Chapter 37: The Battle of Rook's Rest - Part 2
CRISTON COLE
From the ground it looked like madness.
The bastard was running toward the king. Not away from the falling sky. Ulf crossed open field with arrows still in the air above him, and above the arrows Meleys came down out of the smoke like a star that had chosen where to land.
Criston had fought men for twenty years. He knew what a sword did to a man and a lance to a horse. He knew nothing that could be done to a dragon from the grass.
*He's going to die. They're both going to die.*
"Scorpions!" His voice tore in his throat. "West battery, lead her. Lead her."
Four men hauled the bolt around by hand and needed ten heartbeats nobody had. Archers loosed anyway. The shafts went up, turned over, and fell back without reaching her.
Too slow. All of it too slow.
Then Ulf jumped.
Not a leap. Not anything Criston owned a word for. The man went thirty feet straight up, hung there a breath, and kicked. Against nothing. Against air. He rose another thirty and kicked again, and on the third his body turned in the sky and drove upward instead of down.
He was climbing empty space. Using it like stairs.
*What in the Seven Hells is he.*
Meleys opened her jaws. The glow started far back in her throat, orange going white.
Ulf's last kick carried him over her shoulder and put him flat on her spine.
Somebody nearby began to pray. It might have been Criston himself.
ULF
Scales under my hands. Not smooth. Ridged and overlapping like roof tiles, each the width of a shield, every one hot enough that my palms started screaming the moment they closed.
Whatever she was building in that throat was banked somewhere under all this muscle, and I was lying on top of it.
Rhaenys twisted in her saddle. Saw me. Her eyes went wide.
"What ARE you?"
No time for answers.
Meleys rolled. Sky and ground traded places, my legs came off her spine, and for half a second I hung by two fistfuls of dragon.
I spiked my weight to 10,000kg.
Ten tonnes dropped onto one point of her back. The roll died halfway through. Her wings caught wrong, one high, one flat, and the dive came apart under us.
She screamed. I had heard her scream twice already that day. This one had something else in it.
We leveled out three hundred feet above the battlefield, and she was fighting her own body now.
Rhaenys drew a knife and slashed at my face.
I caught her wrist. Squeezed.
The knife dropped, turned twice, and vanished into the smoke below.
"Yield."
"Never." She spat. It struck my cheek and dried before it could run. "The Blacks will—"
"The Blacks aren't here." I had to shout it over the wind. "Vhagar is. Yield, and I'll let you live."
She laughed at that, and the laugh came out cracked. "You'll *let* me. A boy on my dragon's back, telling a Velaryon what he will allow her."
"I'm telling you what happens next. That isn't the same thing."
Meleys hauled her neck back to find me. She couldn't reach. What she could do was breathe, and she did, and the flame went out along her own flank and the wind of her wings folded it back across me.
My sleeves went first. Then the skin of my hands went to something that wasn't skin. I kept my weight where it was and I kept my grip where it was, and the fire ran over my neck and shoulders and moved on.
Rhaenys watched me not let go.
Fury in her eyes. Pride. Defiance.
But also fear.
Good.
Below us, Vhagar climbed out of the smoke, slow and enormous, blotting out more of the field with every beat.
Rhaenys saw her death coming. She didn't look away from it.
"My husband," she said. "My children. My grandchildren. All of them taken." Her voice never rose. "Now you'll take me too?"
"I don't want to."
"Then don't. Let me go."
"You'll keep fighting. You'll keep killing Green soldiers. You'll keep flying at a keep with two children asleep in it."
"Those children hold a claim their father stole."
"They hold a wooden horse with the paint chewed off it. I've seen the nursery."
The wind pulled her braid loose across her shoulder.
"Who are you to them?"
I didn't answer.
"I do what I must," she said.
"So do I."
I released her wrist and stepped back along the spine until there was open air between us.
"You have three seconds before Vhagar reaches us. Use them however you want."
Rhaenys stared at me. Understanding came into her face and settled there like something she'd been expecting.
She wasn't going to beg. She wasn't going to run.
She turned away from me and put her hand flat on Meleys's neck, low, behind the ridge, where a rider's hand goes when nobody is watching.
"We die together, old friend. As it should be."
I dropped my weight and jumped.
Geppo. One kick, then a second, hurling myself sideways out of the shadow that had come over both of us.
Silverwing caught me mid-fall. I hit her back badly, wrong shoulder first, and held on with hands that had stopped reporting anything but heat.
Behind us, Vhagar's jaws closed.
The sound was wet and it was final, and it carried further across that sky than any of the screaming had.
Meleys and Rhaenys, the Red Queen and the Queen Who Never Was, came down together in pieces. Neither of them moved after they landed.
The battle was over.
ULF
Aegon lived.
That was the only victory worth counting, and I counted it standing over him while four maesters worked.
