Chapter Text
Baelor's eyes opened at once, and he was at table.
Across from him Tyrell was saying something about the footing along the north end of the tourney grounds, how the rain three days past had left it soft, and beside Tyrell an old knight whose name Baelor could not for the moment summon was nodding along and reaching for the bread.
The wet crack of a joint of mutton being carved disgusted him immediately, among all the faint clatter of knives and forks, the murmur of a hundred idle voices. The unnamed roar still filled his skull like the sea trapped inside a shell. A low relentless surge that had no source and no end.
Baelor lifted his hand and touched the back of his own head.
It was whole. Solid beneath his fingers, the skin unbroken. No wetness. He pressed harder, hard enough that it should have hurt, and it did not hurt. Only ached the dull common ache of too much wine and too little sleep, and still the roaring would not leave his ears, and still some other memory sat behind his eyes like a stone in a boot: a mace coming down, and the mud, and Duncan's face above him going soft with horror, and Aerion's bloody, dripping, thin face.
He had been dead. He remembered dying. And once a man has had the leisure to consider his own death, there is a great deal else that comes crowding in behind it.
Valarr was nine-and-ten and had never sat a council session unaccompanied in his life. His royal father was old. The Golden Company was still out there across the narrow sea, fed and clothed and drilled on Bittersteel's silver, waiting like a debt waits for the day the succession looked soft enough to test. Dorne was Dorne still, for all the marriage bed and the treaties. There were lords in the Reach who had ridden for Daemon at Redgrass Field and lived to be pardoned, and that was not the same thing as loyalty. Baelor had spent thirteen years learning the difference between the two. He had meant to ride the Reach himself come autumn and see the granaries with his own eyes, because the maesters' figures never told the whole of it and never would. He had meant to see to the roads. He had meant a great many things, all of them the unglamorous grey work of holding a kingdom together thread by thread so that it did not come apart, again. And not one thread of it would fucking matter if he had just died face-down in the mud of some meadow for the crime of standing beside a hedge knight.
Something in his chest that was not quite fear and not quite fury rose up and closed his throat, and he was on his feet before he had decided to stand, the chair shrieking back across the flagstones, his knee catching the trestle's edge so that the plates jumped and rang together like struck bells.
"Maekar." he growled unthinkly. “Maekar! My brother had best pray to every one of the Seven that he is nowhere near this hall.”
The hall had gone quiet around him, forks stilled halfway to open mouths, and Tyrell was looking up at him with a blinking, confused look a man gave a hound that had begun to bark at nothing.
"Your brother has not come back, Your Grace,” said Tyrell. “Still out hunting his sons, so far as any man's told me."
Baelor stood there a moment with his palm flat on the table, feeling the wood cool and solid and entirely real, and tried to make his mind work the way it was meant to work, the way his father's small council had taught him, no matter what came at him. Slow down, Baelor. Ask the plain question first, the rest shall follow.
Except the plain question was what day is it, and a man did not ask that of a table full of lords and keep his wits about him in their eyes for very much longer. So he did not. He made himself sit, slowly, and reached for his cup instead.
"Ser Humfrey," he said, mild now, almost idle, turning his cup by the stem. Maekar had ridden out at midday the…second day of the tourney, with one of the Kingsguard for company. Crakehall, he recalled. “How does his leg fare? Has the maester seen to him properly, do we know?”
Lord Ashford rose to answer with a deferential haste. “Very well tended, Your Grace. My own maester set the bone himself, and swears it will knit straight if the knight keeps off it a fortnight." He inclined his head, deep. "Kind of you to remember it, truly. He'll be glad to hear Your Grace asked.”
He was right then. It was either the three-and-twentieth day of the seventh moon, or the four-and-twentieth right now; the third day of the tourney, or the fourth, and no further than that. Hardyng's leg was too freshly broken for it to be anything more. Not that it mattered, in the end. Ser Humfrey would die an honorable man, in a fight he had no true cause to be part of save spite and a broken bone.
