Chapter 46: The White and the Silver - Part 1
ULF
The sept lanterns were lit by the time I came down the hill, and the moths had already found them. She'd been right about that. She was right about most things she said sideways.
Marta came out the kitchen door at full dark with a covered basket on her hip and bread in it that nobody in the sept had asked for.
I let her get past the stable lane before I moved.
She went the long way. That was the whole of it, in the end. A kitchen girl carrying bread had no reason to walk the wall side, where the torches don't reach, unless she wanted a stretch of dark she could stop in.
She stopped in it.
Behind the sept, where the outer wall meets the buttress, there's a gap in the stone the width of two fingers. Old work, nobody's fault, the kind of flaw a building carries for two hundred years without anyone thinking about it. She crouched. Slid something into it. Straightened and went on to the sept door with her basket, a girl who'd been sent with bread.
Confirmed.
I didn't need the paper. I took it anyway, because Otto's list would always be shorter than the truth and I wanted to hold the difference.
Numbers. The nursery watch, in a hand I'd have called neat if I hadn't known what it was for. Which of the septas slept through the third bell. How many men stood on Helaena's door after the hour turned, and how that count changed on the nights I wasn't in the Keep.
Seventeen, maybe. Thin wrists. Flour still under the nails.
Garrett had given her up in three hours, and she had almost certainly been given up herself, somewhere further up the chain, by a man who would never learn her name.
That's the part nobody warns you about. Not that it's hard. That it isn't.
I met her coming back out.
She knew before I said anything. I've seen that look often enough now to name it, and it isn't surprise. It's arithmetic. She'd been waiting weeks to find out how the sum came out.
"Who pays you?"
"A man at the Hook." Fast, with no bargaining in it at all. "I never saw his face. It's left under the third barrel."
"Do you know what the numbers are for?"
She looked past me at the lanterns. The moths were still working at them, stupid and patient.
"My brother's at Duskendale," she said. "They told me he'd stay whole."
I believed her. It didn't change anything, and that is exactly what I have become — a man who can believe someone and finish anyway.
It was quick. I could afford her that and nothing else.
I left the drop open. A closed drop tells them something. An open one goes on telling me things.
Then I went up the hill, washed the flour off my sleeve, and found something to do with my hands.
The training yard at midnight.
I moved through Rokushiki forms with weighted anklets strapped to my legs, fifty kilograms each, forcing every step to be deliberate, every kick to be earned.
Soru.
The world blurred. Ten meters. Twenty. Thirty.
Tekkai.
My body hardened. A training dummy's weighted club struck my chest. The impact jarred my bones but left no mark.
Rankyaku.
My leg whipped forward. Air compressed, solidified, flew—struck the practice target across the yard. Cut through wood and straw.
Again.
I'd been at this for hours. My muscles burned. My lungs ached. Sweat dripped despite the cool air.
Once more.
Since Rook's Rest, I'd pushed harder than ever. The battle had shown me my limits, and how close those limits had come to killing me.
Meleys nearly caught us. If Vhagar had been two seconds slower...
I couldn't afford limits. Not with Daemon still alive. Not with Caraxes waiting for revenge.
And again.
Soru. Tekkai. Rankyaku.
The combinations flowed together now. Near-instinct rather than conscious thought.
Not enough. Never enough.
"You're going to work yourself to death."
Criston Cole. Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Watching from the colonnade.
I stopped. Caught my breath.
"Better than being killed by someone else."
"Is there a difference?"
"The timing."
He walked into the yard. Armor gleaming in the moonlight. Sword at his hip.
"I watched you at Rook's Rest. What you did on Meleys's back. The impossible jumps. The way you survived the fire."
"I trained."
"No one trains to walk on air."
Silence stretched between us.
"What do you want, Lord Commander?"
"I want to understand what I'm dealing with." He stopped three paces away. Close enough to fight. Far enough to react. "You're not normal. Everyone who watched that battle knows it. The question is whether you're an asset or a threat."
"Ask the queen's children if I'm a threat."
"The children trust you. Children trust many things."
"Ask Helaena then."
"The queen's feelings for you are... complicated." His voice carried an edge. "Perhaps too complicated."
Ah. There it is.
"You think I'm manipulating her."
"I think a bastard guard who becomes a dragonrider who becomes the queen's confidant is climbing awfully fast. Fast climbers usually fall hard."
"Or they reach the top."
"And then?"
Then I protect what I love until the war ends or I die trying.
"Then I keep doing what I've always done. Keep her safe. Keep the children safe."
Criston studied me. Looking for the lie.
He didn't find one.
"Aemond trusts you. The queen trusts you. Even Otto sees your value, though he'd never admit it." He stepped back. "I don't trust anyone. But I respect capability. Just remember—if you ever become a problem..."
"I won't."
"See that you don't."
He walked away. I watched him go.
Another piece on the board. Another calculation to make.
DAWN
Silverwing waited at the Dragonpit.
