Chapter Text
He should’ve known. Maybe not when he struck the fatal blow, but when Baelor fell, surely? Maekar should’ve felt the sudden emptiness and known that something was wrong.
He hadn’t.
The injured had been rushed from the field and Baelor was standing when it ended. Not looking at him, but standing. He’d turned aside to wave off servants and Yormwell before walking off the field with a stiff gait and Maekar lost sight of him, sagging into the mud with exhaustion. Knowing Baelor was fine, Daeron was fine, Aerion was beaten to the seven hells and back but alive…well, that was good enough. Maekar let himself be lifted upright and helped off the field as well.
He blacked out on the way but roused as he was seated in a low armchair before the maester’s inspection. Nothing was broken, luckily. He was deeply bruised and his stomach churned dangerously, but he wasn’t dead yet. Maekar was a soldier with a soldier’s optimism. Even when the blood actually came up just a few minutes later, splattering on the floor between his feet, he only winced and accepted a basin from the man recently pressed into Yormwell’s service.
It didn’t stop there, but the room was suddenly very quiet. A door had opened and closed while Maekar was busy vomiting a sour mix of blood, bile, and everything he’d eaten over the course of his entire life. When he next looked up, the faces of the two servants by the door were suddenly gray, and the maester’s set in stone. “What?” he demanded. His eyes flicked furiously at them before he doubled over again. Gods, Baelor had really fucked him up with that lance… When he spit the last of his insides into the pot, he looked up again. “Damn you, what?!”
“Your Grace…” Yormwell started. It sounded like bad news.
Aerion.
Maekar lurched off the chair and would’ve fallen flat on his face if the maester hadn’t grabbed his arm. “Peace—” the old man pleaded.
“My son?”
Yormwell shook his head. He looked grieved, and that should’ve been his answer. “No, Your Grace. No.”
Time moved strangely after his next words. The world became a fog and Maekar felt as if he was standing on the Redgrass Field again, only it was silent and the blood that sprang up from the soil under his feet was just one man’s. His last sight of Baelor played behind his eyes. Impossible. He was alive. He had been standing.
Maekar was not outright denied his breathless demand to see his brother, but Yormwell gently refused to aid him for several minutes no matter how much he cursed, and only consented for the younger men to help Maekar to his feet when he could see there would be no stopping him. He would crawl if he had to. Maekar would not believe them without seeing Baelor with his own eyes.
He expected to be taken to the tourney yard again, but he was half-carried back to that small banquet hall instead. The confusion was only momentary. Even dead, one didn’t leave the heir to the Iron Throne on a camp stretcher.
Baelor lay supine on the tabletop. He was still armored, gauntleted hands at his sides. They’d bundled a gray cloth under his head, but dark red had seeped through the pillow. Drying blood, but only a few minutes’ past. How? When?
The greater shock than the blood was the appearance of Valarr’s pale face above Baelor’s middle. He’d sat between the table and the hearth, huddled at his father’s side. His eyes—Baelor’s eyes—were red-rimmed, and there was a smear of black on his cheek from where it had rested against the cool metal of his own armor.
The slighter of the servants pulled up another chair for Maekar, but on their side of Baelor’s body. Through a surreal sense of numbness, Maekar gestured for him to put it near Valarr with an expression that screamed ‘Over there, moron.’ He wasn’t going to speak to him over Baelor’s body. He couldn’t.
He fell into the seat with a swallowed groan of pain, waving off the servants and the black speckles in his vision with a grumbled dismissal.
Valarr didn’t say anything. That silence left him nothing to do but numbly stare at Baelor’s body. He was too close, close enough to see the faint open crescent of his eyelids. Baelor’s face was ashen under the muck and his sun-brown skin was patterned with faint bruises and a split across his nose. The color stripped any illusion of restfulness from him.
“Don’t die.” Valarr whispered, and Maekar would take it for pleading if it didn’t sound so bitter. “That’s what Egg said. Father’s last orders to them.” He bit his lip and looked down at his hands, trembling slightly as tight fists on his knees.
He was lost for words, but Maekar’s hand itched to comfort him. Valarr might not be his son, but he’d certainly carted him around as a giggling toddler and spent as much time with him as Baelor and Lena had. His sons and theirs were hardly apart. He'd reared Valarr as much as Daeron, and Maekar knew Baelor would comfort Daeron without question, if their places were reversed.