And in that instant, Baelor very nearly gaped.
He looked about him properly for the first time since he had woken, and made himself see it, all of it. Candlelight. The good dark oak of Ashford's own tables, scarred from decades of feasts before this one. The smell of roast boar dressed with apples and cloves, and beside it a peacock done up in its own feathers. Lord Ashford's high hall rose up around him hung with the household's own device, the white sun beneath its chevron, worked into tapestries so fine he could see the individual threads of Myrish silk, could have counted the stitches if he'd had a mind to. It was too much. No dream had ever shown him a hall in such detail.
That was when it downed to him, that from the very first breath he had drawn at this table, some part of him had already taken all of this for real. Someone, something, had unmade what had happened to him and set him back down here to live it again, and there was only one power he knew of that could reach into a man's dying and pull him back out of it whole.
The Seven. The Father who had judged him, the Stranger who had claimed him and then let him go. Or else it was older than the Seven, some working out of Valyria that no living maester understood anymore, the kind of magic that let a Targaryen dream a thing true.
His head, he realized, had gone clearer than it had any right to be on a bellyful of Dornish red, clearer than it had been in ages. Whichever gods they truly were, they had not chosen wrongly. There was no other soul within a hundred leagues of this meadow who could be given a second turn at this. He was Baelor Breakspear Targaryen, heir of King Daeron the Second and Queen Myriah Martell, Hand of the King and Protector of the Realm, and he and his brother had once stood together on Redgrass Field and broken a rebel host between them so thoroughly that men still sang down came the hammer ringing, down came the anvil's blow—
The doors at the far end of the hall banged open hard enough to gutter half the candles, and a young Kingsguard came half-running, half-stumbling up the length of the room, his white cloak snapping behind him, and dropped to one knee before the high table so fast his greaves cracked against the stone.
"Your Grace," said the Kingsguard. "Prince Aerion's been struck, at the puppeteers' stall, by some knight, and, and Your Grace, Prince Aegon was there, he was with the man who did it…”
Then Baelor came up out of his chair a second time, and what came out of his mouth was, "Seven bloody hells, Seven hells and the Stranger's own cold cock, buggering, whoreson, cunt-faced luck!”
Aerion lay propped against the pillows of Lord Ashford's, well, Baelor's, own bed, red velvet doublet hanging open at the collar where the maester or some servingwoman with steadier hands had loosened the laces to let him breathe easier, and beneath it his chest showed thin and pale and faintly luminous in the low light of the single candle, rising and falling too fast.
Blood had dried black in the creases of his mouth and down one side of his jaw, and more of it kept welling up steady and slow from somewhere behind his lips, dark against the velvet, so much of it that for one lurching moment when Baelor first came through the door he had thought, Gods, his spleen, Duncan struck him low as well and no one's told me, and had very nearly shouted for a second maester before Ashford's own man, gray-faced and patient, caught his sleeve.
“It looks a deal worse than it is, Your Grace,” said the maester, and went on to explain it plainly enough once Baelor made himself listen: the inner lip split clean against the teeth, the left foretooth knocked loose at the root but like to hold if the boy had sense enough to leave it be. Mouths bled free, worse than almost any other wound a man walked away whole from. It looked a slaughter and it was a split lip and a rattled tooth, no more.
No more. Baelor said nothing to that, only nodded, and began to pace.
Aerion, meanwhile, would not stop talking. He wanted the man's whole line for it, he said, working himself up fresh with every pass, his cousins gutted where they slept, whatever miserable dogs he kept found and skinned, the man's own head split open and mounted on a spike outside the castle gate before the moon turned, his eyes plucked out for the crows and his cock cut off and stuffed into his own dead mouth. He was still going, weaving further into the same ragged loop of it, when the servingman came near with a basin and a cloth to see to the blood again, and Aerion's hand came up and cracked across the man's face hard enough to send the basin clattering, water and pink-stained rags across the good stone floor.