We'd put in our hour a few nights ago and come off the ledge better than we'd gone onto it, turns, dives, the long slide down the river wind. Since then it had been most mornings, early, before the hill filled up with people who wanted to watch.
This morning had a purpose attached to it. Vhagar can climb above weather. Caraxes can hold a height for half a day. If Silverwing couldn't do either, I needed to know the number before somebody else found it out for me, over water, with a dragon on our tail.
So: ceiling.
"Higher," I murmured, leaning forward. "As high as you can go."
Silverwing rumbled. Uncertainty.
"Trust me."
Her wings beat. Once. Twice.
We climbed.
The city shrank. The Keep became a toy. The Blackwater Bay became a mirror reflecting morning light.
Still climbing.
Air thinned. Cold bit through my clothes. My lungs worked harder.
Higher still.
There was no telling how high we could go, how far we could push it.
The horizon bent at the edges of sight, clouds drifting below us now, strange, seen from above.
Silverwing's wingbeats slowed. She was laboring.
"Enough. Level out."
She obeyed. Grateful.
We hung there, impossibly high, watching the realm spread beneath us.
From here, the war seems small. The politics, the betrayals, the deaths, just patterns in the dust.
But it wasn't small. It was everything.
"Dive."
Silverwing hesitated.
"Trust me. Dive."
She folded her wings.
We fell.
Wind screamed past. The world rushed upward. My stomach lurched, fighting the impossible speed.
I dropped my weight to 1kg. Became nearly weightless. The wind couldn't tear me from Silverwing's back.
Faster. Faster.
The ground approached. King's Landing grew from dot to city to rushing death.
"Now!"
Silverwing's wings snapped open. The dive became a curve. We skimmed over the Dragonpit's roof close enough to touch.
Then we climbed again, arcing into clear sky, my heart pounding with exhilaration and terror.
That's new. That's something Daemon can't do.
I laughed. Wild. Free.
For one moment, all the fear and planning and paranoia fell away.
Just a man and his dragon, dancing on the edge of death.
This is why they fight for these beasts. This is why men die for the chance to fly.
We spiraled down. Landed in the Dragonpit's yard.
Silverwing settled her wings and looked at me with those ancient eyes.
Was that approval?
I stroked her neck. Felt the furnace-heat of her body, the pulse of her enormous heart.
"Good girl. We'll do it again tomorrow."
She rumbled. Agreement or tolerance. I couldn't always tell the difference.
LATER
The nursery was quiet when I arrived.
Jaehaerys played with his wooden knights: the collection had grown since I'd first seen it. Jaehaera read silently by the window. Maelor napped in his crib, watched by a septa who nodded respectfully as I entered.
"Mother's knight!" Jaehaerys scrambled up. "Do the heavy trick. The stone one. Do it on this—" and he shoved a wooden figure at my chest with both hands.
I knelt. Took the knight from him. Turned it over once and gave it back.
"No."
His whole face fell at a speed only children manage.
"Why not?"
Because a septa saw the river stone and told another septa, and by now it has a name in the kitchens. Because a thing that can't be explained gets explained anyway, by whoever wants it explained a particular way. Because a boy who can't stop talking about a trick is a boy someone will eventually sit down and question.
"Because I only had the one," I said. "It was in the stone. It's used up."
"That's not true."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't."
He considered that, and I watched him decide he liked being lied to honestly better than being lied to well. He's six. He'll remember the shape of it long after he's forgotten the stone.
"Then teach me something real."
So I did. I put his feet where they belonged, turned his shoulders square, and showed him how a man half again his weight can be moved off his balance if you push where he isn't standing. Then I let him do it to me, and went over sideways into the rushes like a felled tree.
He laughed. Pure and joyful, loud enough that the septa looked up and decided against saying anything.
This. This is what I'm protecting.
"Can I show Jaehaera?"
"You can show anyone. That one's not a secret." I got up off the floor. "The stone is. Not because it's a game. Because I asked you."
He nodded solemnly. Six years old, swearing an oath of silence over something he didn't understand, for a man who hadn't earned it.
I ruffled his hair. Moved to check Jaehaera by the window.
"What are you reading?"
"Mother's book. The one with the butterflies."
Helaena's illustrations. Her attempts to make sense of her visions.
"Does it make sense to you?"
Jaehaera looked up. Those violet eyes, so like her mother's. Seeing things others couldn't.
"Some of it. The pictures are sad. But also pretty."
"That's a good way to describe it."
I stood at the window. Looked out over King's Landing.
Somewhere out there, Daemon plots. Rhaenyra schemes. More assassins train for the chance to slip past my defenses.
But here, in this room, three children lived and played and laughed.
That's what matters. That's what I'll die to protect.
Footsteps in the corridor. Helaena entering.
She saw me with the children and smiled, that rare, genuine expression that made everything else worthwhile.
"Staying for dinner?"
"If you'll have me."
"Always."
She took my hand. Led me to the table where servants were laying out food.
Outside, the war continued.
But here, for now, there was peace.