But there was no world in which Baelor would be in his place, was there?
Unfortunately, he’d had just enough time to think, by now. There were sums that led to unfortunate truths. Three Kingsguard, who’d never hurt him. Daeron, facedown in the muck. Fossoway, busy with his young cousin. Aerion, whose only focus had been the fucking hedgeknight. In whose hands did that leave the fatal blow? Who was left?
Maekar looked at Valarr. Any defense, reassurance, or confession died on his tongue, which still tasted faintly of blood.
“...Do you think they know?” Valarr asked, but he was forced to elaborate by Maekar’s continued silence. “The dragons. Does Morghul know kepa is gone?”
Of all the things to care about. Maekar had hardly given their twin mounts any thought, once he’d arrived on Shrykos with Daeron. Neither of the older dragons were visible from the keep and Valarr’s indigo Starscale had taken flight only once that he’d seen.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe they mourn,” Valarr murmured.
So few dragonriders had died in Maekar’s time. He had been too young to understand the Dragonknight’s death. If Morghul had mourned him, it was probably recorded in one of Aerys’s history books. Then on Redgrass Field, he’d been concerned with many more things than the screeching Stormcloud made when the Pretender fell off his back with Bloodraven’s arrow in his throat.
Did Morghul make a sound, this time? Would he have heard it if he did? Or remembered? There was only the clash of steel and the heart-stopping terror of trying to reach his son. Maekar didn’t remember the hit that slew Baelor, let alone what the damn dragons were doing…
“Does it fucking matter, riña? He’s—” Maekar clapped a hand over his own mouth to swallow down a pathetic noise. No. He couldn’t, not at this boy. Not Baelor's son.
Maekar’s eyes burned with the will to keep his composure. This was stupid. He knew what a dead man looked like. He would’ve seen him on the morrow at the burning, with the eyes of others to keep him propped upright. It was so much harder to swallow all the blood with only Valarr as his witness and seemingly innocent of his guilt.
All he couldn’t manage was a choked ‘fuck’ under his breath as he pushed himself from his seat. Coward. Maekar’s entire body rebelled with pain but his determination to leave that suffocating hall was enough to push him through it, stumbling with a hand on the walls back to his loaned bedroom. By some miracle, he was neither spotted nor followed. The entire keep was silent as the grave and the rain had started again, flooding grey light through the rippled glass windows, but everything was starting to become a haze as the door closed behind him.
Maekar fell onto the bed just before his legs could give out. The world was spinning and he could taste blood again as he laid back, feeling it swishing in his bruised gut. That sort of bleeding could kill a man, he knew. Maybe he’d be lucky that way.
Whether he slept or blacked out again, he couldn’t tell, but then he was dreaming.
He was still on the bed, at first. The dark canopy above him rippled with an unseen breeze, then a gale, snapping the heavy curtains inward with the force of a battle flag over a field. Maekar reached up for one with a numb hand and found himself grasping a fistful of blood-red velvet.
“Brōzi, nyke ēdruta!”
And the cloth was the length of Baelor’s sash, clutched in Maekar’s small hand as he ran after him.
“Māzis!” Maekar said, and his voice came out like that of a boy no more than eight.
Baelor—a boy of twelve, with a thin coronet of gold set in his black hair—barely slowed a step. “Come on, Maekar!” His hand slipped to replace Maekar’s dragging grasp on his cloak, pulling him up the dragonpit stairs. “Nyke se lōgor!”
Some part of Maekar is aware that it wasn’t like this. He remembered Baelor at fifteen, standing tall as he held out a hand to Morghul for the first time. A late bloomer that made everyone nervous by looking too Dornish.
“Kepa doesn’t ride. I didn’t need a dragon to be a good king either,” he’d said, but he finally had one. The court whispered that he’d taken Morghul to prove a point, because Shrykos had carried Maekar to Dragonstone and back just a week before. Baelor had to prove himself. Nonsense, of course, but Maekar knew his first choice of dragon certainly wasn’t a coincidence. “Besides, they should be together,” Baelor had confided that same night, smiling at him.
