Chapter 50: Seven Stars
ULF
Buckwell went into the black cells on the second morning back and gave up his cipher on the third. He didn't make me work for it. He asked after his daughters, and when I told him they were still in their own hall with their mother he told me that the strips wound round a septon's prayer-taper. Seven-sided. Standard make. The same taper sold on a tray outside every sept between here and Duskendale, three for a penny.
A year of the Crown's business had left this city wrapped round a candle.
The tally board gave me the rest. Birds went out of the royal sept on the fourth day and the seventh, an hour before the dawn bell, and Grand Maester Orwyle had never counted one of them in his life. The Faith's ravens are the Faith's own. No maester puts his hand in that cage and keeps it.
Marta had died with the drop behind the sept still working. Somebody had gone on emptying it after her.
I took the loft above the rookery on the first night and lay in pigeon lime with my cheek on a beam. Nothing came. On the second night, an hour before the bell, a man in grey climbed the stair with a lamp hooded in his fist, opened the cage, tied something no longer than my thumb to a leg, and put the bird out into the dark over Aegon's High Hill.
Septon Bernard kept the royal sept and had kept it since before Aegon was born. Sixty-odd. Ink to the second knuckle on both hands. He heard the queen mother's confession every seventh day and he said the evening prayer over Jaehaerys and Jaehaera in their beds, and I had watched him do it a hundred times with his palm flat on the girl's hair.
I came down the ladder while the bird was still climbing.
He didn't run and he didn't call out. He set the lamp on the sill and looked at me the way you look at weather you've been expecting since noon.
"You are the one they gave the dragon to," he said.
"You know what I've come for."
"I know that I have been waiting four days for it." He unhooded the lamp. He wanted light on his own face. "Ask, and I will not lie to you. I have never lied inside this sept."
So I asked, and he answered, and it took that man less time to hand me a year of treason than it had taken Buckwell to hand me his daughters' safety.
He had taken nothing. That was the part I kept turning over. No coin, no living, no promise of a seat under a new queen. He offered me his accounts and told me to have them read by any brother I liked, and said the poverty of them was the poorest thing about him. He tied what the drop gave him and he let it fly, and he did it because he had stood in that sept as a younger man and heard King Viserys name his daughter heir before the Seven and before every lord in the realm.
"The gods heard him say it," Bernard said. "I heard him say it. Then men in this castle decided the gods had misheard."
"Men in this castle feed your birds."
"Yes. And I will answer to the Seven for the bread I have eaten here, and so will you, and so will she." He put his hands together, not to pray, only to still them. "You have come to kill me. Do it in front of the altar and not at the bottom of a stair. I would rather be found where I am supposed to be found."
I had climbed that ladder meaning to break his neck and drop him down the turn of the steps. An old man. A dark stair. A sad thing that happens.
I went down the steps alone instead, and when I looked back from the bottom he was still standing there with the lamp, disappointed, like a man dressed for a feast that had been called off.
ALICENT
She had confessed to that man every seventh day for eleven years.
Alicent heard the bastard out standing, because sitting would have meant she intended to be there a while, and she didn't intend it. He told it plainly. The dead kitchen girl, the drop, the cage, the candle. He didn't once ask her what she had put into Bernard's ear across eleven years, and she understood that he was being merciful, and she hated the mercy worse than she would have hated the blow.
"No," she said.
"Your Grace, the man is—"
"You will not touch him. Not his person, not his sept, not his birds. He will not fall, he will not sicken, he will not be quietly sent to the Quiet Isle." Her voice stayed level. It cost her something to keep it there. "Do you know who put the crown on my son's head?"
"The High Septon."
"The Faith is the last house in this realm still saying aloud that Aegon is lawful. The lords say it when Vhagar is overhead and stop saying it when she goes home. The Faith says it in every sept in the Seven Kingdoms, every seventh day, for nothing, because they believe it." She came a step closer. "And in this same season we are putting bastards on dragons and calling it policy. Kill a septon this year, ser, and the Faith will have the war it has wanted since my husband's grandfather, and it will not be Rhaenyra's war and it will not be ours. It will be theirs."
"He is sending Daemon our doors."
"Then let him send them, and be watched."
The bastard did not argue. That was the unpleasant thing about him. He took a refusal like a man setting down a tool he expected to want again.
"What do you take for looking away?" he said.
"Every seventh day you will come to the sept. You will kneel where the court can see you kneel, and you will take the Mother's blessing from Bernard's own hands, and the men who write to Oldtown will write that the Crown's dragonrider is a pious man." She let him have a moment with that. "And if that septon dies of a chill, of his years, of a fall, of anything at all, I will say your name. To my son. To the High Septon. In that order."
"Yes, Your Grace."
He bowed and went out, and it wasn't until the door had been shut a long while that she let herself think about the small room, and the grille, and everything she had ever said through it.
ULF
Helaena was awake when I came in, sitting on the floor by the cold hearth with her paints out and Maelor's blanket across her knees.
"You smell of birds," she said.
"Go to sleep."
"You'll tell me, or I'll ask Bernard at prayers on the seventh day. I'll ask him kindly." She looked up. "He answers me. He always has."
So I told her, because she meant it, and because she has never yet been wrong about which of us is being stupid.
She listened all the way through and then laid her brush across the pot.
"You want him stopped," she said. "Stop wanting that."
"He is twenty feet from your daughter's bed every evening of the world."
"He is a pair of wings." She said it slowly, finding it while she said it. "He cannot read what he sends. He told you so and I believe him. He ties what the drop gives him and he lets it go. So give the drop something."
I sat down on the hearthstone. The whole thing turned over in my hands and came up the other side, and it was hers, not mine.
Kill Bernard and Daemon learns inside a fortnight that his channel is found, and every other thing the Rogue Prince has inside these walls goes silent for a year and comes back somewhere I am not looking. Leave him breathing, and Daemon goes on reading Lord Jon Buckwell's neat hand out of the Antlers, twice in every seven days, for as long as I care to write it.
"He'd warn them," I said. "Plain hand. A letter."
"With his own name on it. From the royal sept. To Harrenhal." She shook her head once. "He'd be hanging the Faith with it, and he'd sooner hang alone, and you have already refused him that."
We took the desk after midnight. I had the taper up from the cells and a blank strip cut off Buckwell's own roll, and Helaena had the letters, because she has copied a hand since she was nine and mine looks like a man breaking sticks.
She wound the strip on the candle and wrote across the wound edge, small, with the long tail Buckwell put on his g's. Then she unwound it into nonsense and held it up to the light.
"The grain goes to Rosby by river," she read off the tally board, flat, weighing the words like paint she had mixed too thin. "Under twenty men."
"Under twenty men."
She turned the strip over between her fingers. Wax dust on her knuckles, blue still under the nail.
"What happens," she said, "when he believes it?"
I reached past her for the next blank strip.