset. She stays in the room. Everything else is negotiable." A pause. The iron eyes came, briefly, all the way to his son's face — the full contact, rarer than eclipses — and what was in them had no name Maekar owned and did not need one. "Send ravens," he said. "Short ones. I dislike prose."

And he was gone across the yard, spine like a lance, leaving his second son standing beside a Dornish midwife who looked Aerion up and down with the professional frankness of a horse-trader and said, in an accent like warm gravel, "You have her eyes and his temper, which is backward, but we managed her and we'll manage you. Eat before we ride. I've buried more fools who wouldn't breakfast than babes who wouldn't turn."

Valarr came to the gate itself. His own ships waited at the quay; Tyrosh had sent its escort; the two coins of the same purchase were being spent in the same week, east and south, and they stood a moment in the grey drizzle while the column formed up — the careful cousin and the conquering one, the whetstone peace between them three years old now and load-bearing.

"Particulars," Aerion reminded him.

"Particulars," Valarr agreed. "And you'll — the babe. When it comes. I want—" The siegeworks assembled one last time, and then, uncharacteristically, he abandoned them and just said it: "I want to be the sort of kin it's glad to see on a quay. Whatever else Tyrosh makes of me. Write me its favorite things. I'll fill ships."

"You'll spoil it."

"*Ruinously,*" said the Young Prince, with the first grain of iron and the last of the lemon-cake boy both, and embraced him hard, and went to his exile the way Aerion had gone to his: head up, into weather.

And his brother — his brother came last, at the very gate, at the very hour, weaving out of the gatehouse shadow with wine on his breath at seven in the morning and his soft ruined face doing something complicated, and gripped Aerion's forearm with both hands, and stood there, swaying gently, saying nothing at all while tears ran openly and unremarked down his face.

"Daeron—"

"I don't know," his brother said. "Before you ask. I don't — I woke weeping and I can't stop and I don't know why, it's the — something's glad in me, Aeri, something's so glad it's flooding the cellars, and I can't get down there to see what it—" He laughed, wet and helpless, and pressed his forehead briefly to Aerion's shoulder, wine and grief and gladness all one weather. "Rains in my head. You know how it is. Go on. Go on — you'll lose the tide."

Aerion rode out of King's Landing with his brother's tears drying on his shoulder, a Dornish siege engine at his flank, a husband at his side singing marching songs in a voice that frightened crows off fences three fields distant, and the vanguard of the greatest secret campaign in the history of the blood of the dragon riding, no bigger yet than a raven's egg, under his heart.

He did not look back at the Red Keep. He had said his goodbyes to the only resident who mattered.

***

Storm's End announced itself a full day before it appeared.

The wind changed first — somewhere past Bronzegate the air picked up salt and iron and a low ceaseless muttering that Aerion took for distant thunder until Lyonel, riding taller by the hour, home rising in him like sap, informed him with insufferable satisfaction that it was the sea. Then the land began to gather itself, climbing toward the cape in great green swells; and then, on the second afternoon, the column came up over the last ridge of Durran's Point and Aerion Baratheon got his first sight of the rest of his life.

He had heard it described all his days — every child of the Red Keep had — and the descriptions were all accurate and all useless. One colossal drum tower, they said: true, and it conveyed nothing of the scale of the thing, the single mountainous fist of pale grey stone rising sheer from the headland with the whole Narrow Sea breaking white and furious at its feet; one curtain wall, they said: true, and no one had made him understand that the wall was a hundred feet of seamless stone that seemed less built than grown, curved and blind and utterly without mercy on its seaward face, so that the gale coming off Shipbreaker Bay — and there was always, he would learn, a gale coming off Shipbreaker Bay — struck it and simply lost, howling off the curve like a defeated thing, as it had struck and lost every hour of every day for eight thousand years. Banners streamed rigid from the tower top. Spray burst on the cliffs below in slow white explosions. The whole enormous fortress stood in the roaring weather with the placid immovability of a thing that had made its argument to the gods themselves seven times, and won.

"Well," said Lyonel, who had been watching his husband's face instead of his home, and would admit on his deathbed that it was the better view.

Aerion looked at the fortress. At the wall that did not flinch, the tower that did not bow, the ancient patient enormity that storms had thrown their whole strength at for eighty centuries and never once moved.

"...You're all like this," he said. "The whole country. It explains everything."

The household met them in the great yard — and it was a household braced, Aerion noted with connoisseur's approval, drilled and scrubbed and visibly prepared by Ser Arstan's ravens for the arrival of the realm's most dangerous consort; the line of servants had the rigid courage of a shield wall — and the tour that followed undid him twice before supper, which he considered a hostile act and said so.

The first was the sea-facing rooms: his mother-in-law's old apartments in the tower's eastern curve, rebuilt through the winter to a raven's specifications — the great hearth remade, and every window glazed new and wide so that the whole grey roaring theatre of Shipbreaker Bay played floor to ceiling across one curved wall, weather worth watching until the end of time. He stood in the middle of it with the sea-light moving over him and had nearly recovered his composure when he noticed, stacked discreetly in a cabinet by the window seat, a neat reserve of cut glass panes, ready-fitted to the frames.

"...What are those."

"Spares," said Steffon Connington helpfully, before anyone could stop him. "My lord's letter said you crack panes when the mood takes you, and to lay in—"

"*LAY IN SPARES?*"

"—a sensible reserve," finished Lyonel, from the doorway, not even attempting to govern his face, and weathered the ensuing storm with his arms folded and his back against the jamb, beaming, while his husband delivered a comprehensive address on the subjects of presumption, spycraft, marital treachery, and the sheer impossibility of being provisioned for like a siege — an address which lost some of its force midway through when its author cracked, in gesturing, a pane, and a footman had a spare out of the cabinet before the echo died, and the Lord of Storm's End had to leave the room entirely and could be heard being unwell with laughter half the length of the eastern stair.

The second was the garden.

It sat in the sheltered southern lee of the great wall, where the curve killed the wind and the sun pooled — a walled acre of green in the stone fist's one soft palm — and at its heart, new-raised, ribbed in iron and glazed like a sept, stood a glasshouse; and inside the glasshouse, in ranked clay pots with their leaves still travel-tender, stood forty small orange trees.

Aerion stopped in the doorway.