As Baelor crossed the room to slap him, he thought distantly, that Maekar had been such an unfit father. Baelor could not for the life of him say where this one had learned to be what he was.
Maekar was not Aerys, for Seven's sake, had won enough for thirty ordinary men's worth of glory; there was no threadbare pride in him needing mending. It was the unaccomplished men who'd stake the whole of their hope on their sons like a last throw of the dice. Which made no sense at all, given how he had let this little princeling grow, as though the worst harm Aerion could ever do was break a porcelain vase from Yi Ti, lie about it badly, and endure a lecture from some long-suffering septon.
The slap cracked through the room. Skin against skin. Loud enough that the serving man and the maester flinched. Four faint red marks were already blooming on his cheek where Baelor's hand had landed. Wonderful. Maekar would have something to say about that too, when he finally rode back through the gate.
Aerion pressed a hand to his cheek and, with wisdom, kept his eyes fixed on the floor. Better not to look at Baelor just now. He was the sort of child who, in the heat of his temper, forgot ranks, forgot titles, forgot himself. He would tell Baelor to go fuck himself and his mother besides and accept a damn exile as readily as another boy accepted a sweetcake.
Baelor lowered himself beside the bed and kissed him, trying to calm him enough. Then he pulled Aerion’s legs apart and struck him soundly on the sex once with the flat of his palm. The fabric dulled the sound, but the sting remained, apparently. Aerion's composure broke instantly; his legs tightened around Baelor’s side and both hands clutched at Baelor’s arm.
“Do not test me,” Baelor said evenly. He beckoned for the servingman’s dagger, and Aerion went still. So long as the old threat still worked. “If you cannot act the prince, perhaps you would fare better as a princes—”
“Uncle,” said Aerion. Had Baelor not known him better, he might have thought it an apology.
Baelor let go. What could still be salvaged tonight, what could not, what was the best outcome left to him now that this had already gone wrong again? He watched him for a moment before asking.
“What do you want, Aerion?”
Not the fucking High Treason. Not the dragon on its stage, nor any of the rest of the vile, furious demands he'd been throwing out like knives. What do you want, past Ser Duncan's head? Past all of this. Say the truth of it once, just once, to your future King, and let me see what I am meant to do with you.
Aerion looked up and met his eyes. A thin scratch crossed his left brow and ran down along the ridge of bone beneath it, creeping with a thread of blood. He was grinning. Wide. Pale. Flushed, it seemed some fever burned behind his skull, shining through his eyes, an androgynous wildness that lived somewhere between beauty and madness, between splendour and rapture, and the same as always when Aerion went too far and could no longer find his way back.
Baelor understood then. He had been given it already. What Aerion actually wanted was Duncan's cousins gutted where they slept. Duncan's dogs found and skinned. Duncan's head split open and mounted on a spike outside the castle gate before the moon turned, his eyes plucked out for the crows, his cock cut off and stuffed into his own dead mouth.
So Baelor left. He came down the west stair past the old armory, where a single torch guttered over racks of borrowed tourney steel, out through the postern door into the night air, and across the yard toward the stables, where he stood a while with his hand flat against a bay mare's neck and did nothing else, until the horse grew bored of him and shifted away. Around the castle's kitchen, he heard pots being scraped and stacked, someone's low tuneless humming, a scullery girl scolding a boy for burning the barley bread again, the whole small unremarkable business of onion broth and boiled mutton and yesterday's bread gone hard enough to want soaking. He stood there in the dark outside a kitchen doorway, and prayed. He asked for nothing grand. Only that this once, mercy might prevail where it had no claim.