Maekar’s hand slipped from his own but Baelor didn't notice. The gap between them stretched from one step to two, then three, then Baelor disappeared into the door of the great hall with Maekar ten paces behind him.
He pushed the great iron door open with all his might and peered into the dark. While not yet as crowded as during the days of Rhaenyra and Aegon II, the dragonpit had never been so quiet in his memory. Where were the hatchlings? The caretakers? Baelor? Maekar looked around the cavernous hall that should’ve housed the greatest of the dragons, yet remained cool and empty.
Then he spied him, a silhouette against a high window: black-garbed, a flash of gold. “Baelor!” he called, but the shadow didn’t move.
Maekar knew the hall well enough. Their aunt had brought them to see Morning once, and they stood high on that ring of stone to be level with her golden eyes. He bounded up the stairs and ran to Baelor’s side.
His brother turned as he ran up beside him. He was older—the young Baelor Breakspear in his prime—and instead of his prince’s coronet, Baelor wore their father’s golden dragon crown on his brow. “Is this what you want?” he asked.
Before Maekar could answer, Baelor reached up and lifted the crown off his head. Blood began to run down his face. From the crown, from his hands, from an unseen wound in his black hair. Rivers of blood streamed down his wrists and dripped off his elbows, running down his cheeks like tears.
“No,” Maekar said. He reached forward and grabbed his brother’s shoulders. “No, Bae. Stop.”
His voice was rougher with age, a grown man's timbre. “You can have it.”
“I don’t want that, I don’t,” Maekar insisted, but Baelor was trying to press the crown into his hands.
The many rings on his fingers dug sharply into Maekar’s palms but Baelor’s words were soothing, like his hands weren’t trembling with the effort to force the crown into Maekar’s open grasp. “You have to.” The blood still hadn’t stopped. It began to flood from between Baelor’s lips and into his beard, now lined with silver. “Finish it.”
“No!” Maekar shoved him hard.
Baelor stumbled back, eyes wide. The crown slipped from his hands but Maekar tilted after him, reaching out to catch his bloodied arms before they fell—
And flailed upright off the bed.
Maekar’s heart thundered in his chest, hand still outstretched to…to…No. It was a bloody dream, but the regret was real. It crashed over him like a wave and against his will, his next breath caught in his chest and choked him. The tears burned as the dam broke, releasing him to sobs that rocked his aching body.
He killed him. He killed Baelor, his brother, his heart outside his body. Even in a fucking dream, Maekar had killed him. How could he have—How was that how they ended? They were always together and now there was just him. A strange hollowness sat low in his chest at the thought.
It took him a long while to steady his breathing again, though the tears dried quickly on his face. He had to move. Baelor’s pyre waited but Maekar needed to see him. It wasn’t right to leave him there, or to leave Valarr alone at his post if he lingered.
As he walked back to the hall, he had to pause by a dark window for breath, and he realized he must’ve slept for hours though it felt like only minutes. The Trial had been before midday, but the halls of Ashford keep had the silence of near-dawn in them. There was hardly a sound in passing. Even the earliest risers were still abed.
There was a guard near the door, but the hatchet-faced youth only seemed to be walking his rounds. He bobbed his head in greeting and kept his eyes on the floor like Maekar might go for his throat, shuffling around the corner as quickly as he could.
Maekar opened and closed the hall door with a groan of effort, pressing hard on his bruised shoulder. It would be comical if it wasn’t so damn pathetic.
The room within was dark. No Valarr, no fire in the hearth. Maekar crossed the room with his fists clenched tight at his hips. The body—Baelor still lay on the trestle table, though they’d wrapped his body in white cloth. There wasn’t a hint of blood.
It felt wrong. A man’s shape under a shroud wasn’t the same as Baelor. Maekar’s hands moved before he could think better of it, lowering the white cloth and revealing his brother’s face, obscured with painted stone eyes. The twin blue irises were even worse. He plucked them off and set them aside. With the Sisters’ care, he seemed closer to sleep than before, clean and peaceful. Maekar tried to convince himself that it was true.
