Chapter 13: The Second Godswood Meeting
ULF
Three days felt like three years.
I trained every waking hour and then found hours that shouldn't have existed. Mikken's forge at midnight, iron in my bare palm until the skin split and closed and split again. The warehouse before dawn, Rankyaku into the support beams until my hip gave out. Sleep in pieces. Underneath all of it a count ran and wouldn't stop. Seventy-two hours. Forty-eight. Twenty-four.
Three days until I could see her again.
*Get a grip. She's a mission objective, not... not whatever this is.*
On the morning of day fifty-three I held my hand on the grate for six seconds instead of five and called it discipline. It wasn't discipline. I only wanted the count to move faster.
By noon I was crossing the Keep's inner courtyards with my pulse climbing, and none of it had anything to do with combat readiness.
She was already there.
Helaena knelt near the weirwood's roots, watching a spider construct its web between two low branches. The strands caught the afternoon light and turned it into something geometric and perfect. Her green dress was ruined at the knees already. She hadn't noticed, or hadn't cared.
I approached slowly, letting my boots sound on the roots so she'd hear me coming. Sat down two meters away, same as before.
She didn't look up.
Five minutes of silence. Just breathing, watching her watch the spider. Septa Teora stood near the entrance with her hands folded, radiating disapproval hard enough to feel across the grass.
"The ants told me you'd come." Helaena's voice was soft, matter-of-fact, like she was giving me the weather.
"The ants are wise."
Her lips twitched. Not quite a smile, but something close. "They also said you're burning yourself."
I went still. *How could she—?*
She turned, reached out, touched my bandaged hand with one finger. Gentle. Curious. The linen was fresh that morning and already yellow at the center.
"Why?"
The question hung between us like the spider's silk. Delicate. Easy to break with the wrong answer.
*Truth. Or as much as I can give.*
"Because I need to be strong enough to stand in fire and not burn." I looked at her, held her gaze, which was more than anyone else in this castle managed. "There are... things coming. Bad things. And I won't be able to stop them if I'm afraid of pain."
Her head tilted. That bird-like motion. "You see the future?"
"No. I just pay attention."
"Then you're wiser than most." She released my hand and went back to the spider. "Most people don't look. They just... exist. Moving through their days like the ants, but without purpose."
"Is that what you do? Look?"
"I see things." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "In dreams. In the patterns beetles make when they walk. In the way shadows fall." Her thumb pressed a small hollow into the dirt. "People think I'm mad."
"You're not mad."
She glanced at me sharply. It was the first hard look she'd given me. "How do you know?"
"Because madness is seeing things that aren't there. You see things that are there, just from angles nobody else considers."
Silence. The spider finished a section of web and moved to the next anchor point.
"That isn't an answer," she said. "That's a kindness wearing one."
"It's both."
"My mother pities me," Helaena said quietly. "Aegon mocks me. Even Rhaenyra looks at me like I'm broken." Her fingers traced patterns in the dirt, loops set inside loops. "But you don't."
"Because you're not broken. You're just different."
"Different." She tested the word, turning it over. "I like that better than mad."
I waited until she'd closed the last loop. "The things you see. Do they come true?"
"Bread comes true. Rain comes true." She started a new loop. "Dreams only arrive."
I had nowhere to put that, so I sat with it. Behind us the septa cleared her throat, a small dry sound meant to be heard.
"Princess. The light is turning."
"It isn't," Helaena said, without looking back.
We sat together, watching the spider work. Minutes passed. Maybe ten. Maybe twenty. Time went strange in the godswood, running at its own pace, and I let it.
Then Helaena stiffened.
"The beast beneath the boards will come for the little ones."
Her voice changed. Distant, flattened, like she was reading something written in the air.
My blood went cold.
"What?" I kept my voice level. Calm.
"The beast beneath the boards. It has two heads, but one is already rotting." Her eyes had gone unfocused, fixed on nothing I could see. "They'll ask her to choose. She'll choose wrong. Everyone chooses wrong."
*Blood and Cheese. She's seeing Blood and Cheese.*
"When?" I asked carefully.
She blinked. The distance faded out of her eyes and left confusion in its place. "When what?"
"When will the beast come?"
"I don't know. The dreams don't have time. Just screams. Always screams." Her hands began to shake. She pressed them flat against her thighs to stop them, and that didn't work either. "My children—"
I took her hand without thinking. She didn't pull away. Behind us the septa took one step forward and then, for a reason I'd never learn, stopped where she was.
"I won't let anything happen to your children. I swear it."
"People swear things here. That's what the words are for." She looked at our joined hands, then at my face. "Why do you care? You don't even know them."
"Because you do. And because some things are worth protecting, whether I know them or not."
Her hand squeezed mine. Tight. Like she was drowning and I was the only solid thing in reach.
"The dreams show fire and blood and darkness. They show a white figure standing in the center, burning but not consumed." She leaned closer, near enough that I could count the pale lashes over those unfocused eyes. "Is that you?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"The butterflies say you're dangerous."
"I am."
"But not to me."
"Never to you."
She held on a moment past that, then let go and folded her hands into her lap. My palm went cold where hers had been.
The spider finished its web. A fly struck it and struggled. The spider came down fast and began wrapping it in silk.
"Death comes for everyone," Helaena whispered, watching the fly's last struggles. "But maybe it doesn't have to come for them. Not yet."
"Not yet," I said. "Not ever, if I'm quick enough."
"You aren't quick enough."
"Then I'll get quicker."
She weighed that as gravely as if I'd handed her a treaty to sign. "Yes," she said. "I think you will."
Septa Teora's voice cut across the grass. "Princess, you have lessons. We must return."
Helaena stood slowly, reluctantly. Brushed the grass from her dress and did a poor job of it. Looked at me one more time.
"Will you come back?"
"Every third day. If you'll have me."
She smiled. Small. Fragile. Real.
"The butterflies would like that."
Then she was gone, walking toward the entrance with that strange, floating gait, already somewhere else entirely. Septa Teora went after her, and at the arch she turned and gave me a look with nothing kind anywhere in it.
I stayed beneath the weirwood, alone except for the completed web and its dying prey.
*Two heads. The beast has two heads.*
Cheese I had. The ratcatcher who drank too loud in the Silk Street tavern, the one my street children had been reporting on for days. A name, a face, a schedule.
But Blood, the second head, I hadn't identified yet.
And her prophecy had a timeline problem. *One is already rotting.* Past tense. Did that mean one of them was dead? Or dying?
*No. Think.* Rotting could be the flesh or it could be the man. A body going bad, or a soul. In Flea Bottom both came cheap.
I needed more. Names, faces, movements. I needed the second head before the beast finished forming.
I stood, knocked the weirwood's pale dust off my shoulder, and headed for the exit.
Three days until I could see her again. Three days to hunt.