Chapter 30: The King's Death
ULF
Midnight brought the bell.
Not the hour bell. The deep one out of the Great Sept, bronze and slow, the throat that only ever opened for a dead king. It came up through the floor and into my boots before it reached my ears.
I was at my post outside Helaena's chambers. I counted the strokes because there was nothing else to do with my hands.
A servant came round the corner at a dead run, shouting into every doorway he passed.
"The king is dead! King Viserys is dead!"
The words went down the corridor ahead of him and kept going, into the stairwells, into the stone.
It had finally happened.
Helaena's door opened before I could knock on it. She stood there in her nightgown, hair loose, face pale as bone. She'd been awake. She was always awake before the bad things.
"It's begun," she whispered.
"Yes."
"The children."
"Come."
We went to the nursery at a walk. A run would have told anyone watching in that corridor exactly where the valuable things were kept.
Jaehaerys and Jaehaera slept. Jaehaera had a fist wound into her brother's sleeve and wouldn't let go even in sleep. Neither of them knew their grandfather was dead. Neither of them knew the realm had just split down the middle with the two of them sitting on the crack.
Helaena knelt beside the bed and touched their faces with trembling fingers. Jaehaerys frowned and turned over.
"They're so small," she whispered. "How do I protect them from dragons?"
"You don't. I do."
She looked up at me. "You can't fight every dragon."
"I can fight enough of them."
"The bell woke the moths," she said. "They're all flying the wrong way tonight."
I had no answer for that. I rarely did.
Footsteps in the corridor. Several sets, in step, boots and not slippers.
I moved to the door, hand on my knife.
A knock. Otto's voice, pitched low enough to be courteous and loud enough to carry to his men. "Princess Helaena? The queen mother requires your presence. Immediately."
I opened the door. Otto stood there with four guards. All armed. All of them his own, men I'd watched take coin from the Hand's steward in the yard. He didn't look past me into the room. He'd already been told what was in it.
"The children stay here," I said. "Under guard."
"Agreed. You'll accompany the princess. The queen mother insists."
He said *insists* like a man laying down a card he'd been holding since supper.
Helaena stood. She kissed each child on the forehead, unhurried, and then she straightened her back and walked out past Otto without waiting to be asked twice.
The Red Keep had come apart behind us. Servants ran with their arms full. Guards were being posted at junctions that had never needed guarding. A door was barred somewhere below, and then another, and the sound chased us down the stairs.
Nobody was weeping. Otto was moving too fast to leave room for it.
The small council chamber had been made into a war room while the king's body was still warm.
Alicent sat at the head of the table in a dark gown, her hair pinned as though for a feast. Criston Cole stood behind her chair with one hand resting on his sword belt. Aegon had been dragged out of whatever brothel he'd spent the evening in and slumped in a chair still reeking of wine and sex, one boot unlaced.
Aemond stood near the window. Alert. Eager. He'd been dressed for an hour.
Grand Maester Orwyle shuffled his papers, and shuffled them again, and set them down in the same order.
And in the corner, on a cushion, the Conqueror's crown. Valyrian steel, ruby-studded, waiting.
Nobody asked how the king had died. Nobody asked who had sat with him, or what he'd said at the end, or whether he'd said anything at all. Forty years of a man's reign, and not one person in that room asked after him.
Otto addressed the chamber. "King Viserys is dead. May he rest with the Seven."
Orwyle murmured the response. No one else troubled themselves. This was business.
"The matter of succession must be resolved immediately."
"Rhaenyra is the heir," Aegon muttered into his own chest. "Father named her. Half this table knelt to her."
"Your father was a sentimental fool," Otto said coldly. "The law is clear. Eldest son inherits. You are the rightful king."
"I never wanted—"
"Your wants are irrelevant." Otto's voice cut like a blade. "Your sister's children are bastards. Strong bastards, not Velaryon. She's married to her uncle in defiance of the Faith. Her claim is poison to the realm."
"So is forcing me to be king."
"Nevertheless."
Aegon looked at his mother then. He looked at her for a long moment, and Alicent kept her eyes on her own folded hands and didn't lift them. That was her whole answer, and he took it.
Otto turned. "Lord Commander. The crown."
Criston crossed the chamber and lifted the Conqueror's crown off its cushion with both hands. He carried it like a thing that might come apart, and he'd handled a headsman's work that season with less care in his face. He set it down in front of Aegon.
"Your Grace. The realm needs you."
Aegon stared at the crown like it was a viper coiled on the table. His hand shook when he raised it. He pressed it flat to the wood to stop it. Then, slowly, he reached out. Took it.
