The wind hit me the moment Dusk cleared the trees.
It was cold and salt-thick, a scent off the bay when the tide ran strong and the moon pulled the water toward the open sea. It caught my hair and threw it back and pressed my cloak flat against my body and tried to peel me from Dusk's shoulders. I gripped the feathers at his neck and leaned forward and laughed, because there was nothing else to do with the feeling that filled my chest.
This was the second time I had flown.
The first had been three weeks prior, a short and clumsy thing, more leap than flight. Dusk had run along the cliff edge with me clinging to his back and thrown himself into the air with a great thrust of his wings, and for perhaps thirty heartbeats we had hung above the bay before his wingbeats turned uneven and he banked hard and brought us down on the shingle with a jarring thump. I had slid from his back laughing and shaking and he had shaken himself like a dog in the water and looked at me with an expression that, on a smaller creature, might have been embarrassment.
Tonight was different.
Tonight he climbed. The wings beat once, twice, three times, and each stroke drove us higher with a force that pressed me into the ridge of his spine. The trees shrank. The hall became a small square of light with a thread of smoke rising from its chimney. The bay opened beneath us, black water and white foam and the long pale line of the shingle where the waves broke and drew back and broke again. I could see the watch fire burning on the rise, a pinprick of orange, and the dark shapes of boats hauled up above the tide line.
Dusk leveled out and the pressing stopped. The wind steadied. His wings found a rhythm, long and sweeping, the primaries catching the air with a sound that was less a flap and more a thrum, deep enough that I felt it in my ribs. He banked, and the world tilted, and I tightened my grip and pressed my knees against his sides and watched the coastline slide beneath us.
I could see everything.
The farms south of Velton lay in dark patches between hedgerows, the wheat fields silver where the moonlight touched the heads. A river wound through the meadows and caught the light in a thin ribbon. The road ran pale between its ditches, empty at this hour save for a fox that trotted along the verge and stopped to look up as our shadow passed over it.
Dusk made a sound in his throat, a rolling purr that vibrated through his whole body and up through my legs and into my belly. He was enjoying himself. His wings beat with a strength that had a looseness to it, a pleasure in the work, like a horse running free when the field is wide and the rider gives it its head. He turned his great head and one bright eye found me, and I could have sworn the look in it was a grin.
"Higher," I told him.
He obeyed. Another thrust of the wings, and another, and the air grew colder and thinner and the land beneath us became a map drawn in moonlight and shadow. I could see the whole of Velton's holdings now, the farms and the fishing coves and the salt sheds and the little trails that connected them. I could see where the fields ended and the wild ground began, where the forest thickened into dark country that ran toward the hills.
And beyond the hills, to the south, a glow sat on the horizon.
Duskendale.
The town showed itself as a scatter of warm lights against the dark mass of the land, clustered around the harbor where the masts stood in their ranks. The Dun Fort was a blunt shape above the rest, its towers catching the moonlight on their upper courses. I could see the glimmer of lanterns along the walls and the faint smudge of smoke from the forges and bakers that never quite stopped working, even in the small hours.
We flew toward it. The land rolled beneath us, farms giving way to heath, heath to scrub, scrub to the outskirts of the town where the road widened and the buildings began. Dusk's wings caught an updraft off the coastal bluff and he rode it without beating, gliding in a long smooth arc that carried us over the town walls and across the rooftops.
The smell of the town rose to meet us, tar and malt and the stale salt of the harbor. Dogs barked below. A watchman on the wall turned his head at some sound or feeling, but we were too high and too dark for his eyes to find us against the sky.
Then Dusk banked again and we turned north, following the coastline where the cliffs ran high and the waves smashed white against the rocks below. The wind pushed at us from the side and Dusk adjusted, tilting his wings, shifting his weight. He handled it well, but I could feel the effort in the way his body tensed beneath me. Each time a gust caught him wrong, he dipped and recovered with a quick beat that cost him more than it should have.
It was not my weight that troubled him. I was light, barely a burden on a creature his size. The problem was balance. My body sat high on his back, above his center of mass, and every movement I made shifted the load in a way that his wings had to compensate for. He had not been built for a rider. He had been built for flight, and flight alone, and the addition of a girl on his shoulders changed the mathematics of every stroke and turn and glide.
He's listing left, Amy said. Feel it?