Should he say ‘sorry’? That was pointless. ‘Sorry’ wouldn’t undo a godsdamned thing. He could promise to take care of Valarr and Matarys, not that they needed it, or assure the corpse of his murdered brother that he would do his best to help their ridiculous brothers…which Maekar couldn’t do even a tenth as well as he would have…
“There’s a reason you do all the fucking talking…” Maekar grumbled to himself, to Baelor. He sniffled and tapped his toe against the table leg. “I don’t know what to do, Bae. You’re—” Mine. “Fuck.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Oh, dying young had always been possible, but they’d had an agreement. (Well, Maekar had agreed. Baelor had rolled his eyes.) If the Blackfyres did one of them in, then it was really a bit of a null issue, because the other one was going to follow. The young Maekar really had no intention of surviving his brother for longer than it took to avenge him.
Then they both lived. They’d done their fighting, and now life was politics and rearing their clutch of dragonspawn. Their pyres were waiting for old men. They should’ve been, anyway.
Maekar paused. A very mad thought blossomed in the back of his mind. If anyone else ever said such a thing outloud, he’d have them chained to their bedposts, but it sounded almost sensible. Fair. He’d done this, so…maybe it was right that he went along too.
Never let it be said that Maekar Targaryen lacked commitment.
Before he could think better of it, Maekar bent and slid his arm under Baelor’s shoulders, closing his eyes against the thought of his handiwork. His muscles burned with the exertion of lifting Baelor as gently as he was able, trying not to jostle him. Thankfully, they’d removed Valarr’s armor and dressed him lightly. (Maekar imagined they’d have to melt the suit to slag, if Valarr had his way.) Baelor was bigger than him but only just, and Maekar was stronger even now. While it might not be graceful, he could carry him.
He didn’t see that guard again, nor anyone else. There couldn’t be many people who considered the keep worth breaking into, so security was understandably lax. Most of the doors were unlocked. The last—an oak kitchen door—was even propped with a stone. He kicked it out of his way and cold autumn spray blew in.
Knees locked, Maekar staggered into the rain.
Mud sloshed around his feet as he walked across the keep yard and out the unbarred gate. If he’d planned on returning, he’d have notes on their security…
A few lights dotted the tourney camp in the meadow, torchlight through tent ceilings, but no sound broke the rain cover. No bodies were huddled on the road there, either, which was good. Maekar dreaded being stopped. He might not have the strength to start again, and he doubted there were many who wouldn’t try to steer him back into the keep or even take Baelor from his arms.
Turning aside and walking into the high grass, Maekar tried to find some guilt inside him for what he planned, but came up with little. For so long, his life had been Baelor’s. His other obligations were thinner. Dyanna was lost to him. Like Baelor’s sons, Daeron and Aerion did not need him, nor did Aemon. His girls were small enough to forget him. Aegon… He was leaving Aegon. Then again, the boy hardly needed him either. As it was, Egg was older than his years, and it would only be a matter of time before he became the first of Maekar’s sons to finally claim a dragon. There was some grief in his heart at missing that, but it would probably be better for the boy to not have Maekar’s shame hanging over him anyway.
Time became strange again. A ride on horseback of only a few minutes to where they had left the dragons was easily two hours at his broken pace, but it didn’t feel that way. The pain in his body grew and then ossified. There was nothing but the rain and the weight of Baelor in his arms.
When he mounted the hilltop, he had to take a long look at the valley to see any of them. There was a faint shimmer of scales about a hundred paces to his right, but the size was wrong. Valarr’s mount, then. He meant for Shrykos to aid him. The armor would pain him enough; Maekar wouldn’t use Valarr’s dragon for this too.
“Shrykos, jorrāelā nyke!” Maekar shouted into the dark.
Starscale stirred but only to curl tighter on his own tail, having no interest in Maekar.
“Shrykos!” Maekar repeated. He waited a long moment before calling again. “Shrykos, lōgor!”
Not a damn sound.
Choosing to believe that he wasn’t heard and not that he had the laziest dragon in the Seven Kingdoms, Maekar continued his march into the valley. The pain returned and his arms ached, but he couldn’t stop now. There was a faint hill on the far side of the clearing that might’ve been her, much bigger than the blue Starscale.
In a taste of irony only the gods could be partial to, he nearly walked over Morghul’s tail.