Maekar rode back the next midday, and brought Daeron with him slung half over his own saddle-bow like a sack of turnips pitched off a cart, filthy and reeking of some low tavern's worst wine. He kicked his eldest living son down off the horse's rump without much ceremony and left him where he fell in the yard's mud, and stood there afterward with his hands on his hips, complaining, prickly and lively as ever, his hair still perfect, still bright silver, healthy, and Baelor could see he was secretly pleased with himself for having run his errand and dragged his wastrel son home to answer for it. Because nothing had happened yet.
Then he had them bring Ser Duncan up from the cell.
The hedge knight knelt where the light came down grey and thin through the solar's one window, the sky outside the color of old iron, and said nothing while Baelor told him all of it again. Every word of it fresh in his memory as though it had happened moments ago. The charge against him, the offense to House Targaryen, trial by combat, a Trial of Seven, as Aerion would surely bring up.
“If,” Baelor said at last, the word forced through his teeth because there was no gentler way to let it leave him. It tasted foul in his mouth even as he spoke it. A prince of the realm, asking a favor of a hedge knight. Asking him to spare mercy for the very boy this same hedge knight would shortly be fighting for his life to answer for. "If it comes to you and Aerion in that circle, would you stay your hand?”
“Your Grace,” Duncan said. He found the courage to look up at him then. “Would Prince Aerion do the same?”
Baelor looked upon the same young, brave face he had known before. Every bone in him begged him to lie. If he died tomorrow, would more innocents die in his place? What in the Seven bloody Hells did Aerys know of war and command? Was that the choice before him now? One innocent life, or thousands?
“No,” he said.
Last night he had risen with such fierce will to live, wanting nothing more than more years with his sons, his brother, his realm. Yet here he stood, a lesser man than he wished to be.
“No,” he said again. "Prince Aerion would not. You may go, Ser Duncan.”
Valarr brought him his armor himself, and worked through the buckles and straps until he came to the left vambrace, where some old dent from a tourney years past had never quite sat true against the arm beneath it.
Baelor looked upon him and thought: He will do well. A good King. Not today, not for some years yet, but he would do well, when it came time. It would all be fine.
Once his helm was down and latched, the whole wide grey world narrowed to the width of a single slotted eye-piece, no wider than two fingers held together, and everything Baelor knew of the sky from that morning forward he knew through that narrow gap alone. It rained harder as the trial began, a thin unbroken sheet of it. The whole meadow seemed to weep on all of them at once, some vast unblinking eye come loose from its socket and pouring itself out over the field.
He was calmer than he had been the last time. That surprised him, distantly. This is not about Aerion, he told himself, and made himself believe that too. Nothing here was about Aerion. Aerion could only wish. But that was its own kind of lie, and Baelor knew it. Aerion had never once in his life done anything to be looked at. He simply did whatever he wanted, whenever the wanting struck him, and let the looking fall where it fell.
He found his eyes going away anyway, out past the milling press of steel and mud. Aerion's shield painted with the three-headed dragon, one the orange of a hearth banked low, one the yellow of a struck flint, one the deep true red of a wound. His surcoat had been dyed and worked to look like smoke folding through fire, and his helm, black as a crow's wing, wore a crest of red enamel flame curling up from the crown of it like something still rising. He looked like a boy who had asked his tailor for a costume.
Aerion himself was drowning in his armor. It hung too large on him everywhere, and the enormous Ser Duncan had hold of him by the arm and was swinging him bodily through the rain the way a man swings a doll. He screamed.
Here it came, Baelor thought, watching through the rain and the press and his own brother's roaring somewhere off to the right. And for one impossible instant, across all that distance and grey water, he was almost certain Aerion was looking back at him, bloodied again, just as Baelor remembered him bloodied, but his eyes bright, lit from within like something struck by lightning, blazing with a pure, undiluted intensity that needed no words at all to make itself understood. Traitor, he said. Traitor, traitor, traitor. You perverted dog. Prince of Dragons Bred On Their Own Babies, going back a hundred years and proud of it. queen? I would sooner seat a goat upon the Iron Throne. you take and you take and you take, and when it comes to it you won't even stand with me, me, who shares your blood as close as any man alive.