I did. A slight pull, a cant to the port side that Dusk corrected with each beat but could not quite shake. It made the flight less smooth than it should have been, a constant small adjustment that wore at him.
I've already started fixing it, Amy went on. I made some micro-adjustments to his flight muscles and his proprioceptive system while you were working on him last week. Shifted the insertion points on a few key tendons. Altered the vestibular feedback so his brain accounts for the extra mass above the wing plane. But those changes are cellular. They need time to propagate. A few months, maybe less if he keeps eating at the rate he has been.
"A few months," I said aloud, and the wind stole most of the words.
He'll be bigger by then too, Amy added. Stronger. The growth templates I set are still active. By the time the adjustments finish, he'll be able to carry you for hours without breaking a sweat. Well. Without breaking whatever the avian equivalent of a sweat is.
I stroked the feathers at Dusk's neck. He rumbled in response, that deep vibrating purr that I felt more than heard.
"We should turn back," I told him. "Before you tire yourself."
He made a sound that might have been protest, a short rough note in his throat, almost petulant. He wanted to keep flying. The sky was open and the wind was fair and his wings knew what to do with both.
"I know," I said. "I want to stay up here too. But I will not have you fall because you were too proud to land."
He turned. The motion was wide and slow, a great banking curve that carried us back over the heath and the farms and the dark line of the coast. The bay opened beneath us again, the water silver and black, and Velton's lights grew from pinpricks to warm squares and then to the shapes of buildings and walls and the hall's roof with its smoke trail rising.
Dusk descended in a long glide that ended at the clearing where the trees opened and the grass was soft. His feet found the earth and his wings folded and he settled with a heavy grace that shook the ground beneath me. I slid from his back and stumbled, legs stiff from the cold and the gripping, and caught myself on his shoulder.
He turned his head and nuzzled my hair with his beak. The coo he made was soft and warm, meant for me alone.
"Good boy," I said, and scratched the place beneath his jaw. "Good, good boy."
His eyes half-closed. He leaned into my hand until the weight of his head nearly pushed me over.
I stood with him for a while in the dark clearing, listening to the wind in the trees and the distant sound of the waves. The stars hung thick above us. The air smelled of pine and salt and the warm feather-musk of Dusk's body.
I did not want to go back inside. The sky was better than stone. The wind was better than walls.
But the cold crept in, and my fingers went numb, and Ser Tolan would worry if I stayed much longer.
"Rest," I told Dusk. "Hunt if you are hungry. I will come again."
He watched me go with those bright eyes, his great black shape still against the trees, and I walked back to the hall with the taste of the wind still on my tongue and the feeling of flight still humming in my bones.
I slept hard and woke late, which was unusual for me. The sun had already climbed past the palisade when I opened my eyes. Erik was crying in the next room, and I could hear Mother's voice soothing him through the wall, the low steady murmur she used when he would not settle.
My legs ached from Dusk's back. My hair smelled of the wind and needed washing. I dressed and went down.
The hall was warm and bright. Sunlight came through the open doors in a broad band that lay across the floor. Father sat at the head of the table with a cup of small beer and a plate of bread and cheese. Mother had Erik on her lap, bouncing him with one hand while she cut a slice of apple with the other. Merlon sat to the side with his tablet, already at work on the day's tallies.
The smell of food hit me and my stomach turned. I had not eaten since the evening before, and the flight had taken more out of me than I cared to admit. I sat and pulled a piece of bread toward me and bit into it.
"You slept late," Mother said, her tone light but her eyes already busy reading my face for signs of illness or worry.
"I was tired," I said.
"Growing girls need their rest," Father said, not looking up from a letter in his hand. "Eat. You look thin."
I ate. The bread was good, fresh from the morning bake, and the cheese was the sharp kind that Velton made from goats' milk. There were boiled eggs and a small dish of Darkwood Powder beside the salt. I sprinkled some over my egg and watched the yolk turn richer.
Mother waited until I had finished my first egg before she spoke again, and the way she waited told me she had been thinking about what she meant to say for some time.
"Amelia," she said, in the voice she used when the words had been practiced.
I looked up.
Mother shifted Erik to her other knee and met my eyes. There was a steadiness in her face, a composed quality that I recognized from the times she had prepared me for Duskendale.
"You are three-and-ten now," she said. "Nearly a woman grown. It is time we spoke of your future."
I set down my bread. Something cold moved through my stomach.
"My future," I repeated.