The absolute darkness had shielded the black dragon from view, despite his size. With a rumble like an avalanche, Morghul roused, tail like a fallen tree sliding off into the dark and his head raised in a faint silhouette against the charcoal sky.
“Morghul,” Maekar breathed.
It wasn’t what he intended, but maybe Valarr had been right. The dragon should see Baelor one last time. That might even make it easier.
Morghul took no coaxing to obey, unlike his willful sister. His head dipped low, spined chin almost scraping the grass as he scented his master’s presence. The press of his snout carried the force of a gentle battering ram, pushing Maekar back two steps as he seemingly examined the body of his rider.
With a groan, Maekar fell to his knees into the mud. He damn-near tipped backwards with the effort to not drop his brother and knew that he wouldn’t be able to rise again.
“I’m sorry,” Maekar said. He could hardly hear himself over the rain, not that it mattered. Maybe it was easier for the words to leave him because he knew the dragon couldn’t understand. “I did this, I’m sorry.”
If Morghul understood, he wasn’t wrathful. The sound that left his throat was best described as a croon. Grief of a lost rider, as Valarr said.
“Vestragon iā vōs nyke vēdran,” Maekar said, in hopes that the dragon would understand and obey, though Maekar wasn’t his master. It was right for Morghul to do it.
The dragon’s head withdrew only a few paces, becoming a shimmer of scales in the dark. If he understood, there was only one way to find out.
“Morghul…dracarys!” Maekar called to him.
There was a rattle of breath from the dragon, but nought else.
“Dracarys!” Maekar repeated, louder.
Still nothing, but Maekar thought he understood. Like as not, Morghul would light Baelor’s pyre someday, but no one anticipated his very-much-living brother to be holding his body instead.
Maekar clenched his jaw. “Dracarys ñuhys, Morghul. Kessa…” I can’t do it alone. Gods help me, I can’t do it without him. “Dracarys.”
There was a shift in Morghul’s posture, something recognizable to the soldier in Maekar. A hardening of will, maybe. The setting of your teeth before obeying an order. The dragon’s maw opened and a spark billowed deep within the cage of his teeth.
Maekar closed his eyes against the light of the coming flame. Even then, he could see it through his lids. They were close. Though his flame was only orange-red at its hottest, it would be over quickly. No one survived a blast of dragonflame from ten paces. Everything became bright, like the sun was rising over the meadow, and Maekar clung to Baelor with all his strength.
It wasn’t the searing agony he expected. Heat like a Dornish wind blew over his face, but it did not hurt him. There was no pain, only warmth and the glow beyond his lids, and smoke so thick that he could taste it on the back of his tongue.
He expected to scream until his voice tore, for even his soaking hair and clothes to catch and turn him into a human candle, because that’s what was supposed to happen. There was only light. The pain of the fire was no more than the Sun could do to him on a hot day. Then even that faded, and it was dark again.
The last wisps of warm orange flame died around him as he opened his eyes. Then there was only rain and the soft hiss of steam as it fell onto the smoldering grass. If he wasn’t kneeling in a ragged oval of scorched earth, ringed with flickering cinders, Maekar would swear he had imagined the fire at all.
Maekar looked at Morghul. He had turned his great head aside, one dark eye catching the reflection of an ancient flame. Baffled was an understatement. “...I don’t understand,” Maekar said, though he wasn’t sure if it was to himself or Morghul.
The dragon in question didn’t seem perturbed. The great eye blinked, still watching him.
“Nng…”
A litany of curses fell from Maekar’s lips in shock, dirty enough and loud enough that the Mother would’ve smacked him soundly on the ear for it. But he didn’t drop Baelor. That wasn’t…corpses make noises—
He didn’t believe it until Baelor’s eyes flickered open. Brown and violet, almost too dark to see but for the flicker of starlight. They were not the eyes of a man dead for hours.
“Bae,” Maekar gasped. “Baelor…”
His brother winced against the sound, but he blinked hard a few times, and his eyes fixed on Maekar. “Hh…” He wheezed a cough, hand rising to grip Maekar’s arm. “How hard did you hit me?”
Though tears pricked his eyes again, Maekar Targaryen—the most sour face in the Seven Kingdoms, who’d smiled only a handful of times in his entire life—laughed before he could stop himself.
It was promising that Baelor looked worried.