Chapter 42: The Queen's Heart
HELAENA
Morning light filled the nursery.
Jaehaerys played with wooden knights on the floor, arranging them in patterns only he understood. Not ranks. A spiral that closed on itself, and when she'd asked, he'd said they were waiting.
Jaehaera sat by the window brushing a doll's hair with mechanical precision, ten strokes, then ten more, her lips moving on the count. Maelor was barely two and still unsteady on his feet. He toddled between them and laughed at nothing, at the dust turning in the light, at his own laughing.
My children. My beautiful, doomed children.
The dreams showed her things. Terrible things. Blood on stone floors. Small bodies broken. A choice she couldn't unmake, put to her by a voice that was patient about it.
But also: a shadow standing in the doorway. A man made of iron and fire. Protecting.
She'd stopped telling the maesters. They wrote it all down and then gave her the careful voice they kept for the dying.
"Mother?"
Jaehaerys had looked up. His silver hair fell across his face exactly as his father's used to, before Aegon drowned himself in wine and resentment.
"Yes, sweetling?"
"Is the knight coming today?"
"Ulf isn't a knight."
"He fights like one. Ser Criston says he fights better than any knight in the realm." Jaehaerys moved a wooden figure, the one he'd painted silver, out of the spiral and set it down apart from the rest. "I want him to teach me."
"Teach you what?"
"How to be strong. So I can protect Jaehaera and Maelor."
Six years old. He still needed his meat cut for him, and he'd already divided the world into the guarded and the guarding.
"The spiders have gone out of that window corner," Helaena said. "All of them. In one night."
Jaehaerys waited to see whether that was an answer. Children wait better than grown men. When nothing more came, he went back to his knights.
The door opened. Ulf entered.
He was different in this room. In the corridors he put his heel down first and guards heard him three turns off. Here he came in on the flats of his boots and stopped inside the threshold, hands open, until Maelor had looked at him and gone back to laughing.
"Good morning, Your Grace." He bowed to Helaena. Then, more casually: "Morning, prince. Princesses."
Jaehaerys scrambled up. "Can you teach me to fight?"
"Jaehaerys." Helaena's voice carried warning.
"It's all right." Ulf knelt, bringing himself to the boy's level. There was yard sand still caught in his cuff; he'd been training since before light. "Fighting's important. But it's not the only thing."
"What else is there?"
"Knowing when to fight. Knowing when to run. Knowing who needs protecting and doing whatever it takes to keep them safe."
Jaehaerys considered this with surprising seriousness. Jaehaera had stopped brushing.
"Father says real men fight. They don't run."
"Your father's brave. But even brave men choose their battles." Ulf picked up one of the wooden knights and turned it so the boy could see the painted shield. "See this fellow? Good sword, strong armor. But he's alone. One enemy, he wins. Two enemies, maybe. Ten enemies?"
"He dies."
"Right. So what does he do?"
Jaehaerys chewed his cheek. "Get more knights?"
"Or." Ulf set the figure down and picked up the tall one with the chipped crown. "He protects the king. Stays close. Makes sure the important piece survives, even if the knight falls."
Jaehaerys stared at the two figures. Then he set the silver one against the crowned one, close enough that they touched.
"You're the knight."
"I'm not important."
"Mother is the king?"
"Your mother is everything."
Helaena looked down at the spiral and didn't trust her own face.
ULF
After the septa collected the children for lessons, Helaena and I sat in her solar.
The morning sun laid gold across the floor and the half-finished painting on her table, beetles and moths ringed round the parchment's edge. Outside, dragons circled. Vhagar's shadow crossed the rooftops and the street below went quiet the whole length of it. Dreamfyre was somewhere south of the river. Silverwing had taken the Dragonpit's high wall at dawn, as she had every morning since she first let me on her back.
Helaena dipped her brush and didn't use it.
"Do you know they carry their own coffins?" she said. "Beetles. The shell is the coffin. They wear it their whole lives and it never once feels heavy."
I had no answer. She hadn't left room for one.
"He loves you," she said.
"Jaehaerys? He's six. He loves whoever pays attention to him."
"That's exactly it." She pulled at a loose thread on her sleeve, and went on pulling until the cuff puckered. "Aegon never... He visits. Occasionally. But he looks through them. Like they're furniture."
"Aegon's dealing with his injuries."
"Aegon was distant before the injuries. Before Rook's Rest. Before any of it." She stood. Crossed to the window. "I've accepted what my marriage is. Political arrangement. Breeding duty. I stopped hoping for more years ago."
There was something kind I could have said. It would have been a lie and she'd have heard that before I finished.
"What do you hope for now?"
She turned. Those violet eyes, strange and beautiful and seeing too much.
"For my children to survive this war. For one person who looks at me and sees something other than 'the mad one' or 'Aegon's burden.'" She stepped closer. "For you."
"You have me."
"I know." She touched my face. Traced the new scar along my jaw, the one Rook's Rest had left me, still pink and tender at the end of it. "But I don't understand you. Not fully. You fight like nothing I've ever seen. You know things before they happen. You take my dreams seriously when everyone else thinks I'm broken."
"You're not broken."
"What am I then?"
She sees what's coming and can't stop a hand's breadth of it. She's in a war nobody asked her to join, tied to a man who's never once earned her, and half this court calls her gift a sickness.
"You're special. Different. Like me."
Her hand dropped. "Different how?"
Careful. How much to reveal?
"I see threats before they arrive. I train in ways that shouldn't be possible. I can do things—" I stopped there and let the pause do the rest. "Things that would frighten most people."
"I've seen what you did at Rook's Rest. What you did to the assassin in the passages." Her voice was steady. "I'm already frightened."
"Of me?"
"Of losing you. Of watching the war take you piece by piece until nothing's left but the killer."
"I'm still here."
"For now." She leaned her forehead against mine. Her hands were cold. They always were. "Promise me something."
"Anything."
"When this is over. When the Dance ends, whoever wins. You'll still be yourself. Not just a weapon. Not just a guard. You."
I thought of a water pitcher on a table beside a guarded sickbed, and a man sweating out three days in it while a healer wrote down infection in his notes, and how little I'd felt the morning word came that he'd stopped. I hadn't been in the room. I hadn't needed to be. Cheese had cost me even less.
"I'll try."
"That's not a promise."
"It's honest."
She kissed me. Longer this time. Deeper. Her fist closed in the front of my jerkin and stayed closed.
When she pulled back, her eyes glistened.
"I've seen what you'll become. In the dreams. Standing in fire. Fighting monsters. Covered in blood that isn't yours." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "It frightens me. But it also means you survive. And right now, that's enough."
"I'll survive. And so will you. And so will the children."
"You can't know that."
"I can try my damnedest to make it happen."
She laughed. The first real laugh I'd heard from her in weeks, and it came out of her startled, a stair that isn't there and a foot already falling.
"My strange knight. My impossible guard." She kissed my cheek. "Stay with me. Tonight. Tomorrow. Every night until the world stops burning."
"That might be a while."
"Then we'd better start now."
She crossed to the door and turned the key, and didn't look back at me while she did it. Out on the Dragonpit wall Silverwing lifted her head and called once over the rooftops, and past the river Dreamfyre answered.