"Your betrothal," Mother said. "You are of an age where matches must be considered. Lord Gunthor spoke of it when we were last at the Dun Fort, and there have been other inquiries since. The Darkes have hinted. Even Lord Rosby sent a man last month with questions about our house that were too pointed to be idle."
The cold in my stomach became a fist. My skin prickled from scalp to fingertip and the color drained from my face so fast that the bread in my mouth lost all taste. I could feel it happening, a visceral and physical recoiling, as if my body itself had decided the answer before my mind could form one.
Oh, here we go, Amy said. I was wondering when this conversation would show up. Honestly, I'm surprised it took this long.
I did not answer her. I could not. My throat had closed around the bite of bread and I had to swallow twice before it went down.
Father looked up from his letter. His eyes found my face and his brow creased at once.
"Amelia," he said. "Are you well? You have gone white as a sail."
"I feel queer," I said, because it was the truest word I had for the wrongness that sat in my belly and my chest and my skin all at once.
Amy's laughter erupted inside my head with a force that made me blink. It was not a chuckle or a snicker. It was a full, helpless, breathless burst of hilarity that rolled through the back of my skull and kept rolling, and I could feel her shaking with it in whatever dim place she occupied when she was not at the front.
Oh my God, she managed between waves. Oh my God, Amelia. You did NOT just say that.
I did not understand what was so amusing and I did not have the patience to ask. My hands had gone to my lap and my fingers laced together and squeezed.
Father set his letter down. He looked at me, then at Mother, and something moved behind his eyes that was not anger but was close kin to it.
"Serys," he said.
Mother's chin lifted. "She must hear it sometime, my lord. She is not a child who can hide in the solar with a quill and pretend the world will wait for her."
"She can hear it," Father said, "and she can hear it in a year, or two, or five. Look at her."
He pointed at me with his cup, a small and undignified gesture that showed how little he cared for dignity in that moment.
Mother looked. She saw what he had seen, the pallor, the locked hands, the set of my jaw that said I was holding something back with all the strength I had. Her mouth softened, but she did not retreat.
"The world will not give her five years," Mother said. "She is a lord's daughter with a gift that half the realm whispers about. Men will come. They are already coming. If we do not choose wisely, someone else will choose for us."
Father leaned back in his chair. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, the way he did when a petitioner had made a poor argument and he needed a moment before answering.
"Serys," he said again, quieter this time. "Do you remember the rope stall?"
Mother's hands stilled on Erik's back.
"You stood there with your mother pretending she could not see me," Father said. "And I stood there with fish oil on my hands and my tongue turned to stone. You said my name, and I went red as a beet, and I thought I should die before I smeared your sleeve. You remember."
"I remember," Mother said, and her voice had lost its edge.
"No one made that match for us," Father said. "We chose each other, Serys. We chose each other because I could not stop thinking about a girl who asked me the price of rope, and you could not stop thinking about a boy who read to your sisters when the rain came."
Mother's eyes shone. She blinked and the shine went, but I had seen it.
"We married for love," Father said. "Not for toll-rights or salt sheds or a name on a ledger. For love. And that love built this house and kept it standing through lean years and bad storms and bandits on the road and everything else the gods saw fit to throw at us. I will not deny my daughter the same freedom we had. Not when our house is rising, Serys. Not now. We are not so desperate as to sell our girl to the highest bidder. We have coin in the undercroft. We have powder on every lord's table from here to Duskendale. We have fish running thick and wheat growing tall and a people who have not seen a funeral in half a year. We are prosperous, and prosperity means we can afford to give our daughter freedom."
He turned to me. His face was open and kind in the way it was when he judged a petitioner and found in their favor.
"We do not need to have this conversation," he said. "Not today. Not this year. When you are ready, when you have found someone who makes you smile the way your mother makes me smile, we will talk. Until then, you will learn your numbers and your courtesies and your history, and you will eat your breakfast, and you will not look like someone has dropped a fish down your shift."
I let out a breath that shook more than I wanted it to. My hands unlocked. The fist in my stomach eased.
"Thank you, Father," I said.
Mother watched us both. Her mouth worked, and for a moment I thought she would argue. Then she sighed, a long slow sound that carried all her worry and her love and her frustration in a single breath.
"You are too soft with her," she told Father.
"I am exactly soft enough," he replied, and took a bite of his bread with a look of satisfaction.