"Dorne sends them up the boneway in spring," said Lyonel, behind him, quieter now, the beam banked down to something that asked nothing. "These came with the winter fleet. Maester Harmund gives them even odds; oranges have never fruited this far north; he's written three letters explaining why it can't be done and ordered forty more trees in the same ink, so I'd say he's caught it too." A pause. "My mother wanted a glass garden her whole life. My father always meant to build it and there was always a wall wanting work first. So it's hers, by right — but the trees are yours. You eat oranges like a campaign, and I meant—"

"—the supply lines held," said Aerion.

His own voice came out wrong — low, unarmored, wrecked — and he stood in the warm green glass-filtered light amid forty small brave impossible trees planted against a maester's arithmetic because a man had watched him eat fruit at a breakfast table, and he did not turn around, because his face was doing something unsanctioned, and behind him his husband had the towering decency to say nothing at all, and the sea muttered beyond the wall, and one of the saplings, in a draft, moved its leaves.

"I hate you," Aerion informed the orange trees, thickly.

"Aye," said Storm's End.

The welcome feast was held that night in the great hall within the drum tower — a cavern of firelight and antlers where the whole gathered strength of the household and half the near bannermen roared their lord home and eyed their lord's consort with the fascinated wariness of men introduced to a beautiful wildfire — and it was there, between the boar and the sweet, that Aerion rose, unscheduled, unannounced, and silenced eight hundred people by the simple expedient of standing still until they noticed.

"Ser Arstan," he said, into the quiet. "Bring me the salt cup."

The hall's stillness changed texture. Every marcher soul in it knew the history — the refusals were legend by now, institution, sport; there was standing money on the next one — and old Selmy rose from his place with his granite face working strangely and fetched the Durrandon silver with his own hands, and filled it at the board, seawater and wine, the taking of the weather, and bore it up the hall through a silence you could have anchored ships in, and set it before the blood of the dragon.

Aerion looked at it. Then at the hall — the firelit ranks of his husband's people, his people now, storm-bred and salt-souled, eight hundred faces he intended to fill with dragons.

"I was asked to drink this once in King's Landing," he said, and his voice carried to the antlers, silver and clear, "and I refused, and I told the man who offered it — this man; he's forgiven me, he says; he lies badly — that when Storm's End wished to take my weather, it might apply to me on its own walls. These are its walls." He took up the cup. "I have crossed your Marches. I have seen your sea. I have stood on Durran's stone and felt what it is that doesn't flinch, and I find—" the letter-opener smile, but warm, gods, warm, the whole hall leaning into it— "I find the weather here is worth the taking."

And he drank it down — seawater, wine, eight thousand years — every drop, before eight hundred witnesses, and turned the cup mouth-down on the board in the old sign of a thing completed.

The hall drew breath to erupt.

"*However,*" said Aerion Baratheon, and the breath held. "The custom, I am reliably informed, is called an exchange of weathers, and I have examined the records, and Storm's End has been taking weather off its consorts for eighty centuries and giving back nothing but fish. That ends tonight. Ser Arstan—" a flick of ringed fingers toward the doors, where, on his prearranged signal, the stewards were already coming up the hall with casks that had traveled from King's Landing under canvas and his personal seal— "serve the hall."

It was Dornish fire-wine, the strong red of the deep sands laced after the old Rhoynish fashion with dragon peppers, and it went down eight hundred marcher throats like swallowed wildfire, and the resulting sixty seconds — the coughing, the weeping, the roaring, Lord Swann's face achieving colors outside the known heraldry, Ser Rolland Caron's voice cracking two octaves midway through a toast — passed immediately and permanently into the folklore of the Stormlands as the night the dragon gave us his weather back, and when the hall could breathe again it came up off its benches in a storm of love that shook dust from the antlers, because their lord's impossible consort had just done the one thing no custom could have compelled and no refusal could have equaled: he had taken their weather and armed them with his own.

It was into the crest of that roar that Lyonel Baratheon rose, cup high, tears of pepper and pride entirely undifferentiated on his face, and bellowed the household to order for one announcement more — "since we're trading weathers" — and told them.

The sound the hall made then had no precedent in the household books. Ser Arstan sat down abruptly. Steffon Connington leapt onto a bench. Somewhere in the din the wagering began before the cheering even peaked — silver or black, the hair, the eyes, name your stakes — and Maester Harmund could be seen already composing in his head the letter in which he would explain to the Citadel why the heir of Storm's End would be born into a household that had greeted the news by drinking pepper wine and betting; and at the center of it all the dragon and the stag stood side by side in the firelight of their own hall, the one huge and lit and laughing, the other cinched and silver and smug enough to start a second war, receiving the roaring of their nation.

Loosed, thought Aerion, one hand resting, sovereign and secret, over the campaign no bigger than a raven's egg. And landed. And welcomed by the garrison.

The goshawk flew three mornings later, from the top of the great seaward wall, in a bright tearing wind off the bay.

He had gone up alone at first light — alone save for the falconer trailing at a distance under strict instruction to exist inaudibly, and the hooded storm-grey madness riding his gauntlet like a folded piece of the sky — and he stood on Durran's stone a hundred feet above the white violence of Shipbreaker Bay, in the streaming wind, in the country he had annexed and been annexed by, and worked the hood's braces loose with his teeth and fingers the way a year of secret mews visits had taught him, and looked one moment into the mad gold eyes that had gone still for him in a ballroom before either of them understood why.

"Meraxes," he told her — her name, chosen a year since and told to no one, a queen's own she-dragon for a storm-grey queen of the rain-woods; let the household blink; the annexation proceeded name by name — "we're home. Go and see."

And cast her off.

She went up the wind like something loosed rather than launched — one great slicing spiral off the wall, up and up into the tearing bright morning until she rang at a pitch that stopped the breath, a grey star over the grey sea — and Aerion Targaryen Baratheon stood on the wall of Storm's End with his hair streaming loose and his head tipped all the way back, watching the first wild thing he had ever loved take the whole sky for her own, and made no attempt whatsoever to call her.

She was gone twenty minutes. The falconer, downwind, aged visibly.

Then she stooped out of the sun — falling like judgment, like the ballroom, like everything between them — and flared at the last with a crack of feathers, and came to his lifted fist.

Her own wings. Her own choice.