Baelor was stunned still by the sheer force of it, a full heartbeat too long, and in that heartbeat he felt the wind change against the narrow slot of his helm, faint as a held breath.
Ser Quentyn would be proud, brother, my strong, dearest brother, he thought, nonsensical, already half gone from himself.
Then Maekar's mace came down, meant for someone else entire, or meant for exactly him, and caught him full across the breastplate. The plate buckled inward, some deep tearing crack of metal folding on itself, and he had no more than the length of a single breath to understand that his own ribs were going the same way beneath it before he felt nothing at all.
Baelor's eyes opened at once, and he was at table.
Across from him Tyrell was saying something about the footing along the north end of the tourney grounds, how the rain three days past had left it soft, and beside Tyrell an old knight whose name Baelor could not for the moment summon was nodding along and reaching for the bread.
"Ser Donnel," he hissed, low, after a long moronic second of looking around, again. "Come, come, now—where is the puppeteers' stall?”
He didn't even spare a glance at the high table, half of it gone rigid at his outburst, as Donnel scrambled up and fell in behind him and they blew past the benches; he caught, only at the corner of his eye, some lord's wife two seats down pressing a hand to her mouth.
His mind was running with a hundred things at once, and his lungs hurt, this time. Not his head. Fucking hell. He didn't understand why he was here again. He didn't remember the Seven. The Father who had, should've, judged him. He should have remembered them, and instead there was only this: pain in his currently intact chest, and the ragged, animal knowledge that something had gone wrong all over again, in some new and different way he had not yet had the time to understand.
The camp came up out of the dark all orange and noise, torches and cookfires and the low warm roar of a crowd holding its breath together, and Baelor pushed through the press of squires and grooms and washerwomen with Ser Donnel a half-step behind him, both of them shouldering men aside without a word of apology, because there was no time left in the world for apology.
The tent stood at the heart of it, lit from below by a bank of oil lamps so that everything above the footlights burned gold and every face watching it was turned up and rapt, mouths open, children hoisted onto shoulders for a better look. Baelor ducked through the flap and found himself pressed at once into a crowd packed shoulder to shoulder. And above the little painted rooftops of the puppet town reared the dragon.
It was a magnificent thing, whoever had built it, canvas and silk stretched over cane, wings that must have spanned the width of three men with their arms out, worked by rods so that they beat, slow and terrible, stirring the smoke off the lamps into drifting veils. The eyes were chips of yellow glass set deep beneath a ridged brow, the jaws hinged open wide and behind the gums stood row upon row of teeth carved from bone or horn. Its scales had been painted in overlapping scallops of red and black lacquer that caught the firelight and threw it back broken into a hundred small flames, so that the whole beast seemed to be smoldering from within, and its throat, when the puppeteer worked some hidden bellows, glowed a deep coal-orange and let out a long tongue of gauze that rippled upward like true fire given cloth to wear.
And there stood Aerion, not ten feet from the footlights.
He was watching the dragon the way other men watched their gods, chin lifted, lips parted, utterly still in a way Baelor had never once seen him hold himself for anything that was not his own reflection. The firelight had found his hair and turned it from its pale silver into a deep, burning apricot-gold, like fruit-flesh held up to a lamp, like the last hour of a summer evening burning off the western hills, and for one terrible, tender moment, caught like that, lit like that, he looked less like a monster in the making and more like, Aerion.
Wate and Yorkel, who stood guard over the prince, went to one knee at once. Baelor spared them scarcely a glance. One look was all he gave Donnel. Donnel understood it and fell back a step, hand dropping to his sword's hilt.
Then Baelor stepped forward, closed the distance in three long strides no one thought to stop because who in the Seven Kingdoms stops him, and got one arm hard around Aerion's waist and the other clamped fast over his mouth, and hauled him bodily off his feet.