Mother shook her head, but the line of her mouth had gentled, and when she looked at me again there was no reproach in it.
"Eat your egg," she told me.
I ate it. It tasted better than it had a minute ago.
Erik grabbed a piece of apple from Mother's hand and shoved it into his mouth and looked enormously pleased with himself. Father laughed. Mother wiped apple from the babe's chin and said something about manners that no one at the table took seriously.
The morning settled. The light moved across the floor. Merlon scratched at his tablet and pretended he had heard none of it.
Six weeks passed.
The second shed went up beside the first, its timbers fresh and pale against the weathered stone of the quay. A third was already being framed. The drying racks stretched along the beach in neat rows, and the smell of Darkwood Powder hung over the village like a permanent season, rich and salt-green and warm.
The gold came in steady shipments now. Not only from Duskendale. Maidenpool had placed an order. A merchant from Rosby arrived with a cart and a purse and left with six barrels and the look of a man who had found a river of coin in a place he had thought held only fish. Father bought new boats. He hired carpenters from the town to build a proper warehouse. Hobb complained about the noise, and the cost, and the way young men walked with their chests puffed because they had a copper in their pocket, and then he ate his supper with Darkwood Powder on his stew and said nothing more.
I spent my days with Erik and my evenings with Dusk, and in between I studied with Merlon and walked the fields and listened to the smallfolk speak of weather and tides and the quiet miracle of a village where no one died.
The letter came on a morning in the middle of the seventh month, carried by a raven. Merlon broke the seal and read it twice before he brought it to Father.
Father stood in the yard with Ser Alwyn, watching the men unload timber from a barge that had come up the bay. He took the letter and read it with his eyes narrowing.
I was close enough to see the seal, the pale stamp of House Darklyn pressed into dark wax.
Father read it through once more and then looked at Merlon, and then at me, and then at the sky as if asking the gods for patience.
"Gunthor," he said, and handed the letter back. "Read it aloud."
Merlon cleared his throat.
"From Lord Gunthor Darklyn, Lord of Duskendale and the Dun Fort, to his loyal vassal Lord Forrest Darkwood of Velton. Greetings and good health. I write to inform you that His Grace King Viserys of House Targaryen, First of His Name, has declared a great tourney to be held in King's Landing to celebrate the fifth year of his union with Queen Alicent of House Hightower. All lords of the Crownlands are bidden to attend with their households. I ride with my own household and I invite House Darkwood to travel in my company. The road is safer in numbers, and I find your daughter's conversation more stimulating than my uncle's, though he would have my hide for saying so. We depart Duskendale in a fortnight. Send word at your earliest. Your liege, Gunthor."
The yard went quiet. The men at the barge had stopped to listen. Ser Alwyn's hand rested on his belt. Hobb leaned on his spear and said nothing for once.
Father folded his arms.
"King's Landing," he said, and the words sat heavy in the morning air.
The road from Velton to Duskendale took three days, and I spent most of them watching the hedgerows slide past the carriage window and trying to keep Erik from chewing on my sleeve.
He had grown fat and content in the weeks since his birth, his cheeks round and his grip fierce. Mother had wanted to leave him behind with the wet nurse, but Father had said no child of his would be left in Velton while the rest of the house went south. I suspected the truth was simpler than that. Father could not bear to be parted from his son for a fortnight. He checked the cradle every time the carriage jolted, which was often, and he asked Merlon twice in the first hour whether the rocking of the wheels could harm a babe's head.
"It will not, my lord," Merlon said both times.
Ser Tolan rode beside the carriage on a bay gelding that Father had bought him with the first of the Darkwood Powder gold. He sat the horse well. Better than well. His back was straight and his shoulders had filled out in the weeks since Amy had worked on him, thickened with a quiet strength that showed most when he moved. He ate like three men at every meal and still looked hungry after. The cooks had stopped remarking on it. They simply set a second plate before him and a third beside that, and watched as he cleared them both.
We reached Duskendale on the evening of the third day, and the Dun Fort opened its gates for us as if we had never left.
Lord Gunthor met us in the yard with his children at his heels and a grin that split his face. He had put on weight since I had last seen him, a prosperous thickness around the middle that spoke of good eating and better temper. Eating must've felt quite pleasant without a toothache.
"Darkwood!" he bellowed, lifting Father's hand in both of his and shaking it with a force that made Father wince. "By the Seven, you look well. The powder agrees with you. It agrees with us all. My cooks would murder me in my bed if I cut the supply."