"*There's* my girl," said the dragon to the hawk, on the walls of the storm, and if he wept doing it, the wind took the evidence out to sea, where it kept everything, and told nothing.

***

The six moons that followed taught Storm's End, at close range and in exhaustive detail, everything the Red Keep had spent a year learning about its consort — and taught Aerion, in return, the full four-chambered anatomy of the invasion he had been promised.

He hated being watched. He had assumed, having been watched his entire life, that he possessed a complete bestiary of the experience; the Stormlands supplied three new species inside a fortnight. There was the sentinel watching — the guards who materialized at the foot of any stair he approached and shadowed him along the seaward wall at a fixed twelve paces, until he made a study of losing them in the drum tower's coiled passages purely for the sport of hearing the alarm go up, and Ser Arstan aged a decade in a moon, and a formal accord was at last negotiated in the solar with all the gravity of a border treaty (the Wall-Walking Accord, Lyonel called it, straight-faced, and had Maester Harmund actually draft it, and Aerion signed it with his largest seal purely to punish them both): walls in fair weather with one escort of his own choosing; walls in foul weather with two; the outer cliff path surrendered until spring, under protest, in exchange for unrestricted mews access in perpetuity. There was the anxious watching — the household's collective held breath whenever he stood near an open stair, carried anything heavier than a book, or expressed an intention involving horses; he could clear a corridor of servants merely by pausing thoughtfully at the top of a flight of steps, and did, on bad days, because a creature must have some recreation.

And there was the third kind, the new kind, the kind he had no armor catalogued for: the soft watching. The way conversation in the great hall warmed by degrees when he entered now instead of stilling. The way the kitchen sent up, unasked, the things he had eaten twice. The way hard-handed marcher grooms and laundry-women looked at him sidelong as he passed with an expression he finally, reluctantly, one sleepless night, identified from old memory as the way the smallfolk of the Dornish Marches had once looked at his mother — not at a prince; at the keep's own luck, carrying. He hated it. He informed Lyonel at regular intervals that he hated it. He was not believed, and this too he hated, chiefly because he was not believed correctly.

He hated being fussed over, with the single anomalous exception of Wylla of the Tor, whose fussing was so devoid of sentiment as to constitute a different substance entirely. Wylla did not coo. Wylla inspected him daily like a fortification, pronounced her findings in warm gravel — "ankles good, color good, temper foul, all correct" — overruled maesters, septas, stewards, and on one legendary occasion the Lord of Storm's End himself ("you may be the wall of the Marches, lording, but in this corridor you're traffic; move"), and was, by the third moon, the only living creature besides his husband permitted to touch him without ceremony. When the household attempted fussing of its own — the plague of cushions was the worst of it; cushions propagated in his path like mushrooms; he could not sit on a bench along the length of the eastern gallery without one materializing beneath him mid-descent — he retaliated with decrees. When the decrees failed (the cushions merely went covert), he complained to Wylla, who looked at him for a long moment and said, "They had a lord's mother die in this keep of a wasting no one caught in time, and a lord's father die of a wound no cushion could have reached, and they've decided the third one in their keeping is going to be smothered in comfort if it kills them and you. Endure it. It's not for you anyway; it's for their dead." And Aerion, who understood hoards and the guarding of them better than any soul in the Seven Kingdoms, endured the cushions thereafter in regal silence, and if he occasionally, when unobserved, straightened one — that was between him and the gallery.

He hated the maesters. This was an old hatred with new provisions, and it reached its Storm's End crisis in the fourth moon, when a draft of Maester Harmund's regular report to the Citadel came into his hands through channels (Marra; the channels were always Marra) and he discovered that he had been rendered, across four pages of neat maester's minuscule, into a specimen: charted like weather, tabulated like grain-stores, his moods logged in the margins as one notes the weather, his ancestry diagrammed with annotations on "the notorious volatility of the Valyrian strain" and speculations upon which "traits" might "transmit" — the whole document composed in the bloodless third person of a man describing a promising but unstable alloy, and concluding with the sentence, which Aerion read aloud to the solar three times in three different registers of silk, "It is to be hoped the Baratheon vigor will temper the draconic excess."

The retribution was proportionate, surgical, and won Lyonel's open beaming admiration from the doorway, which was by then the established seal of a deserved kill: Aerion did not rage, did not burn the letter, did not have the maester's books rained upon. He annexed the correspondence. He appeared in Harmund's tower rookery the next morning with the draft, three corrections to its High Valyrian etymology ("if you must diagram my strain, maester, decline it properly"), and an announcement that all future reports to the Citadel touching his person or his child would be reviewed, amended, and countersigned by their subject prior to dispatch — "history is written by the literate, maester, and I have checked, and I am more literate than you" — and for the remaining moons of the pregnancy the Citadel received, over Harmund's increasingly resigned seal, a chronicle of gestation at Storm's End in which the consort's health was reported as "unprecedented," his temperament as "sovereign," and the draconic excess as "proceeding entirely according to design." Archmaesters in Oldtown are said to have fought over the copies.

And he hated — with a purity that approached the devotional — the smugness of his husband's bannermen.

It rolled in with every visiting party from the second moon onward, gold-and-black and beaming, and it had one voice and one text, infinitely varied: Storm's End does not miss. Lord Swann arrived for the summer court and toasted "the marcher aim" with a wink visible from the battlements. Old Lord Dondarrion, ninety and deaf, congratulated Lyonel on "good soil" at a volume that reached the kitchens. The wagering — hair, eyes, sex, weight, birth-moon — escaped the household within weeks and ran the length of the Marches; a septon at Blackhaven preached against it and was discovered to hold a position on "silver, before the new year." Young knights drank to their lord's vigor until Aerion, six moons gone and magnificent and out of patience, rose at the harvest feast and delivered before the assembled smugness of the south a brief address on animal husbandry — in which he observed, sweetly, that he had reviewed the local convention whereby the field congratulated the bull, found it charming, rustic, and entirely backward, and wished the hall to note for the record that Valyria had spent five thousand years perfecting exactly one bloodline, that the bloodline in question had done all the actual work currently on display, and that if Storm's End did not miss, it was because Storm's End, for the first time in eight thousand years, had been given something worth hitting — and sat down to a heartbeat of scandalized silence followed by the loudest, longest, most delighted roar the hall had produced since the pepper wine, because the Stormlands had by then fully completed the transition, begun at a leave-taking feast two years before, from fearing their lord's consort to collecting him.