For one instant Aerion fought like a cat thrown into a bath, twisting, kicking back with both heels, a muffled shriek of pure animal outrage buried under Baelor's palm, his whole body arched with the horror of being seized from behind by something he could not see. Baelor held on and put his mouth close to his nephew's ear. “It's alright. It's alright. Little dragon. It's me. Kepa.”
And the fight drained out of Aerion went so fast and so completely, the whole taut, thrashing length of the boy gone loose and pliant in his arms like something unstrung. There went the breath Baelor had been holding so nauseously as well, though he did not dare let Aerion go; he was not taking any fucking chances, thank you very much. As he backed toward the exit he caught another set of vigilant, violet eyes on him from the right, lower than most people's waist around him.
"Fancy the dragons, do you? Still a babe at heart, for all your seven-and-ten years." He said, giving Aegon a silent, pointed look over the top of Aerion's head, who was clearly paying it no mind at all. That nephew, bald and eight years the younger, had more sense in him than the one in his arms would manage if he lived to be a hundred. Find me once this is done.
"Dragon," Aerion mumbled, muffled, and made more of those soft, wretched noises against his palm.
Yes, sir. Aegon answered with his eyes fluently.
Baelor threw Aerion at Donnel the moment they were close enough to the treeline, where the horses stood tethered and unsettled, the Kingsguard's own mounts stamping and blowing and tossing their heads at something in the dark none of them could name. Donnel scrambled to catch him with an awkward, blundering clumsiness that Baelor secretly grimaced at; as though this were his first raw day at the job and not the thousandth repetition of it. Aerion hissed the instant he touched down, clawing at Donnel's throat and at whatever bare skin showed above his gorget.
“Keep your hands off my person,” Aerion spat. “Is this how you serve a prince, Ser Donnel, mauling him like some sellsword pawing a whore he hasn't paid for? Does it please you, manhandling me so?”
“Quiet,” Baelor ordered.
Aerion immediately turned back to him, still half-hanging off Donnel’s chest because Donnel had not been given leave to let him go. “He put his hands on me. In me,” Aerion’s eyes were watering and reflecting the moon, it was magical, truly, how he managed to do that in a blink. He eased into High Valyrian too like his mind hadn’t even caught up yet. “Kepa. Grandsire keeps such filthy little dogs in white cloaks.”
Donnel's eyes went front and back between them, something close to horror in his face, his mouth half opening on a word and half on a plea. Baelor was sympathetic, to be honest. A man needed no knowledge of that dead language at all to know exactly what Aerion had just said about him. Though if he meant to spend his sympathy on every soul Aerion had ever been crude to, he might as well resign the Handship now and name himself First Scribe to the Register of Men Prince Aerion Has Called Pigs, Whores, or Both, and let some other fool worry about the Reach's tithes.
He motioned Donnel toward the horse instead. Donnel lifted the prince up onto it and swung up into the saddle behind him, and at Baelor's next gesture bent Aerion forward over the animal's neck, belly-down across the withers, until his face hung low enough. Baelor caught his nose between two fingers and pinched it shut.
Aerion's eyes went wide with pure, violent indignation, how dare you, how dare you written across his whole face plainer than any words he might have spat if his mouth had been the part stopped up instead. And he held it, held it, jaw clenched, for a good deal longer than Baelor had expected of him. Then the breath ran out, his mouth fell open and he began to pant, small and quick and helpless through it, in the manner of the little Lyseni bell-hounds Jena used to keep in her solar, silk-coated things no bigger than a loaf of bread, with long feathered ears and bright liquid eyes that Valarr as a boy had loved to crown with wreaths of hawthorn twigs, calling them his little lords. They had panted just so, tongues out, dainty chests heaving, eyes bulging with the same wet, wounded outrage, whenever some game or other had run them too hard across the yard.
“Take him to my son,” Baelor said flatly. It was done. He had fixed the matter. For once, he was owed a fucking moment of peace. “Lay hands on him as you please should the young prince misbehave.”