"Then we shall keep you well stocked, my lord," Father said, smiling despite himself.
Gunthor turned to me and his eyes softened. He did not lift me this time. I was taller than I had been, and he was wise enough to see that a girl of three-and-ten did not care to be hoisted like a sack of grain.
"Lady Amelia," he said, and bowed his head a fraction. "You have grown. Velton suits you."
"Duskendale suits you as well, my lord," I said. "Your jaw seems much improved."
He laughed at that, a great booming sound that echoed off the yard stones and made the horses twitch. "Improved! The woman has a gift for understatement. I have not felt the tooth since the day you prayed for me. I eat apples again. I crack walnuts with my back teeth. My lady wife says I am a different man."
"A louder one, certainly," Lady Meredyth said from the steps, her mouth curved in a smile that was fond and long-suffering both.
The children crowded in. Alyn had grown an inch and carried himself with the stiff pride of a boy trying to be older than his years. Ysilla still could not keep her ribbon tied, and Tomas had lost his thumb-sucking habit and replaced it with a tendency to stare at people with an unblinking intensity that unnerved the servants.
"Do you still have the raven?" Alyn asked at once.
"I do," I said.
"Is it true he eats horses?"
"He has never eaten a horse," I said. Well, he probably could, just not all at once. "That I know of."
Alyn looked disappointed.
We rested one night in the Dun Fort and departed the next morning in a column that stretched from the gate to the first bend of the bay road. Lord Gunthor rode at the head with Ser Alwyn and a score of Darklyn men-at-arms in black and grey. Father rode behind them with our own smaller guard. The carriages came next, three of them, wheels creaking and horses pulling steady against the ruts.
The largest carriage belonged to the Darklyns, and Lord Gunthor insisted that I ride in it with his children and with another passenger who had been waiting for us in the Dun Fort's guest chambers.
Jeyne Darke came down the steps that morning with her mother's hand at her back and her father's eyes watching from the doorway above. She was taller than I remembered, and her hair had darkened from straw to a warm brown that fell past her shoulders. The rash across her nose had faded to nothing. Her cheeks held color. She walked without the careful tread of the sick, and when she saw me standing by the carriage, she smiled with such openness that I did not know what to do with it.
"Lady Amelia," she said, and curtsied low and proper and stayed there a heartbeat longer than courtesy demanded.
"Lady Jeyne," I said, and took her hand to raise her. Her fingers tightened on mine and did not let go at once.
"I have wanted to see you again," she said, "since the day you came to my chamber and said your prayer."
Her eyes were grey, clear and direct. She looked at me like I was a shrine or a relic. It made my skin prickle.
She likes you, Amy observed, with an amusement that sat warm and lazy in the back of my head. Like, really likes you. Look at her pupils.
I did not look at her pupils. I looked at her face and found kindness there, and gratitude, and something else I could not name.
"I am glad you are well," I told her, and meant it.
Jeyne's parents saw us into the carriage with embraces and whispered instructions for their daughter. Lord Martyn's eyes found mine as the door closed, and he nodded once, slow and heavy with trust.
The carriage lurched forward. Ysilla immediately climbed onto Jeyne's lap. Tomas settled himself against my side. Alyn sat across from us and tried to look dignified, which lasted until the first pothole sent his elbow into the window frame and he yelped.
Lord Steffon rode outside with the guards, having declared that he was too old for the rocking of a coach and preferred a sore arse on a horse to a sick stomach on a cushion. His absence left the five of us in a space that was well appointed but tight, with cushions of dark blue velvet and curtains that let in the sun in pale bands.
The road south from Duskendale was kinder than the roads I knew from Velton. It ran wider, better drained, with stone markers set at intervals that Merlon had told me dated from the old Darklyn kings. The land was gentle. Fields gave way to orchards and orchards to gentle hills where sheep dotted the slopes in white clusters.
Jeyne sat beside me and could not seem to stop looking at my face.
It was not an unkind stare. It was not a rude one. She simply looked. When I caught her eye she would flush and glance down and then, within a minute, she would be looking again.
She's got it bad, Amy said. Honestly, it's kind of adorable.
"What is it?" I asked Jeyne at last, because the looking was making me warm in a way I did not understand.
