Chapter 26: The Silverwing Encounter - Part 1
ULF
Tam was the fourth fisherman I asked, and the first who didn't walk away.
"Dragonstone's outskirts? Where the wild dragons roost?" He spat into Blackwater Bay and watched it go. "Why in the Seven Hells would you want to go there?"
"Personal business."
"Suicide's personal, I suppose." He scratched his beard, and I could see him doing the sums behind it. "Five silver stags to take you. Ten to wait and bring you back. If you live."
"Deal."
He had the coin out of my hand before I'd finished the word, muttered about fools and their money, and shoved the boat off the dock with his heel.
I'd asked Otto for two days' leave the night before. Personal matters, business left over from Flea Bottom. He granted it without looking up from his letters, which told me what a dragonseed guardsman weighed on his ledger.
Helaena knew the truth before I said it.
"You're going to find her." We were behind the astronomy shelves. "Silverwing."
"Yes."
"The dreams show you on her back." Her thumb moved along the inside of my wrist. "But not yet. Not for a long time."
"I know. This is just first contact."
"Then don't ask her for more than that." Flat. Not a prophecy. An instruction. Then she kissed me and pushed me back a step, both hands on my chest. "Come back to me."
"Always."
The crossing took three hours. His boat was small and sturdy and stank of yesterday's catch. He rowed. He didn't want to talk, which suited me.
Dragonstone came out of the haze in the second hour. Black rock, Valyrian stonework grown into the cliffs. Rhaenyra held court in there. Daemon was in it too, sharpening whatever he sharpened that month.
We weren't going near it.
"There." Tam lifted his chin at the coast a long way north of the fortress. "Rocky shore. Northern edge. Wild dragons roost in them cliffs. Silverwing's been spotted regular-like."
"How do you know it's her?"
"Silver scales. Huge. Old as sin. Only one dragon matches that." He shrugged. "Nobody's sat on that one's back since the Good Queen died, and she's not forgotten it."
He put us onto a beach of rounded stones. Salt, seaweed, grey driftwood above the tideline. I took my pack: salted fish, a skin of water, a knife. A knife against a dragon is a joke you tell yourself.
"I'll wait here," Tam said. "Three hours. You're not back, I'm gone."
"Fair enough."
"And if you do come back, ten more silver stags."
"If I come back, you'll get them."
He dragged the boat past the tideline, sat down in its shadow, and settled in to wait.
I went inland.
The cliffs stood up like broken teeth, black and porous, sharp enough to open a palm through a glove. Caves pocked the higher faces, shelter and a hunting view both. I climbed with my hands where I could and used Geppo twice where I couldn't, and paid for both. My calves burned by the second ledge, so I stopped. I didn't want to meet her already spent.
The roar came before she did. I felt it in my sternum before I heard it. Gulls went off the cliff face in a white sheet, and every animal thing left in me wanted to go back down that slope and not stop until the boat.
I froze instead. Dropped my weight to ten kilograms, which still takes two or three breaths and leaves my gut swimming, and the sea wind got a grip on my coat and tried to walk me sideways.
Then I came over the ridge and she was already looking at me.
She was bigger than the stories bothered to say. Twice Syrax, maybe three times. One foreleg was thicker through than the mast of Tam's boat. She stood on a shelf of rock above open water with her wings half spread, and the morning came through the membrane so I could see the branching veins and the old healed splits, long as a man. Her scales weren't the polished silver of a song. They were pitted and salt-dulled, scoured by a hundred years of nobody.
I didn't run. I walked, slow, hands out and empty.
At twenty paces she rose. All the way up. The wings came open and took the sun out of the sky and the temperature on my face dropped like a door closing.
The roar again, straight down at me. This is mine. Go.
I stopped. Knelt. Made myself smaller and lower and less worth the effort.
Then I spoke, in the High Valyrian I'd been beating out of library texts for six weeks.
"Sȳz gēlion."
Good morning. Six weeks of dead grammar, and that was what I had for her.
Her head tilted.
I pulled the salted fish from the pack and tossed it underhand. It skidded to a stop on the stone between us.
Her eyes tracked it down. She snorted. Then she exhaled.
Fire, and almost none of it. A flick, no more effort in it than shaking water off a hand. The fish was gone before the sound reached me and the stone under it went orange.
I was already set. Tekkai had me heel to jaw before the fish left my hand, because I'd decided out on the water that whatever she chose to send I would take it kneeling rather than shift a foot on her rock. Hardening does nothing against heat. Heat is only ever the candle work, and I had two years of candles in me. The wash came off the stone and through me. My skin drew tight and went red, the hem of my tunic curled black, the hair went off my forearms.
Three seconds is all Tekkai gives me. I spent them and let go a heartbeat before my chest gave out.
The air cleared. I was still standing.
Silverwing made a sound down in her chest, long and low. Not the roar. I sat where I was, cross-legged, hands open on my knees.
"I'm not here to hurt you," I said, in the common tongue, because my Valyrian was spent. "Just to meet you. That's all I came for."
She looked at me. Then she folded down onto the shelf, slow as a ship settling, and put her chin on the rock.
We stayed like that while the sun climbed.
Two hours, near enough. The gulls came back. A lizard ran over my boot and kept going. My knee went numb, the burned skin on my forearms stiffened with salt, and neither of us moved. Every minute she spent not killing me was a minute she was choosing.
Eventually she turned to the sea and started reading the water for fish, and I stopped existing to her.
I stood slow, backed over the ridge, kept her in front of me until the rock hid her.
She didn't follow.
Tam was dozing against the boat. He came off it like it had bitten him.
"Seven Hells. You're alive."
"Disappointed?"
"Shocked." He looked me over. "You're burned."
"Slightly."
"Slightly. Right." He shoved the boat down the stones into the water. "That's fifteen silver stags. Five for the crossing, ten for stupidity."
I paid him. He kept glancing at me over his oars the whole row back, like I might sprout wings and cost him his fare.
She didn't kill me. That was the whole of it. There's a long stretch of country between not killing a man and carrying him, and I'd walked four steps of it. I'd have to go back until my face on that rock was as ordinary to her as the gulls. Helaena was right about the not-yet.
She was in the godswood when I came back through the Red Keep, crouched over a line of ants carrying crumbs toward the roots, and she stood so fast she scattered them.
She saw the singed hem first. Then my hands.
"You met her."
"I did."
"And?"
"She didn't kill me. That's a good start."
She took both my hands and turned them over in the light, pressing the red skin gently with her thumbs, testing where it hurt.
"These will heal."
"They always do."
"Good." She bent and kissed my knuckles. "I need these. For holding mine."
I pulled her in against me right there under the trees, in the open, where any septa on the path could have turned her head and seen it. Somewhere behind the hedge a guard's boots came along the gravel and slowed.
I didn't let go.