But he loved what it proved. That was the fourth chamber, the sealed one, the one no bannerman's smugness could reach or sour, and it filled a little more with every turning moon: the arithmetic made flesh, the campaign advancing under his heart at its own pace, indifferent to maesters and wagers alike. Dragon blood took root in Storm's End — he caught himself, some nights, standing at the great sea-window with both hands over the swell of the future, thinking the sentence in exactly those words, like a line from a chronicle not yet written — and on the night the proof first moved, it did so with a sense of occasion that not even its mother could have staged better.

It was the great gale of late summer, the first true monster off the bay since their arrival, and Aerion was of course on the wall — fair-weather clause voided, foul-weather escort doubled, the Accord honored to its letter and violated in its entire spirit — wrapped to the eyes in black fox with Lyonel a windbreak at his back and the whole world gone to grey violence below, spray bursting fifty feet up the stones, the old wall taking the sea's argument and not flinching, when the first thunder went off directly overhead like the sky's own keel breaking —

— and something under his heart kicked.

Hard. Unmistakable. Once, at the thunder, and then — as the rolling crash died off over the cape — twice more, quick and furious, as if in answer, as if something very small and very certain were demanding the sky do that again.

Aerion stood absolutely still on the wall of Storm's End with his hands flying to the fox fur and his whole face — he could not have stopped it; he did not try; the gale was the only witness with a memory — coming undone.

"He kicked," he said. "At the thunder. He — Lyonel. Lyonel. He heard the storm and he — he's not frightened, he's arguing with it—"

And the Lord of Storm's End got his great hands inside the fox cloak, and felt for himself the next round of the argument — thunder, and answer; the sky's blow, and the small furious reply — and stood on his own wall in the tearing wind with his forehead bent down to his husband's and the rain and the other thing running indistinguishable down his face, laughing and wrecked and enormous, saying storm-called, he's storm-called, do you hear that, old man — this last apparently addressed to the wall itself, to the stone, to Durran, to his father, to eight thousand years of dead Baratheons who had it coming — and the escort at twelve paces turned their backs with the perfect discipline of marcher men and told the tale in the guardroom anyway, and by winter the whole coast had it: that the heir of Storm's End had answered thunder from the womb, and the sky had blinked first.

The ravens flew, and the ravens returned. From Tyrosh, in Valarr's careful hand, the promised particulars, arriving with the regularity of tides: She has painted her hair green this moon and informed me it is the exact color of my face at sea, which is true. She laughed at my Valyrian and then corrected it, which no one warned me a wife would do. I find — particulars as promised, cousin, since you'll extract them anyway — that I mind it less weekly, and this week not at all. Send word the moment the child comes. The ships are half filled already; Tyroshi toys are a scandal; the septas will faint; I have bought everything. From King's Landing, in a hand grown shakier but no less itself, a parcel: swaddling clothes of fine lambswool, worked all over — by whose needles was never in question — with small seven-pointed stars, and a note reading only: For the child. The Mother watches over the presumptuous. ESPECIALLY the presumptuous. — Alerys. And from Summerhall, at strict intervals, ravens bearing the collected paternal wisdom of Prince Maekar of House Targaryen, four words at a time: Eat. Sleep. Obey Wylla. — and once, in the eighth moon, unprecedented, unrepeated, unexplained, five: Your mother would be pleased.

Aerion kept that one in the drawer.

The fear came in the ninth moon, on a flat black night between gales, the way fear does — not on the wall, not at the maester's charts, but at three in the morning, out of nowhere and everywhere, and Lyonel woke to ash.

He knew it before he was fully conscious — a year and a half had trained the knowing into his blood — the gray wrongness threading through the room's dark, and beside him the rigid, careful, ferociously governed stillness of a creature lying awake pretending otherwise; and he did what the whole marriage had taught him to do, which was nothing: no lamp, no alarm, no what's wrong to be lied to. He turned over, slow as tide, and gathered what could be gathered against the warm bulk of himself, and lay breathing, a wall in the dark, until the wall did what walls do, and the weather, finally, broke against it.

"What if it's like me."

Barely sound at all. Aimed at the ceiling, at the dark, at the sea muttering beyond the glass.

"You've heard the stories. Don't pretend; Ser Arstan will have — everyone at that court had a story and most of them are true, that's the — the septas, nine of them, I made septas pray for reassignment, I was six. The falconer's boy. My own brother's pup, Lyonel, I was eleven and I — there is something in the blood, everyone has always said it, my father said it through a door, what the blood throws up in every third generation — and I have spent nine moons growing my own blood a body, and every soul from here to Oldtown is wagering on its hair, and I lie here doing the only arithmetic that matters and I cannot make it come out: what if I have made another me? What if it looks up at me some morning with my own eyes and there is the fire in them and no — and it hurts things, and lies about it, and hoards, and bites, and I have to watch it be — watch everyone learn to flinch from it, watch it learn to like the flinching, and know exactly, exactly where it got—"

"Then it'll be the luckiest creature ever whelped in this keep," said Lyonel Baratheon.

The dark went still.

"Hear me, because I've had nine moons to think on this too, and I've thought on nothing else harder." His voice came up out of the keel, slow and level, the load-bearing register, and he felt the rigid shape against him listening the way it had listened across a fire in Maegor's Holdfast a year ago, with everything. "You're afraid it will have the fire. I'm counting on it. Gods send it's exactly like you — the temper, the teeth, the hoard, the pride, the whole beautiful arsenal — because here's the thing you've never once been able to see, my heart, being inside it: the fire was never the flaw. The fire's the oldest and finest thing in the world; your whole line is proof; half of what I love breathes it. The flaw was the alone. Six years old and burning, in a keep full of people who wanted things from you, with a dead mother, a father behind a door, and not one living soul in all that gilded horror whose whole answer to the fire was to stand there and be stone. That's what made the biting. Not the blood. The blood just gave the loneliness better weapons.