Jeyne blushed to the roots of her hair. "Forgive me. I stare. My mother tells me I stare and I cannot help it. It is only that I remember your voice, from when I was ill. I remember very little of those weeks, but your voice I remember."
I did not know what to say.
"It was only a prayer," I said.
"I don't believe you," Jeyne said, with a firmness that surprised me. Then she smiled. "But I will not press you. My mother told me not to press you. She said you are private and I must respect that."
"Your mother is wise," I said.
"She is," Jeyne agreed. "She also said I must bring you this."
She reached into the satchel beside her and pulled out a small cloth bundle tied with twine. Inside was a bracelet of woven leather, plain and well made, with a single bead of blue glass set at the clasp.
"She made it," Jeyne said. "For you. Mother likes to make gifts herself, even if she says so herself that she lacks any artisanal talent."
I turned the bracelet over and felt the smooth leather and the cool glass and the careful stitching where the thong met the clasp. It was a simple thing. It was worth more than gold.
"I will wear it," I said, and slipped it onto my wrist.
Jeyne beamed.
The hours passed in talk and silence and the rocking of the wheels. Alyn told us about the tournament. He spoke of the lists and the melee and the archery butts and the prizes that King Viserys had set for the victors. He spoke of the knights who would ride, and the lords who would watch, and the dragons that roosted on the hill above King's Landing.
"You will see them," he told me, leaning forward on the bench. "Real dragons. Vhagar is the largest. They say she is old as the Conquest. And Caraxes is long and red and mean as a snake. And Syrax, who the Princess Rhaenyra rides. And Seasmoke, and Meleys the Red Queen. They fly over the city at dawn and dusk and the smallfolk scatter like mice."
"Have you seen them?" I asked.
"Once," he said, and his voice dropped as if the memory demanded reverence. "From the walls.."
Ysilla tugged at my sleeve. "Are you going to fight in the tournament?"
"Ladies do not fight in tournaments," Alyn said.
"Why not?" Ysilla asked.
"Because they are ladies and everyone knows girls can't fight."
"That is not a reason," Ysilla said, and crossed her arms.
Tomas, who had been dozing against my side, stirred and said with perfect clarity, "Ladies can fight," and then fell asleep again.
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.
On the second day, Lord Gunthor rode alongside the carriage and bent down from his horse to speak through the window. His face was ruddy from the wind and he had a strip of dried meat in one hand and his reins in the other.
"Your first tournament, Lady Amelia," he said. "And in King's Landing, no less. You are in for a spectacle. The king spares little when it comes to celebrating his queen. There will be jousts, and a melee, and a feast each night that would make the gods themselves jealous. Half the realm will be there. Hightowers, Velaryons, Lannisters, Tyrells. You will see more gold in one hall than Velton has seen in a lifetime."
"I look forward to it, my lord," I said.
"And your man will ride." Gunthor's eyes went to where Ser Tolan sat his horse two lengths back, straight and watchful. "He is the only entrant from House Darkwood, yes?"
"He is," I said.
Gunthor studied Tolan with the look of a man appraising a horse. "He looks well. Strong."
On the third night we camped beside a stream where willows trailed their fingers in the water. Lord Steffon built a fire and told stories of the old Darklyn kings while the children huddled close and listened with wide eyes. Jeyne sat near me, her shoulder touching mine, and I did not move away.
She asked me about Velton. I told her about the wheat fields and the bay and the drying racks and the smell of Darkwood Powder on cold mornings. I told her about Erik, and how he gripped my finger, and how he put everything he could reach into his mouth.
Jeyne laughed at that.
You know, Amy said that night as I lay in the carriage with my cloak around me and the stars visible through the curtain gap, she's not just grateful. She's attached. Like, genuinely attached to you. You're basically her favorite person in the world.
"What am I supposed to do with that knowledge," I whispered.
Eh, I guess you're too young for that sort of thing anyway.
I turned onto my side and listened to the stream and the soft breathing of the children and the far-off sound of men keeping watch.
The days that followed blurred together in the rocking of the carriage and the slow southward crawl of the land. The fields grew richer. The towns grew larger. We passed through villages where men stopped their work to stare at our column, and through market squares where women sold bread and cheese from stalls set against old stone walls. The road filled as we went south. Other lords joined the procession, some with their own trains of riders and carts, some with only a handful of men and a banner.
