Chapter 40: The Assassin Returns - Part 2
AEMOND
Aemond took the torch off the nearest guard before he'd look at her.
The body lay on cold stone at the foot of the stair, one arm folded under it, hood pushed back. Female. Cropped hair. Calluses banding the first two fingers of the right hand. Shoulders built by somebody's patient instruction over years. Her neck was broken, and broken clean, which was more than a dark stairwell usually managed.
"She fell?" He didn't bother hiding what he thought of that.
"That's what it looks like, my prince." The guard captain gestured up at the steep junction where the two passages met. "These passages are treacherous in the dark."
"Mm."
Aemond lifted the torch and walked the walls instead of the body. Blood low down, smeared three feet along the stone and stopping. Far too much of it for a woman who dropped once and died. A second smear at knee height, wiped, the wipe hurried and already dry at the edges. In the dust, two thin parallel lines. Heels.
And in the corner, past where the light reached, the bastard. Standing very still, face scrubbed blank.
"Double the nursery guard," Aemond said. "Two inside the door. Four in the corridor. They change at odd hours, not on the bells."
"Yes, my prince."
"Seal every passage mouth on this level. Brick, not bars. And anyone who knew these routes without my leave, find them and hang them from the outer wall."
The captain's mouth opened. "The ratcatchers, my prince, and the kitchen women who use the lower—"
"Anyone."
"Yes, my prince."
They took her out feet first. Aemond waited until the footsteps thinned into the stone and stopped.
"You did this."
Not a question.
The bastard met his eye. He never made the mistake of looking at the sapphire instead. "She was heading for the children."
"And you stopped her."
"Yes."
"How did you know she was in the passages?"
"I heard her."
Heard her. Through two feet of granite, in the black middle of the night, from a corridor forty paces off. One more impossible thing for a list Aemond had stopped enjoying somewhere around Rook's Rest.
He crouched and drew the papers out of the dead woman's jerkin. Four sheets, the ink still black rather than brown. He shook them open against his knee.
"These are recent. Here's the godswood stair drawn as it was cut, and it was cut this spring." He held the sheets up. "Someone sat down inside these walls with good parchment and gave her our bones."
"I know."
"Find them."
"I intend to."
Aemond straightened and looked at the bastard for a while. Strange. Dangerous. Necessary now, and he had made himself so without asking anyone's leave.
"Do what's necessary. Whatever necessary turns out to look like, and whatever name it's wearing. No one will interfere with you. If my grandfather has questions, he brings them to me."
"Understood."
Aemond turned to go. Stopped in the mouth of the passage.
"The children are my family too. Whatever disagreements exist between us, that remains true."
"I never doubted it, my prince."
He'd meant it. That was the difficulty. A liar could be bought, and Aemond had coin. Going up the stair he priced out what it would cost to keep this one, then what it would cost to end him, and disliked both numbers equally.
ULF
Dawn crept through the nursery windows.
Helaena sat in the rocking chair with Jaehaerys on her lap and Jaehaera pressed against her side. None of them had slept since the alarm. The chair hadn't rocked once.
"Is it over?" Jaehaerys's voice was small. Scared.
I knelt in front of him. Eye level.
"Someone tried to hurt you last night. They failed."
"Who?"
"Bad people. People who don't like your family."
"Why don't they like us?"
"Because your family sits in a chair they want to sit in."
He thought about that with his whole face. "Will they try again?"
*Yes. Always. Every month until this war ends or until they get it right.*
"Probably."
Helaena's hand closed on her son's shoulder. Warning. I let it pass. He'd catch me in the lie by winter otherwise, and then nothing else I told him would hold.
"But here's what matters," I said. "I'll be here. Every night. Every day. And I'm only going to say this the once, so take it plain: anything that comes through that door goes through me first, and nothing in this world has managed that yet. Anything. Always."
Jaehaerys studied my face. Hunting the lie. Straight at me, no manners about it.
He didn't find it.
"Promise?"
"Promise."
"Then when do you sleep?" he said. "Everybody sleeps."
"Not everybody."
Jaehaera hadn't spoken since the shouting woke them. She slid off the chair, crossed to her toy chest, and came back with her fist shut around something.
A ribbon. Light blue. Frayed at one end where it had been cut short rather than untied.
She didn't offer it to me. She walked past me to the nursery door, went up on her toes, couldn't reach the latch, and stood there waiting until I lifted her.
"The last one burned," she said.
"It did. I'm sorry."
"So this one doesn't go on you." She threaded it through the iron ring and knotted it. Pulled the knot down. Tested it. Pulled it tighter. "It stays on the door. You stand at the door. Then you're both in the same place and I can see it from the bed."
I set her back on the floor. "That's a better plan than mine."
"What was yours?"
"Standing at the door."
HELAENA
She watched from the chair.
He had put his hands on a dragon's throat and held it while it burned him. Last night he had done something in the walls that the guard captain was calling an accident, and he'd come up the stair afterwards with another person's blood dried into the creases of his knuckles.
Now he was holding her daughter up to a latch so a five-year-old could tie a knot she got wrong twice.
Helaena had stopped trying to keep those two men in separate rooms. They used the same hands.
Jaehaerys went down first, dropped flat into sleep by exhausted fear. Jaehaera followed a few moments later, still frowning. Helaena carried them to the bed, tucked the furs to their chins, kissed their foreheads and said prayers she wasn't certain anyone was on the other end of.
Then she went to the window where Ulf stood.
The sun came up over King's Landing, gold on the red roofs, Vhagar's shadow slid across the Dragonpit and off it. Higher, smaller, Silverwing turned on a long slow wing.
She took his hand.
"The dreams show me fire and blood and death."
"I know."
"They also show you. Standing in the middle of it. Holding the line."
He squeezed her fingers.
"Then I'll hold it. No matter what comes. No matter the cost."
She put her head against his shoulder. Below them the city started up: soldiers on the Hook, shutters banging open.
"More will come," she said. "More assassins. More battles. More death."
"Yes."
"And you'll face all of it."
"Yes."
"Why?"
He turned and took her face in both hands. Those strange eyes, seeing further than they had any business seeing.
"Because when I close my eyes, I see your face. And when I imagine a world without you in it, I can't breathe." He kissed her forehead. "That's reason enough."
She held on to him hard enough to hurt her own arms.
"You're going somewhere," she said into his collar. Not a question.
"There's a dead drop near the kitchens. Whoever gave her our passages will have to feed the next one the same way."
"Today?"
"Before the bread's out of the ovens."
She let go of his hand and made herself do it slowly. "Be back before they wake."
He crossed the room. At the door he put two fingers on the blue knot and tested it, exactly as her daughter had, and then he was out and gone down the corridor. She heard four steps. At the servants' stair the steps stopped, and no sound came after them at all.
Helaena turned the rocking chair to face the door, so the blue knot was the first thing in front of her, and sat down to wait for the kitchen smoke to come up.