"And this one—" his hand moved, spread whole and warm over the swell between them, and the small furious tenant within, as if summoned to the argument, kicked his palm, and Lyonel's voice cracked and steadied— "this one is going to burn just as hot, gods willing, and it is going to do it in a keep where the fire has a hearth from its first breath. Where the wall is born already standing. Corrected and kept in the same breath, from the cradle — the thing you waited seven-and-ten years to learn one house could hold, it will never once have to learn, because it will never have known anything else. No one alive has ever seen what that grows, Aerion. Your fire, and my stone, and not one hour of the alone." A silence, sea-filled. "I'd wager the Stormlands on it. I have wagered the Stormlands on it. It's the whole treaty."

The ash-note thinned in the dark, and thinned, and under it — slow, banked, breathing — the other scent came home.

"...If it bites you," said the blood of the dragon at last, thick and small and unarmored, into his shoulder, "you are not permitted to laugh. It will make the biting worse. I speak from a position of considerable authority."

"Noted," said the wall, and gathered him in entire, and held the whole campaign, mother and vanguard both, until the sea talked them under.

***

Maegor Baratheon was born in the last great gale of autumn, in the ninth year of the peace of Daeron the Good, and he came into the world the way he would do everything in it: loudly, furiously, and on his own schedule, with the largest storm of the season for a herald.

Lyonel would remember the night in fragments all his life, the way men remember battles. The labor beginning at dusk as the glass fell and the bay began to stack white against the cliffs. Wylla of the Tor rolling up her sleeves in the sea-facing rooms with the flat satisfaction of a commander whose enemy has finally taken the field — "storm-born, then; good; they're the strong ones; OUT, lording" — and the door of his own wife's — his own husband's birthing chamber closing in his face with him on the wrong side of it. Maester Harmund arriving with instruments and being met at the threshold by sixty years of Dornish gravel: "You may attend the door, maester. From the far side of it. Boil what I send out and pray what you like." Marra going in with an armful of linen and a face like a soldier's. Steffon, fourteen now and useless with love, praying loudly and badly in the stairwell to an increasingly eclectic selection of gods until Ser Arstan took him down to the hall out of mercy.

And then the vigil: the worst hours of Lyonel Baratheon's life, and he had been at the Redgrass.

He kept the stair. He had promised himself, at dawn on his wedding night, that when this hour came — he had known even then it would come; he had lain in the dark of his greatest victory making the acquaintance of exactly this fear, filed under childbeds, ballasted in the keel — he would keep the stair and keep it quietly, and he did: planted on the landing outside the door like a piece of the wall relocated indoors, while the gale hammered the tower until the very stone hummed, and from within, hour upon hour, through oak and storm, came the sounds that unmade him — the low ones, the sharp ones, the long silences that were worse than either, and once, toward the blackest hour, his own name, in a voice with no armor left anywhere on it, and Ser Arstan had to put a hand on his lord's shoulder and physically weigh him back down onto the landing, because the door was Wylla's border and even Storm's End did not cross it.

"He held the stair eleven hours," the old knight would tell it after, in the hall, for years. "Never moved. Never spoke. Somewhere past the middle watch I looked at him and understood something I'd known forty years and never once seen plain: it was never the sword that made his father's line, nor the size. It's that they can stand still longer than the world can rage. The sea's been learning it eight thousand years. I learned it on that stair."

The cry came at first light.

Afterward, every soul in Storm's End that night told it the same way, unrehearsed, and would swear to it before any septon produced: that the babe's first cry and the storm's last great thunderclap came in the same breath — and that the cry won. That a sound came through that oak door, out of something no bigger than a loaf, that met eight thousand years of Shipbreaker Bay's best argument head-on and out-shouted it — loud, furious, entire, a proclamation, a demand, the rawest and most unnegotiable announcement of arrival the old tower had ever housed — and that within the hour, as if conceding the field, the gale wheeled off the cape and broke, and the morning came up washed and ringing and absurdly gold, and the household went about with the wide-eyed hush of people who had heard the sky blink first, twice now, and were beginning to keep count.

The door opened. Wylla of the Tor stood in it with her sleeves bloody and her gravel voice gone rich as harvest: "Whole, both. Loud, one. Come and be introduced, lording — and wash your hands, those are ramparts, not fingers."

Lyonel Baratheon crossed the threshold of the sea-facing rooms and stopped as if he had walked into the wall of his own keep.

Gold morning light lay across everything — Marra weeping into the linens with total dignity, the great window full of washed sky and settling sea — and propped high in the bed at the heart of it, wrecked and soaked and incandescent, silver hair in ruins and violet eyes blazing with an exhausted sovereignty that made every court triumph of his career look like rehearsal, sat his husband, alive, alive, with a small furious bundle wrapped in seven-pointed stars already held against his chest as though the arrangement predated the Andals — and the bundle was complaining. Continuously. At volume. About the light, the linen, the recent management, and the general conduct of the world to date.

"He has opinions," said Aerion. His voice was shredded and imperial. "Already. He has been born one hour and he has registered objections. Come and — Lyonel. Lyonel. Come and look at what I made."

Lyonel came and looked at what he'd made.

Silver. That was the first thing — the down on the small furious head was true Valyrian silver, bright as struck coin in the gold light (three floors below, within the hour, Steffon Connington would collect from Lord Swann's man the largest sum ever won by a squire in the history of the Marches, and give the whole of it, scarlet-eared, to the sept, "for luck, and because I only bet it out of loyalty") — and then the small fists, already fighting the swaddle and winning, one star-wrapped arm hauled triumphantly free and waving; and then, as Lyonel's shadow fell across the bed, the crying stopped.

Just — stopped. Mid-objection. And the newborn heir of Storm's End opened his eyes for the first recorded time in the presence of his father, and they were violet — deep, pale, impossible, Old Valyria entire, Aerion's eyes, set wide in a small crumpled furious face — and they found the enormous shape looming over them, the largest thing in their one-hour-old world, and inspected it, up and up, unhurried, unafraid, with an air of frank proprietary assessment —

— and the small freed fist reached up, and closed, hard, around one enormous finger, and held.

"Fatherhood changes men," Ser Arstan would say in the hall, in the years after, beginning the tale the whole coast knew. "I've watched it forty years — some it softens, some it steadies, some it frightens sober. But I only ever saw it happen once — watched it cross a man's face in the one heartbeat, like weather making landfall. The morning the little lord took his first grip." The old knight would look into his cup, then, and the hall would wait. "Eleven hours on that stair he stood like his father's wall. One newborn fist, and the wall came down. Never stood in the same place again, either. Where it stands now—" and here the granite would crack, every telling, into the grin the household had learned that same gold morning— "is around."

