Chapter 36: The Battle of Rook's Rest - Part 1
RHAENYS
They thought she didn't notice the trap.
Fools.
Rhaenys had flown dragons for sixty years. She knew when she was being herded. The Green ground forces sat too thin on the western approach, too thick on the east, and not one scorpion cart stood behind the western line. An obvious feint. They wanted her to strike the exposed flank, commit Meleys to a dive, and spring whatever they'd buried in the treeline.
Let them try.
"Lykirī," she said, and put her heels behind it. "Down, sweet girl. Slow. Let them see us come. Let them believe we took it."
The Red Queen answered with a sound felt through the saddle more than heard, and dropped. Crimson scales drank the afternoon light.
Below, the camp came apart. Soldiers scattered from the picket lines. Tents ignited, canvas going up faster than the men could crawl out. A supply wagon burst, and then the one behind it, throwing burning wood forty feet. Horses tore their lines and ran through their own infantry.
"For Lucerys," Rhaenys said. "For Rhaenyra. For the throne they stole. Dracarys."
A horn sounded from the keep. Two blasts, then three. The Greens were organizing, falling back toward the walls in something close to good order.
Not fast enough.
Meleys unleashed another gout of flame across the retreat. Twenty men vanished in it. Their screams lasted two seconds.
Then golden light in the corner of her eye.
Sunfyre came down out of the cloud cover with the sun behind him, and on his back sat Aegon, armored in green and gold, the crown somehow secured to his helm.
"Ah," she said. "The boy-king himself. Brave or stupid."
She stood in the stirrups and threw her voice across the open air.
"Come down, then, boy! Bring me that crown and I will burn it off your head!"
Meleys turned to meet the charge.
AEGON
Fire.
That was all Aegon understood. Fire above him, fire below where his own camp burned, fire coming at his face with the speed of a dropped stone.
"Dracarys!" he screamed. "Dracarys, now, dracarys!"
Sunfyre and Meleys collided midair. Jaws snapped shut on nothing and then on scale. Claws raked. The impact drove his chest into the saddle horn and emptied his lungs. For a moment he hung sideways over four hundred feet of open air, one boot out of its strap.
"Hold," he wheezed. "Hold on. Hold on. Up. Up, damn you, up!"
He hauled at the reins with both fists. Nothing answered. The dragons were past guidance now, two animals older than his house locked together, falling and beating their way back up, and the men on their backs were baggage.
Meleys was older. Meleys was stronger. Her teeth found Sunfyre's neck and bit deep, and Aegon felt his dragon's whole body seize under him.
Sunfyre screamed.
Aegon screamed with him. Then he screamed at the white bank of cloud where his brother was supposed to be.
"Aemond! Aemond, she has me! You swore you'd be behind me, you swore it!"
The cloud gave him nothing back.
Going to die. I'm going to die up here and Aemond will get everything.
Then the pressure released.
Meleys jerked sideways. Something had struck her.
ULF
The Rankyaku connected perfectly.
A compressed blade of air thirty meters long, thrown from Silverwing's back with a heel snapped through an arc I'd drilled a thousand times. It opened Meleys's tail membrane from root to tip. The tissue split. Blood sprayed out in a fan and froze to red mist in the cold.
First hit. Keep moving.
"Right!" I shouted. "Hard right, now!"
Silverwing rolled. Below and behind us, Meleys was already turning, hunting for whoever had cut her.
Her eyes found me.
Every instinct from another life told me to make myself small. There was nowhere to be small.
The Red Queen forgot Sunfyre. Forgot the campaign, the trap, the boy-king bleeding in her jaws. She came at Silverwing with sixty years of grief behind her.
"Climb!" I shouted. "Climb, go, go, go!"
Silverwing obeyed. Her wings hammered the air and we spiraled up so steeply my vision greyed at the edges.
Meleys followed. Faster. Stronger. Two centuries of muscle against a dragon who'd spent most of her life asleep under a mountain.
She's going to catch us.
Fire bloomed behind me, a wash across my back that would have cooked a man in mail and only turned my skin scarlet and tight. Silverwing banked hard out of the column.
Think. What can you do that she can't?
The answer arrived before the question finished.
"Sōvēs!" I slapped her neck twice, our signal. "Break off and come back for me! Catch me!"
I dropped my weight to one kilogram and threw myself off her spine.
For three seconds I was nothing. Falling, tumbling, sky and battlefield trading places while my stomach tried to climb out through my teeth.
