Chapter 39: The Assassin Returns - Part 1
ULF
Night. Day 170. One week since Rook's Rest.
Rain had come and gone before the watch changed, and the Keep still smelled of it. Wet stone. Cold ash in braziers nobody had bothered to relight. I stood at my post outside the nursery with my back against the wall and my eyes half shut, because you hear better when you aren't looking.
Stone settling. A shutter working loose two floors down. The patrol came up the stair, turned at the tapestry, went back.
Then a sound with no business being there.
Behind the wall. Footsteps, toe first, heel last. Someone who didn't want to be heard, and who knew enough to know it mattered.
The secret passages.
I'd bought three people to watch those routes. The understeward who kept the candle stores. Two of the girls who hauled water up from the cisterns. I'd walked every junction myself in the dark with a piece of chalk and counted my paces between doors.
Someone should have warned me.
Either the network failed, or someone in it turned. That was a question for tomorrow.
I left the nursery door to the two men I'd posted there and went twelve paces to the servants' alcove. Loose stone at knee height, lever behind it. The wall swung inward on grease I'd put there myself.
Dust. Old mortar. No torches, and I didn't want one.
Footsteps ahead. Twenty meters, and turning toward the nursery's hidden door.
Soru.
The world smeared. Ten meters. My shoulder clipped the corner of a buttress hard enough to numb the arm, and I corrected and kept going.
Another burst. Five.
A shape resolved out of the black. Hooded, low, moving well.
Not Blood or Cheese. Those two had been desperate men, sloppy and scared, breathing like bellows before they'd done anything at all. This one placed each foot. This one hadn't raised their pulse.
Daemon's coin buys better now.
They heard me at four meters. Turned. A knife came out of the dark.
Tekkai. My forearm went to iron and the blade rang off it and skittered away down the passage.
A heartbeat of hesitation. That was all I needed.
Soru, and I was inside their reach, and my knife went into the shoulder and I twisted it.
The scream was high and short, bitten off. They spun away faster than I'd allowed for and the return stroke opened my ribs.
Burning, instantly, all down my side. Poison, and a good one.
I counted. Three. Five. The fire in my ribs guttered out and left an ache behind it.
They felt it fail. I watched the calm go out of them.
"What are you?"
I didn't answer. I closed.
Shigan, straight through the shoulder I'd already opened. My finger found bone and I kept pushing.
Then I put ten thousand kilos into my right foot and stomped on the knee.
It came apart. So did she.
Boots overhead somewhere, and shouting. Thirty seconds, maybe, before this became a matter for the court.
I took her by the collar and dragged her deeper.
THE ASSASSIN
This wasn't supposed to happen.
The plan had been clean enough to say in one breath. Wait for the bastard to sleep. In through passage seven-three. Kill the children. Out through the godswood.
The prince's people had given her maps drawn this year, the guard rotation, the hour the wet nurse went down for hot water. They had given her everything except the truth about the white-haired one.
She got a hand under herself and tried to crawl. The leg came with her wrong, grinding, and her vision whited out.
He put her against the wall and held her there.
"Who sent you?"
Blood in her mouth. She spat it at his boots and laughed, and the laugh cost her.
"Daemon? Rhaenyra?"
"You think it matters? More will come. We always come."
"How many?"
"Enough." Her breath came back in pieces. Her voice came out level, which was the last thing she still owned. "You've broken my knee and opened my shoulder, and there's a rope at the end of every road out of here. So let's not pretend I'm buying my life."
"You're not."
"Good. I hate men who lie about the price."
"Then hear the offer. Answer me, and it's quick."
"They all promise quick."
"I keep mine."
He was nothing in the dark. No face. A voice level with her ear and a hand that didn't shift while he used it.
"How long have you been inside these walls?"
"Long enough to know the hour the nurse goes down for hot water."
"Who told you that hour?"
"Nobody had to tell me. I stood in a stairwell for six nights and watched her."
It was a lie, and she told it well, and he said nothing at all. That frightened her worse than the hand did.
"How did you get the maps?"
She laughed again and coughed through it.
"The Blacks have friends everywhere. Even in the Red Keep. Even in the queen's own—"
He hit her. Not hard enough to kill. Hard enough to scatter what she'd been about to say.
"Names."
"I don't have names. Just a contact. Dead drop near the kitchens. You'll never find—"
Another. Harder. Something loosened in her jaw.
"Which kitchens?"
"Ask a hundred scullions. Ask all of them." She smiled with red teeth. "You'd have to."
"What was waiting past the godswood?"
"A boat."
"Crewed by."
"Two at the oars. No names given, and none of them true if they had been." She turned her head as far as his hand allowed, hunting for a face and finding black. "They'll have gone by now. They were told to push off at the third bell whether I came or not."
"The children. Why them?"
"Because it hurts the Greens." No hesitation at all, and she heard how flat it sounded, and didn't care. "Because queens weep for dead children. Because—" She coughed. "Because bastards always die first."
He said nothing.
She listened to him breathe. Slow. Unbothered. She had held men down while they died, and every one of them had worked harder at it than he was working now.
"How did you hear me," she said. "Through stone. Through two turns of stone, and a door."
Nothing.
"They'll say I fell. Won't they."
Then his hand closed around her throat.
"You're right about one thing. Bastards always die."
ULF
I felt her windpipe go.
Quick. Cleaner than she'd earned, maybe. But clean.
One threat ended. I had no idea how many were still walking the city with her contract in their heads.
I went through her while she was still warm. A map of the passages, drawn on good paper, newer than mine and correct where mine was wrong. A vial, stoppered in wax, and I broke the seal and smelled it and knew it. Tears of Lys. And a coin struck with Daemon's sigil, payment nobody could follow back to a purse.
Proof I didn't need and couldn't use.
Footsteps in the passages behind me now. Guards, finally.
I carried her to the steep junction below the old cistern stair and laid her at the bottom of it with her head turned wrong. A fall in the dark. A thief who didn't know the Keep. Tragic, and tidy, and nobody's business but the gold cloaks'.
Then I wiped my knife on the inside of her cloak, put it away, and made myself stand still until my hands were a servant's hands again.
Then I stepped out into the corridor, let a guardsman see my face, and told him to bring light and a maester and nobody else.
The shouting started. Doors opened along the passage. Somewhere above me a woman began to pray.
I opened my hand and found I'd been holding the coin hard enough to leave Daemon's sigil printed in my palm.
Newer than mine. Correct where mine was wrong.
Four men had walked those junctions with me. Two of them had carried the chalk.
I started with their names.