***

The name was loaded and primed before the birth by a full two moons, and deployed with a field commander's timing, and this much must be said in the chronicles' defense: no one could have stopped him, because he had planned it so that no one could.

Lyonel got the only warning in the realm, and got it in the birth chamber itself, in the gold morning quiet, perhaps an hour after the small fist closed around his finger and rearranged his interior architecture forever. He was sitting on the bed's edge by then with his entire forearm serving as a berth, the heir of Storm's End sprawled fast asleep along it with the boneless totality of the very new, and he looked up from his cargo to find his husband watching him with an expression he had spent two years learning to read at distance, through weather, in the dark.

"You're about to say something terrible," said Lyonel. "I can see it loading."

"I have chosen his name."

"...Aye, that'll be it."

"You may register objections," said Aerion, magnanimous, wrecked, sovereign, settling back into the pillows with the air of a man opening formal proceedings he has already won. "There is a window. The window is brief. Maester Harmund is standing by the rookery with the birth-ravens, and the ravens fly within the hour, to King's Landing, Oldtown, Summerhall, Tyrosh, and every seat in the Stormlands, and the name flies with them — because I have also spent two years at this court and yours, my lord, and I know exactly how names are strangled: in committee, gently, by septons and grandsires and men of sense, in the six days between a birth and its proclamation. There will be no six days. There will be an hour. The realm will wake tomorrow to a fact." The violet eyes came to his, blazing, daring, and beneath the daring — Lyonel could read this at distance too, now — braced. Braced the old way. Waiting, even here, even now, to learn if this was at last the wall's edge. "His name is Maegor."

The gale had passed. The room was very quiet. On Lyonel's forearm, the subject of proceedings slept on, silver and oblivious, one star-wrapped fist still raised in the air like a small closed argument.

"Maegor," said Lyonel Baratheon.

"Maegor."

"As in—"

"There is only one as in."

"...The Cruel. The one who built the Red Keep on his masons' graves. Who warred on the Faith till the septons — the Faith, Aerion, the actual — who married six wives and fed men to — that Maegor. You've had two years to plan and a thousand years of kings to pick from, and you looked at this—" the forearm and its sleeping freight lifted, gently, in evidence— "at the loudest, sunniest, most storm-blessed morning this keep has seen in living memory, and reached into the crypt of your entire house's nightmares, and came out with—"

"Yes," said Aerion.

And then he watched — they both told it after, each blaming the other, neither able to complete the account without stopping — he watched his husband's face fight itself: the statesman's horror and the strategist's admiration and the sleeping baby and the septons, gods, the septons' faces when the raven comes all arriving at once, colliding somewhere behind the storm-blue eyes, the great shoulders beginning to shake with the effort of containment, the containment failing by visible degrees — "the High Septon," Lyonel managed, strangled, "he'll have to write a letter, he'll have to convene — they protested a gown, Aerion, they drafted three pages about a gown, and you've — an infant — he’s half a stone —" — and then the Lord of Storm's End lost the field entirely and laughed until he could not breathe, until he had to surrender the baby to Wylla for its own safety, until he slid off the edge of the bed and sat on the floor of the birthing chamber with his back against the frame and howled, wiping his eyes with the heels of both hands, going off again every time he surfaced — "*half a stone* — the letter —" — while his husband watched from the pillows with his chin at war-height and the braced thing behind his eyes standing slowly, slowly down, replaced by something that would not be named but looked, in the gold light, remarkably like a creature discovering that even this, even this, had not found the wall's edge; and Wylla of the Tor stood by the window with the newest Baratheon against her shoulder, surveying the pair of them — the one incandescent in the wreckage of the bed, the other weeping with laughter on the floor — and said to the baby, in her warm gravel, the household's benediction: "Storm-called, dragon-named, and mad on both sides. You'll do, little lord. You'll do."

The reasoning, when Lyonel could breathe enough to require it, was delivered from the pillows like a lecture from a throne, and he never afterward found the flaw in it.

"They named me from the safe shelf," Aerion said. "Aerion — a nothing name, a spare's name, and then they spent all my years telling each other I'd turn out a monster anyway, whispering the other names behind their fans — the Unworthy, the Monstrous, every mad Aegon and cruel prince in the annals; I heard my own father say it through a door. The safe name did not save me one whisper. Names don't make monsters, my lord; keeps make monsters, and keeps unmake them; I am the living proof of both, and I carried the proof nine moons and I will not send him out under a safe name to be whispered at anyway. Let him have the whole strength of it up front — the strongest name they ever wasted, the one they buried under a tyrant and never dared use again — and let him spend it better, in the open, where I can watch. Maegor built the strongest keep in the world. Maegor bowed to no septon living. Strip the cruelty out — and we will strip it, you and I, we have the architecture for it now, you said so yourself in the dark — and what's left under the name is exactly what woke up shouting down your storm this morning: strength that apologizes to no one." A pause; the chin, impossibly, went higher. "Also the septons protested my gown, and I have been waiting two years, and I want to see the letter."

("He wanted to see the letter," Lyonel repeated, faintly, from the floor, and went off again.)

The ravens flew within the hour, as designed. The realm woke to a fact.

The recoil arrived on the return wind, and Aerion collected the responses the way other men collected tourney ribbons, and read the choicest aloud at supper for a moon.

The High Septon's was everything he had dreamed: four pages, formally beautiful, deploring in ascending register the resurrection of "a name synonymous with impiety, kinslaying, and war upon the Mother Church," praying the parents might yet be moved to reconsider "before the child's soul is freighted beyond bearing" — and arriving, by the flight-times of ravens, a full nine days after the name had been cried in every market square in the Stormlands, which lent the whole document the majestic futility of a letter of protest addressed to the tide. (Aerion had it framed.) The court's collective shudder came piecemeal and delicious: three ladies of the Reach were reported to have required air; Lord Costayne was reported to have required a maester; the phrase what can they have been thinking crossed the realm west to east like weather. From Oldtown, the Citadel — via Harmund, countersign graciously waived for the occasion — begged leave to note the name's "considerable resonance in the histories," which was maester for the same shudder in grey.