Silverwing rolled away, unburdened, faster without me. Meleys's flame punched through the empty space where we had both been.
Geppo. I kicked down against air and the air held. Trajectory changed.
Another kick. Rising now instead of falling, hip flexors burning.
Silverwing came back under me on the turn. I landed on her spine, took my weight up hard enough to slam both knees into her scales, and anchored.
Below us, Rhaenys stared up. Shock on her face. Confusion. Her mouth opened around a question that the wind ate before it reached me.
That's right. I'm not what you were told to expect.
AEMOND
Vhagar came out of the cloud like judgment.
Aemond had heard his brother calling. Twice, thin and cracking, the same voice that had begged since the nursery.
"Not yet," he told Vhagar, and held her steady in the white. "Let the old woman work."
Below them, Sunfyre wallowed and bled.
"He wanted to be king in front of an army." Aemond wiped his helm's eyepiece clear. "Let the army watch him be one. Now. Sōvēs."
Vhagar fell out of the cloud, and the sky changed weight around her.
"Dracarys."
Blue-white flame erupted across two hundred feet of open air.
Meleys saw death coming and tried to fold away from it.
Too slow.
Vhagar's fire caught her left wing at the shoulder joint. Scales blackened and curled. Membrane burned through in three places, and the wind tore the holes wider on the next beat.
Meleys screamed. The sound rolled over the whole field, and men who had been running stopped to look up.
Rhaenys hauled her reins over, trying to break east toward the water. Her dragon answered late. Wounded now. Slow.
"You should have stayed on Dragonstone, grandmother!" Aemond shouted after her. "You should have died in your bed!"
"I have buried better men than you!" came back across the wind, thin and unafraid. "Come and take me yourself, boy, if your dragon will let you!"
Vhagar pursued. Aemond smiled inside his helm.
ULF
After that it stopped being a battle and became butchery in three dimensions.
Three dragons circling one. Fire crossing fire. Soldiers dying by the dozen as stray flame walked through their formations, ours and theirs both.
Meleys fought like a cornered animal. Her wounds slowed her. Desperation made up the difference.
"Under her!" I shouted. "Get under her, stay off her flank!"
I circled wide and threw Rankyaku whenever the angle came clean. Most missed; the wind bent them, and a dragon in a turning fight is never where she was half a second ago. A few landed. Cuts across membrane, a long slice down her flank that scattered scales like roof tiles.
Small cuts, over and over, until something bleeds out. My right leg had begun to cramp above the knee.
She can't last. She knows it. She's buying time.
But for what?
Then I understood, and it turned my stomach worse than the freefall had.
Meleys wasn't trying to escape. She was trying to take someone with her.
Her target: Sunfyre. Aegon.
The golden dragon flew unsteadily two hundred feet below, neck wound pumping, one wing folding wrong at the top of every stroke. Aegon clung to the saddle with both arms, barely holding the descent.
Meleys dove.
"Aegon!" I roared into the wind. "She's under you! Break east, break east!"
He never heard a word of it.
I drove Silverwing forward and we were too far. Too slow. Vhagar tried to cut the line and was simply too massive to turn inside it.
Meleys's jaws closed on Sunfyre's wing.
Bone cracked, a sound that carried. Sunfyre shrieked.
They spiraled down together, locked, wings tangled, neither one able to let go or willing to.
The ground came up.
Impact. Dust and debris blew outward across the field in a ring.
ULF
I put Silverwing down a hundred meters from the crash site.
Soldiers were already running toward the wreckage, screaming, shouting orders nobody followed.
Sunfyre lay in a broken heap, golden scales dimmed under blood and dirt. Still breathing. Barely. Both wings shattered past anything a dragonkeeper could mend.
Beside him: Aegon.
The king had been thrown clear on impact. He lay face-down in the churned mud, breastplate crushed inward against his chest, both legs bent at angles legs don't make.
Alive. Barely.
"He's breathing!" I shouted at the nearest man. "Get him clear of the dragon. All of you, now."
"We can't move him!" The soldier's hands hovered over the caved plate without daring to land on it. "The steel's driven into him, my lord. Lift him and we kill him."
"Then shields over him, and stand your ground."
"Against what?"
I pointed up.
Meleys circled above the wreck. Wounded. Bleeding from tail and flank and ruined wing. Still airborne.
She was coming back to finish it.
Not happening.
Two hundred meters up. Meleys diving at seventy degrees. Aegon can't move. The soldiers are too slow and the scorpion crews won't crank in time.
One chance.
I launched.