"Fine. I'll be king. But when this all goes to shit, don't say I didn't warn you."
He put it on his own head. Nobody crowned him. It sat awkwardly, too large, tilting toward his left eye, and he made no move to straighten it.
King Aegon II. The usurper. The beginning of the Dance, decided in a room that smelled of lamp oil and spilled wine.
Otto nodded once. "The coronation will be public. Dawn. The Dragonpit. The smallfolk must see their new king."
"And Rhaenyra?" Aemond asked. He'd been waiting all night to ask it.
"Will be informed after the coronation. By then, it will be irreversible." Otto's eyes went round the table and stopped on each of us in turn. "All gates are sealed. No ravens leave the Keep. King's Landing is ours."
A coup. Clean, efficient, finished before anyone with a fast horse could answer it.
Alicent turned to Helaena, and her voice changed. "Come, daughter. You must be prepared."
"Prepared for what?"
"You are the queen now."
Orwyle stopped shuffling. The blood went out of Helaena's face.
"No. I don't—I can't—"
"You must." Alicent's voice softened, fractionally. She kept it for her daughter and no one else in that room. "I know this frightens you. But your children need you strong. The realm needs you strong."
"I just want them safe."
"Then wear the crown. Use its power to protect them."
Helaena turned and looked at me. Desperate. Asking for permission, or guidance, or a door out.
"Will this make them safer?"
Every man there heard her ask it. Every man there waited to hear a guard lie to a princess.
I wanted to. I wanted to tell her yes, that the crown would keep them out of what was coming.
But I couldn't.
"No," I said quietly. "But it gives us resources. More guards. More control. More ability to prepare."
Otto's chin lifted half an inch. Alicent's mouth tightened. Neither of them contradicted me, because neither of them could.
Helaena closed her eyes. Took a breath. Opened them.
"Then I'll be queen. For them."
"Good," Alicent said. "Come. We must prepare you for the coronation."
Helaena rose and walked past me. She paused there, half a step, and whispered it so only I could hear.
"Don't leave me."
"Never."
Then she followed her mother out.
Otto watched me across the empty chairs. "You'll attend the coronation. As her guard."
"Of course."
"See that she doesn't make a scene. The realm needs to see a united family."
I didn't answer him. I left the chamber and went after her.
Dawn was still an hour off when I stopped in the throne room. Empty. Cold. The torches burned down to stubs.
The Iron Throne stood above me in the dark. Swords. Hundreds of them, melted together by dragonfire, hammered down by Aegon the Conqueror into the one seat that meant absolute power.
In a few hours Aegon II would climb it, and sit on it, and start a war that would kill thousands.
I thought about how it had gone before. Helaena losing her children. Going mad by degrees, in rooms like this one, with her mother's hand on her arm. A high window in the Red Keep and iron spikes underneath it.
I'd prevented Blood and Cheese. Killed them both myself, separately, down in Flea Bottom: poison in the pitcher beside one man's sickbed, my hand over the other's face while he slept off his wine. Neither of them ever saw the inside of this castle. That one horror was averted.
But the Dance was so much more than one assassination. Dragons would burn. Cities would fall. Families would fracture. And Helaena, gentle, prophetic Helaena, would be standing in the middle of every bit of it, wearing a crown she'd agreed to an hour ago.
"Ready?"
Criston Cole, behind me. Full armor, white cloak pristine, no wine on him at all.
"For what's coming? No. But I'll do it anyway."
He almost smiled. "That's all anyone can do."
We walked to the royal quarters together and neither of us said another word.
Helaena waited outside her chambers in green and gold, Hightower colors from her throat to the hem. A crown sat on her silver hair, smaller than Aegon's, delicate, some maester's idea of what a woman's head could carry.
She looked terrified.
I took my position beside her. "Breathe."
"I can't."
"Yes, you can. In. Out. Just like that."
She breathed. Twice, three times, and found some measure of calm.
"Will you stay with me? During the coronation?"
"Every second."
"After?"
"Every second after that too."
She took my hand. Squeezed hard enough to hurt. Then released it before anyone could see.
Below us the bells had stopped and the city had started instead. Carts. Voices. The Dragonpit gates being hauled open, smallfolk already moving through the dark to claim the good ground.
For tonight she was alive, and the children were asleep behind three men I'd chosen myself. That was enough. It had to be enough. Everything else was going to burn.
A servant came up the corridor with a lamp and said the procession was forming. Helaena let out the last of her breath, lifted her chin, and walked toward him.
I went with her.