And then the family.

From Tyrosh: MAEGOR. Cousin. I read the raven at breakfast and Kiera wishes you to know I made a sound she is still describing at feasts. She has painted her hair black and violet "in the little tyrant's honor" and the ships now contain, additionally, a Tyroshi rocking-cradle carved with dragons that the septons will DEFINITELY faint at. I am gladder than I can write and you may not tell anyone. — V.

From King's Landing, in the king's own small exact hand: I note the child is healthy, which is the only sentence in this raven history will care about. I note also the name, as I am given to understand the entire realm has done. You waited, I observe, until it could not be recalled — a technique I recognize, having governed with it for the years of my life; the arithmetic is sound and I withdraw from the field. The realm survived one Maegor. It will positively enjoy debating a second. Send a portrait when he can sit. — D.

From Septa Alerys, three lines under a seven-pointed seal: I have read the name. I have prayed on the name. The Mother reminds me that Maegor also finished what he built, feared nothing, and made the proud keep that shelters the innocent to this day, and that She will thank us all to remember a babe is a page yet unwritten. Kiss him for me. I am making more stars. — A.

And from Summerhall, last, briefest, the raven Aerion opened alone at the sea-window and read standing very still, four words and then, after a gap in the ink where something had been decided, eleven more:

Strong name.

Your mother wanted it for you. I refused. She said I would regret it.

He kept that one in the drawer too, beside the other, and told no one for a year, and when he finally told Lyonel — at three in the morning, into the dark, the only hour such things could be said — the wall held him through what followed and never once said anything at all, which was the entire reason he could be told.

The Stormlands, meanwhile — and this was the joke that finished Lyonel off all over again at the presentation feast, the one that had him wheezing into his own cup while eight hundred of his bannermen demonstrated it in real time below the dais — the Stormlands did not flinch. The name that convulsed the court and mobilized the Faith arrived in the Marches and was received with broad practical approval, because the Marches kept their own books: Maegor, aye — the one who raised the Red Keep, strongest walls after their own; the one who never once let a septon tell him his business (the Marches had long memories and old accounts regarding septons); a builder's name, a fighter's name, a name with weight to it — "sounds strong," pronounced old deaf Lord Dondarrion at the presentation, at kitchen-reaching volume, summarizing the entire realm's southern quarter, "he'll grow into the shoulders of it" — and the hall drank to Maegor Baratheon, first of his name, with a roar that shook the antlers, no more troubled by the crypt of Targaryen nightmares than the sea was, and Lyonel laughed himself entirely, comprehensively, historically sick, and had to be thumped on the back by Ser Arstan before he could stand to give the toast.

***

The war of the wet nurses lasted eleven days, which was ten and a half longer than any other engagement of Aerion's residency, and it ended the way the household should by then have known it would.

The custom came armored in precedent. A lord's consort did not nurse; no lady of Storm's End had nursed in nine generations; Maester Harmund produced the genealogies to prove it, and the letters-by-raven from the court's dowagers to reinforce it, and the arguments were the arguments of eight thousand years — the consort's health, the consort's duties, the consort's rank — and within a sennight of the birth three candidates had been fetched up from the town and the near villages, clean, kind, well-recommended women with milk to spare, and presented in the solar for approval.

Aerion received the presentation from the great chair by the sea-window with his son in his arms, listened to Harmund's full recitation of the precedents with an attention the maester found, in retrospect, ominous, looked over the three good frightened women with the flat unreadable calm of the kingswood meadow — and then thanked them, gently, by name, which frightened them worse, and dismissed them with silver for their trouble and a stipend for their own babes that made Harmund's inkwell tremble, and, when the door had closed, delivered the ruling that crossed the realm within the moon and was repeated, horrified and verbatim, in every solar from Oldtown to the Wall:

"He is the blood of the dragon. Only the blood of the dragon can quench the blood of the dragon. There will be no wet nurse — not common-born, not noble-born, not if the Mother Above descends with her own — while I live and he thirsts, no milk crosses those lips but mine. That is not a preference, maester. That is doctrine. File it with the Citadel; I'll countersign."

The realm found it horrifyingly arrogant. The realm said so, at length, by raven: the dowagers scandalized, the maesters clinically appalled ("an unprecedented conflation of dynastic mysticism with the nursery," Oldtown observed, in the tone of grey men fanning themselves), the court dining out on it for a season — only the blood of the dragon, they repeated to one another, delicious, dreadful, he said it of MILK — and even Storm's End's own household, leal to the marrow, privately allowed that the doctrine was, as doctrine went, very high indeed. Wylla of the Tor alone shrugged in the teeth of eight thousand years: "Milk's milk," said the only medical authority the consort recognized, "but calm's calm, and his comes with calm, and I've buried enough babes of nervous keeps to know which of the two is worth precedent. Let him."

And Lyonel let him.

It was not indulgence, whatever the ravens said, and it was not surrender, whatever the dowagers implied; it was a ruling, and he made it the way he made all his rulings, on evidence — and the evidence was a thing he had seen for the first time on the third night after the birth, coming up the eastern stair at the blue hour with the day's business done, and had stopped in the doorway of the sea-facing rooms and been unmade by, quietly, completely, in a way no battle and no wedding and no birth-stair vigil had managed.

The fire was banked low. The great window held the last deep blue of the evening and the first stars over a settling sea. And in the chair beside the hearth, unstaged, unwitnessed — no court, no campaign, not one soul in the world to perform for, because he had not heard the step — sat the most dangerous creature in the Seven Kingdoms with his son at his breast: silver head bent over silver head, the famous armory racked and forgotten, one ringed hand cradling the small skull with a care that made the rings look like the borrowed things, and his whole face — the letter-opener, the war-chin, the septendecennium fortress of it — undone into something that had no name in the arsenal because it predated the arsenal, that had gone into the vault at six years old with a dead mother's hairbrush and never once come out, and was out now, unguarded, in firelight: peace. Actual peace. The infamous fire in that silver head not merely quiet — he had learned that quiet on his wedding night; this was beyond it — but at anchor, glowing steady in the one harbor it had ever been built for; and the babe fed with small ferocious single-minded gulps, one hand splayed sovereign against the collarbone above him, claiming it, and the sea muttered its old argument at the glass and lost, and neither of them moved, and Lyonel Baratheon stood in his own doorway with his heart going like a slow tide and understood that he was looking at the answer to a question the entire realm had been asking for the years, and that the answer was: this. He needed this. All that time, under all that fire — he needed someone who needed him back at full, artless, shameless volume, and could not read a chronicle, and did not know he was supposed to be feared.

