Chapter 20: The King's Summons
ULF
Day eighty-one. I had a crate of Myrish glass on one shoulder and both boots on the gangplank when the noise behind me on the wharf dropped away.
I set the crate down before I turned. Men who turn with cargo on them lose the cargo.
A royal servant stood at the head of the pier in black and red, picking his way between the tar barrels without letting his hem touch anything. Every gull on the dock was louder than he was.
"Ulf, called the White? His Grace King Viserys requests your presence in the throne room. Immediately."
Gavrel had stopped hauling. He'd been the loudest man on this dock for eleven years and he wasn't going to waste a morning like this one.
"The king himself." He whistled low. "You're moving up in the world, bastard."
"Or down."
"Same stairs." He spat over the side. "My cousin got called up there once. Came back with a limp and a story he never told."
I didn't ask what the story was. He wanted me to.
Two men dead inside a fortnight. Harren in a healer's bed, Cheese in his own spilled wine, and nobody had asked a single question about either. Kings don't have to ask.
Or I was about to be arrested for double murder.
I washed my hands in the water barrel, brushed the worst of the dock off my sleeves, and followed. The servant walked the whole climb up Aegon's High Hill without once looking back to see whether I was still there.
The throne room was as I remembered it, and remembering it hadn't made it any smaller. Pillars ran up into a dark I couldn't see the top of. The banners hung dead in still air. At the far end, on its steps, the Iron Throne, uglier in life than in memory, every blade in it welded on wrong.
Viserys sat on it, older than his years. Pale, thin, one gloved hand curled in his lap. His breathing reached me from forty paces, and it came through something wet. Dying slowly, exactly as I remembered.
Otto Hightower stood at his right shoulder. Already counting me. Hand of the King, and he wore it like a man doing sums he hadn't been asked for.
Alicent beside him. Young, beautiful, trapped, her fingers laced together hard enough to show white.
Corlys Velaryon near the front, salt-burned, staring at the ceiling like it owed him money. He caught my eye and gave me the smallest nod he could manage.
And at the back, in the fall of window light, Princess Rhaenyra. Bored. She had one glove off and was turning it over in her fingers, and she looked at the throne with no interest in it whatsoever.
The herald's staff came down twice on stone.
"Ulf, called the White, champion of the melee and marine in service to House Velaryon!"
I walked forward. Every eye in the room came with me. Steady pace, no hurry, no shuffle. I stopped where a man of no rank stops and went down on one knee.
"Your Grace."
"Rise." Viserys's voice was weaker than a king's voice should be. He waited for his own breath to come back before he used it again. "Corlys speaks highly of your service. A tournament champion turned sailor. Unusual."
"I serve where I'm needed, Your Grace."
"And you fight in an unusual manner." He shifted forward on the seat, and one of the blades scraped his sleeve. "I've heard reports. Inhuman speed. Strength beyond reason. Skin that turns aside blades." He leaned a little further. "How do you explain such things?"
Careful. Truth wrapped in misdirection.
"Foreign techniques, Your Grace. Learned from a traveler in my youth. Disciplines from beyond the Narrow Sea. Training methods not commonly known in Westeros."
Otto let that sit long enough for the room to hear how thin it was.
"And where, precisely, did you learn these techniques?"
I met his gaze. "Flea Bottom, Lord Hand. The traveler was passing through. Taught me in exchange for food and shelter. He died years ago."
"How convenient." Otto's eyes didn't move off my face. "And your lineage? Your appearance suggests Targaryen blood."
Here it was. The question I'd known would come, in the mouth I'd known would ask it.
"My mother was a washerwoman, Lord Hand. She claimed my father was a Targaryen—which one, she never said. I have no proof. No claim. No ambitions beyond earning my bread honestly."
"A bastard with Targaryen blood and mysterious abilities." Otto turned his shoulder to me, which was the whole point of the turn, and spoke to the throne. "Your Grace, such individuals can be... dangerous."
From the back of the hall, unhurried: "Half the men in this room carry Targaryen blood, Lord Hand. You only ever notice it when they're poor."
Rhaenyra hadn't raised her voice. She didn't have to. Otto's jaw set and he let it pass unanswered, which cost him more than answering would have.
Corlys stepped forward into the gap.
"Lord Ulf has served House Velaryon faithfully. He's proven his worth in combat against the Triarchy. I vouch for his character."
"You vouch for a man you've known mere weeks?"
"A wind doesn't have to explain where it was born to fill my sails." Corlys turned his head, and only then did he look at Otto. "I vouch for results, Lord Hand. Pirates flee at the mention of his name. My ships return safely. That's worth more than speculation about mysterious travelers."
Otto opened his mouth. Alicent spoke first.
"You sit with my daughter. In the godswood."
Not a question. Her father went very still beside her.
"When she permits it, Your Grace."
The queen looked at the floor between us rather than at me. "She has not woken that wing screaming in eleven nights," she said. "Before you, it was three nights in seven."
Nobody filled the quiet after that. Otto's hands came apart and folded again.
Viserys raised one finger off the arm of the throne, and it was enough.
"Enough. Otto, your concerns are noted. But Lord Corlys is right—results matter." He looked at me, and there was more left in the eyes than in the rest of him. "Serve him well, White. And perhaps one day, you'll serve the Crown directly."
I bowed deeper. "You honor me, Your Grace."
"Dismissed."
I backed away three steps before turning, and walked out at the same pace I'd walked in, while my heart slammed hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth.
That could have gone worse. Much worse.
At the door a hand touched my arm. An older woman in household grey, no rings, no fuss, her voice pitched to reach me and nobody past me.
"Lord Ulf? Princess Helaena requests you attend her in the godswood tomorrow afternoon. She requires assistance with... insect observation."
I almost smiled. "Tell the princess I'll be there."
She nodded once and was gone down a servants' stair before I finished turning my head.
Viserys knows. He'd sat through his queen saying it out loud in open court and not blinked. He knows about the meetings, and he's allowing it.
For now.
Evening found me on the battlements with the city spread out under the last of the light. Cookfires, smoke, the river going the color of old iron. Down there somewhere ran the undercroft passages Blood and Cheese would have come through. Empty tonight. Empty every night from here on.
I counted the board as it stood. Blood and Cheese, dead. Helaena, trusting me. Viserys, tolerating me. Corlys, employing me. Otto, suspicious and contained. Visible enough to be useful, small enough not to be worth killing.
But Viserys was dying. I'd heard it in every breath he dragged up to make a sentence with. Months. A year at the outside.
Then the Dance. Aegon against Rhaenyra, green against black, dragons burning each other out of the sky.
And I was nowhere near ready.
I went inside and strapped on the weighted vest. Thirty kilograms more into the bracers and ankle weights. One hundred thirty-five in total, hanging off me while I moved.
Soru bursts down the length of the room. Tekkai holds until my jaw ached. Rankyaku. Geppo, low, over and over, until the air stopped feeling like a mistake under my heel.
Fire training after. Poison, in the small doses my body had learned to argue with.
Hours. My body screamed and I let it.
Not for power. Not for glory. For Helaena. For Jaehaerys and Jaehaera. For one timeline bent out of true.
I went down onto the bed at dawn with my knuckles split and the bells starting over the city. Somewhere below, the kitchens were already up.
I got my hands wrapped, and went to find water.