Chapter 54: What the King Remembers
ULF
The king's man caught me on the gallery stair before the court had finished emptying, and he didn't bother with my name or any title he might have hung on it.
"His Grace wants you. Tonight, not tomorrow."
I'd seen him at the back of the hall an hour earlier, standing where the light didn't reach, writing nothing down. Men who write nothing down are the ones who remember everything.
Aegon's chambers were on the sea side of Maegor's, and they smelled of three things. Poppy, first. Then charcoal from four braziers burning in a room already too warm. Under both of those, faint and constant, the smell of a body that had been cooked and hadn't finished healing.
Grand Maester Orwyle stood at the table with his scales out, weighing a dose. He glanced up once and went back to the weighing.
The king lay under a wooden frame that held the blankets off his legs. The right side of his face had taken the fire at Rook's Rest and kept it. His hair had grown back in patches there and not at all above the ear. His hands were unmarked. He was turning a cup on the coverlet with them, slow, and not drinking from it.
"Shut the door," Aegon said. "You. Not him."
I shut it.
"Sit. No. Stand. I like you standing, it's the only thing anyone does for me now." He got the cup to his mouth and set it down again untouched. "Orwyle wants me asleep. I've told him no since noon. Do you know what it costs to hold a thing off for six hours so you can have one conversation?"
"No, Your Grace."
"Then don't nod at me like you do." His voice was thick, but the words came in order, and that was worse than a slur. "My wife sleeps in your rooms. Not every night. Enough nights."
Orwyle's scales stopped clicking.
"Get out," Aegon said, and the old man went, and left the poppy behind on the table.
"You want me to deny it," I said.
"Gods, no. Then I'd have to have you killed, and it would take three tries." He smiled with the good half of his face. "I don't care. That's the part all of them get wrong. Mother thinks I'm shamed. My brother thinks I'm too far gone to count the days. I'm not shamed and I can count. She's happier. The children are alive. Nothing came out of the walls after them because you were already in the walls." He tipped the cup a finger's width. "My father would have called that a good bargain."
"Then we understand each other."
"We don't, or you'd have brought me something."
He set the cup down hard enough to slop wine across the blanket, and the jolt of his own arm took his breath, and for a moment his eyes were wet and furious with it. When he came back he was smiling again.
"Do you know what I asked for, the first day they carried me in here? A mirror. Nobody has given me one since. That is how this castle cares for its king."
"What do you want?"
"Sunfyre."
I let the brazier crack in the silence.
"Sunfyre can't fly."
"Sunfyre is alive. He's in the pit and he's alive, and neither of us can walk, and every man in this Keep has decided that means we're both finished." He leaned forward two inches and the frame over his legs creaked. "You're the only one who'd try it. Cole would tell my mother. Orwyle would tell my brother. My grandsire would nod and forget me before he reached the door. You had a dragon nobody wanted and you got onto her back anyway."
"That isn't the same thing."
"No. It's smaller." His hand went flat on the blanket. "One hour. One hour in the air, near the end, so that when the singers get to me there's something after the burning."
"And when I say no?"
That was when he stopped performing. It was quick and it was very clean.
"Then tomorrow I sign an order removing my wife's household to Oldtown, to my grandsire's kin, and appoint her a new sworn shield out of my brother's men. I am her husband and I am the king, and the septons will call it a devout act." He watched me. "It would take a morning. I wouldn't even need to be sober."
Somewhere below us a bell rang the hour and got it wrong by one.
He had all of it. Not the shape of it. All of it. He had been lying on his back for months with nothing to do but listen to servants, and servants know everything, and he'd put it together while the council treated him as a hand that signed things.
"Say it out loud," Aegon said. "I want it out loud. No one has promised me anything since the field."
"I'll get you onto Sunfyre."
I heard my own voice do it, and I knew what I was buying. Not a flight. A funeral with better weather. Sunfyre would carry him up and something in that wing would go, and the crown would come down in the only place it had been travelling toward since Rook's Rest.
"Good." Aegon sagged back into the pillows, all the danger gone out of him at once. "Did she ever tell you what I was like? Before. When we were wed and she still spoke to me."
I didn't answer that.
"Weeks," Aemond said from the doorway.
I hadn't heard the door. He'd been there long enough to be leaning on the frame, and his eye went off me and onto his brother and back with nothing in it a man could argue with.
"Whatever you are doing, do it in weeks. We fly for the Riverlands before autumn." He inclined his head, courteous as a cut. "Brother. You look well."
AEGON II
He lay listening to their boots go down the passage, the White's heavier and slower, Aemond's quick as a man late for something better.
The pain came back the moment the door opened. It always waited for company. It sat in both legs and in the meat of his right shoulder, and it didn't throb, whatever fools believed. It simply stayed, pressing on him at the exact weight it had pressed since the field.
He turned the thing over twice to be sure of it. He had won. He had taken the one man in this castle who feared nothing and made him say a sentence he didn't want to say, and he had done it flat on his back, with wine soaking into his blanket, using no weapon but the law that had handed him Helaena in the first place.
That law had bought him a wife who flinched when he reached for her. Now it had bought him an hour of sky.
Orwyle came back for the scales and didn't look at the bed.
"Your Grace should sleep."
"His Grace should have died at Rook's Rest," Aegon said. "Give me the cup."
ULF
Helaena was on the landing at the foot of the serpentine with a lamp, a shawl over her nightdress, awake, as she always was when the Keep was.
"You were with my husband."
"He wanted the Gold Cloak numbers."
She looked at me longer than that deserved. "Is he dying?"
"Orwyle says not yet."
"That isn't what I asked." She took the lamp with her when she turned, and the stair below went dark, and she let me walk down it.
The pit at night is the quietest place in King's Landing.
They kept Sunfyre in the third vault, the one with the fallen roof that lets the weather in, because the keepers had stopped pretending he wanted anything better. He was awake. Gold scale gone dull as old coin, and where the left wing folded there ran a channel through the muscle the length of my arm, healed crooked, the membrane under it puckered and thin as scorched parchment.
I walked him twice with a torch. He tracked me and never moved his head, which cost him less than moving it would have.
A wing carries a spar in it, the same as a ship. His break was above the joint. Whatever used to haul that wing down and back was gone for good and no amount of feeding brings it back. But the down-stroke was not the question. He could still make lift. The question was holding a beat, an hour of it, in still air, with a man strapped into the saddle who couldn't grip with his knees or shift his weight and would sit up there like ballast in a hull.
I did the sums twice. The second time honestly.
It could hold him. Not for a war. Out over the water and back, in the calm before dawn, for one hour, it could hold him.
The torch guttered and I put my shoulder off the vault wall and started up the steps toward the keepers' door.