He never said a word of it. He backed out of the doorway with a hunter's silence, stood in the stairwell until his eyes could be accounted for, and went down to the hall, and the following morning issued the only decree of his tenure delivered with his hand flat on the high table: that the consort's custom was now the custom of Storm's End; that the doctrine of the milk was household law; that the next raven, maester, dowager, or visiting dignitary with views on the nursery was welcome to present them to the Lord of Storm's End personally, in the yard, at their convenience — "per house precedent," he added, and the hall, remembering a wedding feast, roared, and the matter was closed in the Stormlands forever, and passed, like the pepper wine, into the folklore: the dragon feeds his own, and the stag stands the door.

Because the ferocity — the outline of it had been visible from the pregnancy, but the birth gave it its final form, and its final form frightened people, and Aerion, who had spent a lifetime being feared for his cruelty, discovered without one flicker of regret that he vastly preferred being feared for his love.

It had rules, the ferocity, and the household learned them the way coastal villages learn the tide: fast, and by heart. No one lifted Maegor uninvited — no one; a visiting Reach lady learned it in the second moon, reaching cooing into the cradle at a hall gathering, and the temperature drop that crossed that hall was reported as far as Highgarden; she was not savaged, which was somehow worse; she was simply looked at, once, entirely, and thanked for her interest in a voice like the skin of ice on a bucket, and she took the next dry road north and told the tale for years. No one discussed the babe's blood, prospects, or "temper to be watched for" within his mother's hearing and finished the sentence. The guards on the nursery stair — Aerion had chosen them personally, interviewed them personally, terrified them personally — held standing orders that ran to two pages and could be summarized in four words, and were, in the guardroom: none stand between them. And the whole keep came to know the sound — they told it in the kitchens with a shiver that was half pride — of the consort's step changing on the stairs when the babe cried two floors up: the court glide dropped mid-stride like a mask, and something faster and older coming through the passages of Storm's End with its hair loose, and gods and cushions alike got out of the way.

And Maegor — Maegor, storm-called, dragon-named, half a stone of accomplished fact — Maegor grew that first year into the walking refutation of every whispered fear and every court wager, the first sign, visible to any eye, that the match was not dilution and never had been. He was Aerion cast again — the silver, the violet, the fine imperious bones, beautiful in his mother's exact image, so exactly that visiting lords startled — and he wore that face with his father's whole weather behind it: sunny, booming, entirely without fear. He slept through gales that woke the garrison. He laughed — his first laugh, duly entered in the household book by a weeping Steffon — at thunder, at close thunder, a great delighted full-body chortle at the loudest sky of the spring, and thereafter demanded storms be watched from the sea-window as other babes demand sweets. He seized Lyonel's beard in both fists at five moons and roared at him, tiny and furious and beside himself with joy, and the Lord of Storm's End roared back, and the two of them conducted bellowing matches across the high table that scandalized exactly no one in that hall. He charmed grooms, guards, septas-by-post, and one gravel-hearted Dornish midwife who was heard singing to him in the old Rhoynish, and denied it. Dragon-faced and stag-hearted, the household said — it was Ser Arstan who coined it, watching the babe conduct the harvest feast from his mother's hip like a small silver lord of misrule — dragon-faced and stag-hearted, and the phrase ran down the Marches and up the kingsroad and arrived, eventually, at every door that had wagered on dilution, and collected.

Fatherhood changed Lyonel. The whole coast could inventory it: the wall that stood around now; the great voice gone gentle at one particular pitch; the Lord Paramount of the Stormlands discovered flat on his back on the nursery floor being ceremonially defeated, at length, with full commentary and roaring, by half a stone of his own succession; the letters to his bannermen grown shorter and the time in the yard grown shorter and the hours at the blue window grown long. He had been the realm's most open-handed lord before; he became something quieter and larger, a man whose treasury had found the gold beneath the gold, and even his laughter changed key — the landslide still, but with bedrock under it now, and everyone who loved him heard it.

Motherhood changed Aerion more.

Not softer — the ravens that reported him softened were corrected within the moon, usually by their own subjects; the tongue kept its edge, the vanity its altitude, the corsetry (restored by the fourth moon over Wylla's shrug and the Pentoshi's ecstatic correspondence) its architecture; he remained fully capable of gutting a Fossoway by post. But the fire had found its form. All these years it had roared through him looking for something worth burning for, and been offered only things to burn at — and now it had a hearth, and an heir, and a keep, and a doctrine, and the difference showed the way a change of course shows in a great ship: slowly, hugely, in the wake. The cruelty went out of the venom and left only the craft. The hoarding turned outward — the drawer in the sea-facing rooms gained, that first year, a curl of first-cut silver hair tied in scarlet ribbon-end, laid beside an orange peel gone amber-dark, a fishwife's ribbon, a book of poets, and two ravens' worth of his father's entire heart — and its keeper, who had spent a lifetime guarding scraps with his teeth bared, discovered that a hoard with a living center guards itself, and stood down, one sentry at a time,  years of walls.

He was still Aerion. Storm's End would not have had otherwise, and said so, often, in its cups. But the household kept one image above the others, and told it quietest, and it is the one the chronicle should close on:

The blue hour, in the sea-facing rooms, on an evening late in that first year with the autumn's first true gale standing up black and silver out on the bay. The consort of Storm's End at the great window with his son on his hip — both silver heads turned to the weather, the small one crowing at the far lightning, one small fist opening and closing at the storm as if to summon it faster — and the fire quiet, and the keep breathing, and the whole vast argument of Shipbreaker Bay coming home to break, as it had broken for eight thousand years, on walls that did not flinch.

"One," said the blood of the dragon — softly, to the storm, to a skull four hundred miles north, to a drunkard's dream, to the long hall of years no living eye had walked — and Maegor Baratheon shouted his agreement at the thunder, and the thunder, as was by then traditional, blinked first.

The realm had called it a triumph, that year. The realm was wrong, as usual, by one word and the whole world.

It was a landing.