I learned to read the banners as we traveled. Merlon had taught me most of the great houses and their sigils, but the lesser ones were new to me, and I took quiet pleasure in matching the arms to the names. I suspected I'd forget most of them within the next few hours.
On the evening before we were to reach King's Landing, Lord Gunthor gathered the party around the fire and spoke of the order of entry and the protocols of the court. His voice had a weight to it that I had not heard before, a seriousness that sat poorly on a man who laughed so easily.
"When we enter the city," he said, "we ride under Darklyn banners. All of us. You are my vassals and my guests, and you will be presented as such. Lord Forrest, you will ride beside me. Lady Serys and Lady Amelia will travel in my lady wife's carriage. The children will behave."
He fixed Alyn with a look. "The children will behave."
"I always behave," Alyn said.
"You once put a live crab in the septon's boot," Gunthor said. "Admittedly hilarious, but don't do that in the King's Court."
"That was Ysilla's idea."
"It was not!" Ysilla squeaked.
Lord Steffon coughed into his fist and looked at the sky.
We broke camp at first light and took the last stretch of the road at a pace that told me the men were eager to arrive and nervous about what awaited them. The countryside here was different from what I knew. The soil was darker, the grass thicker, the trees broader in the trunk. Estates sprawled across the hills with walls of worked stone and gates of iron. The smell of the air changed as we rode, thickening, losing the clean salt edge I had carried in my nose since Velton.
Jeyne's hand went to her nose. Ysilla coughed. Tomas buried his face in my side and whimpered. Alyn, who had been leaning out the window to look for the city, pulled back with his face screwed up and his eyes watering.
I pressed my sleeve over my mouth and breathed through the cloth. The stench was extraordinary. It was the concentrated essence of too many people living too close together in a place where the wind could not carry the worst of them away. Chamber pots and tanneries and butcher shops and open sewers and the sweet rot of garbage left in the sun and the sharp bite of horse dung ground into cobblestones and the slow thick reek of the river where it met the tide.
"How," I said, lowering my sleeve because a lady should not speak through her own arm, "do people live in such a place?"
Ser Tolan's horse drew alongside the carriage window. He looked down at me with a calm face, though I noticed that his own nostrils were pinched.
"You grow accustomed to it, my lady," he said. "After a day or two, you will scarcely notice. Though I will say that the stench is also why perfumes are such a prized commodity among the rich in King's Landing. A lord who can afford to smell like roses instead of the street is a lord who announces his wealth with every step."
"I would rather announce my wealth with clean air," I said.
Tolan's mouth twitched. "Then Velton has made you richer than most."
Jeyne, who had gone slightly green, managed a weak smile. "My father warned me. He said to breathe through my mouth for the first hour."
"Your father is a wise man," I said, and did as she suggested, though the taste was hardly better than the smell.
The road climbed one more rise, and then the trees fell away, and King's Landing lay before us.
I had seen Duskendale and thought it large. Duskendale was a fishing village set against a puddle. King's Landing sprawled across three hills and spilled down their sides and filled the spaces between them with a density of rooftops and towers and walls and streets that my eyes could not take in all at once. The city was enormous, swollen and vast, a beast made of stone and timber that had eaten the land around it and was still hungry.
The Red Keep sat upon the highest hill, Aegon's Hill, its pale red walls catching the afternoon light and holding it. The towers rose above the roofline of the city, taller than anything I had ever seen, and the banners of House Targaryen flew from every battlement, black and red against the sky.
Below it, the city churned. I could see the Dragonpit on Rhaenys's Hill, the great dome that housed the royal dragons when they were not in the sky. I could see the harbor where the Blackwater Rush met the bay, thick with ships, a forest of masts and furled sails and rigging that swayed with the tide.
And then the sky darkened.
I looked up. Jeyne looked up. The children looked up. The guards looked up. Every man and woman and horse in the column lifted their heads at the same time, drawn by the same instinct, the animal knowledge that something vast had passed between them and the sun.
Wings. Great and terrible. The span of them covered the road and the fields on either side and threw a shadow so deep that the horses shied and the men went quiet.
Dragons flew overhead, their wings beating the clouds and the wind, and the scent of them was like the scent of brimstone, and their scales radiated vibrant and beautiful colors.
They were magnificent.
They were terrible.
They were the most wonderful things I had ever seen.
Inside my head, Amy was silent for a long time.
Then, very quietly, in a voice stripped of its usual dry humor:
Holy shit.