Both legs shattered. Multiple fractures in each, the left one open at the thigh. His armor had caved in and driven itself into his chest, ribs against lung, so every breath made a noise I would be hearing for years. Dragonfire had caught the edge of his helm and taken half his face with it, ear to jaw, cooked through.
He would survive. He would likely never walk.
Forty feet off, Sunfyre lay where he'd fallen, golden scales gone the color of old brass under the dust. One wing was folded beneath him at an angle wings don't fold. The other lay open across the ground, membrane split from elbow to tip, bone showing through in two places. He was breathing. He would never fly as he had that morning, and every man on that field could see it by looking at him.
*The king is crippled. His dragon is crippled. Everything the Greens were this morning was standing on those two.*
Criston Cole came up at my shoulder with his sword still drawn. He seemed to have forgotten it was in his hand.
"That was..." He stopped, and started over. "What you did. I've never seen anything like it. Not in a song. Not in a fever."
"Neither have I."
"What ARE you?"
Everyone kept asking, and nobody wanted the true answer.
"Just a man who trained very hard."
"No man runs on air."
"This one does."
"Then I'll not ask it again." He wiped his blade on his surcoat without looking at it. "But other men will. Men with fewer reasons to be grateful to you."
"Let them ask."
He stared at me. Questions burned behind his eyes, and he was clever enough to keep them there.
"The queen will want to know you're safe," he said at last.
"Which queen?"
"Both of them." A pause. "But I meant Helaena."
Of course he did.
I turned my wrist over. Jaehaera's ribbon was still tied there, singed black at both ends, the knot holding.
"Send word to King's Landing tonight. The battle is won. Meleys and Rhaenys are dead, both of them, and there's a body to show for each. Sunfyre is crippled. Aegon—" I looked down at the ruin in the grass. "Aegon will need months. If he recovers at all."
"And Aemond?"
We both looked up.
Vhagar was circling. He had put her down once, long enough to walk to what remained of his grandmother and confirm it with his own eye, then gone up again. He wasn't patrolling.
"Aemond is regent now," I said. "Until Aegon heals."
Criston nodded slowly. "Gods help us all."
AEMOND
Victory.
The word sang in his blood, and Aemond let it sing.
Vhagar banked low so he could take the field in properly. Meleys's corpse, vast even ruined, steaming where her belly had opened. Rhaenys beside her, small and broken, a scrap of black and red in all that meat. Sunfyre crippled but alive. Aegon breathing, barely.
*Brother. You were always too weak for this.*
But the bastard.
Aemond had watched from above, which meant he had watched better than anyone. The impossible climb. The landing. The instant the Red Queen's dive simply stopped, as though someone had hung an anchor on her spine and she had learned it far too late.
*That is not training. That is something else.*
He would learn what it was. There was time.
*I am regent. Vhagar answers to me. The war continues on my word.*
He turned Vhagar's head toward King's Landing. There was his mother to tell, and he found he was looking forward to choosing the words.
ULF
Night came over Rook's Rest and did nothing to cool it.
Fires still burned in the supply lines. Men groaned in the dark where the litter parties hadn't reached. The dead lay where they had dropped and would go on lying there until morning.
I sat on a broken stretch of wall with both hands wrapped in wet linen, watching Silverwing sleep in the courtyard below. She'd taken burns along one flank, shallow ones. She would heal faster than I would.
We won.
It didn't feel like winning.
Rhaenys kept coming back. Not the knife. Not the spitting. The hand going flat on Meleys's neck in the last three seconds she had.
She'd been a grandmother. Somebody's mother. She had watched her family come apart, chosen the side she believed in, and flown at us with everything she had left.
And I'd helped kill her.
*This is the Dance. Everyone loses. It's only a question of order.*
I worked the ribbon off my wrist with two fingers and held it up to the firelight. Blue, once.
*Come back to me.*
I would. Tomorrow I'd fly to King's Landing and hold Helaena and tell her about the battle, some of it, the parts that can be said in a room with children sleeping through the wall. I'd let Jaehaera tie a fresh one on. I'd pretend the world wasn't drowning.
Tonight, though.
A soldier came along the wall with a torch and stopped when the light found me.
"You're the one who jumped on Meleys."
"I am."
"How?"
"Practice."
He considered that far longer than it deserved. "You're touched by the gods. Must be."
"I'm touched by something."
He went on down the wall, and I could hear him already telling the next man, and the version he told had grown since he left me.
The White Demon. The man who walks on air. The bastard who broke the Red Queen with his hands.
None of those were going to shrink.
I climbed down and found dry ground in Silverwing's lee, where her body pushed the cold back a few feet, and lay flat with my burned hands open on my chest, because closing them wasn't possible yet.
Sleep took a long while. When it came I dreamed of fire, and falling, and an old woman's hand going flat against a red neck three feet from mine while I watched and did nothing.