Chapter 55: The Blacksmith's Name
ULF
Dawn came up grey over the Dragonpit and I was still on the sand, running the same arithmetic I'd started at midnight. A strapped man. One hour, maybe. Above me Sunfyre's ruined wing opened and shut, opened and shut, like a bellows with a hole burned through it.
One of Otto's clerks found me there, which told me how long I'd been standing in one place.
"The Hand's compliments." He held out a roll of parchment, the seal already broken from his own reading. "Final list of candidates. Council sits at the third bell."
I took it. He didn't go.
"There's more?"
"He said you'd want it early." The clerk's eyes went to Sunfyre and came back fast. "He said you'd want time to be unhappy about it somewhere private."
Otto knew me better than I wanted him to.
I unrolled it against the pit wall and read by the lantern the keepers had left burning. Thirty-eight names. Trade and street beside each, in a clerk's tidy hand. A fishmonger's son off the Hook. Two boys from the Street of Silk who shared a mother and not a father. A cooper. A ropemaker with a Valyrian grandmother nobody could prove.
Eleventh line down.
Hugh, called Hammer. Smith. Street of Steel.
I read it three times. The letters didn't change and neither did my stomach.
I'd never seen the man. I knew how he died anyway, and what he did before he died, and whose blood was drying on his hands while he did it. That knowledge sat in me like a scar from a wound I hadn't taken.
I rolled the parchment up. My hands were steady. Nothing behind them was.
THE COUNCIL CHAMBER
Shutters open, gulls screaming over the Blackwater, the map table still crusted with wax from the last argument. Otto at the head. Orwyle beside him with his chain pooled on the wood. Aemond stood at the window with his back to the room. That was how he attended. Ser Criston Cole held the door and watched me the whole time, as he had since the Antlers.
Orwyle began to read the roll aloud. He got through ten names.
"Strike the eleventh," I said.
Otto didn't look up. "Which is the eleventh?"
"The smith. Hugh Hammer, Street of Steel."
"You have the dawn copy." Otto turned his own page over, unhurried. "Good. Then give me your ground."
"He's dangerous."
"They are all dangerous. That is the entire purpose of them." He set two fingers on the parchment. "Six feet and a half, by the Gold Cloaks' measure. Works iron twelve hours a day. Survived the summer fever and the winter before it. He is the strongest name on this page, and you would like me to strike him two days before the trials, on a feeling."
"On judgement."
"Whose?"
There it was, and I had nothing to put in the gap. Not one word of it could be said in that room.
"Mine," I said.
"Your judgement kept my grandson alive at Rook's Rest, so I will hear it out." Otto folded his hands. "But this has one chance to survive its first morning. If thirty-eight men go into the pit and thirty-eight come out as ash, the Faith wins, my granddaughter's name is on the ash, and there are no more dragons for this war. I need one of them to live. He is my best odds of it. Give me a reason written in something other than your face."
Aemond spoke from the window without turning. "Let the smith go up. Half of Flea Bottom will discover a Targaryen grandmother by the next moon and we will not need press-gangs again."
"He's ambitious," I said.
"Every man on that roll is ambitious," Otto said. "Ambition is the only reason to walk into a dragon's mouth."
"He won't take the small ones. He'll go for Vermithor. The Bronze Fury, and he'll get him, and once he's up there you will never get him down again."
Aemond turned around.
He came to the table, picked up his own copy and read the eleventh line twice.
"Trade," he said. "Street. Height, since my grandsire had them all measured." He laid the page flat. "It does not say which dragon he wants."
"A big man wants a big dragon."
"You named him before the Grand Maester reached him. That I forgive; you had the roll at dawn and you have clearly read it until you were sick of it." Aemond's voice stayed pleasant, which was how it went before it stopped being pleasant. "But no man wrote Vermithor beside that name. The smith has never stood in this room. He has never spoken to a soul at this table. And you said the Bronze Fury as though the two of you had settled it between you over ale."
Cole had come off the door. Otto said nothing at all, which was worse.
"Explain it," Aemond said.
So I took the only road left, which was the truth with its face turned sideways.
"I've known men built like him. Big, poor, good at one thing, told every day of their lives that the one thing is all they will ever be. Put a dragon under a man like that and he doesn't climb down grateful. He climbs down hungry. He'll take the beast, then he'll want the honour, and then he'll look at what's sitting on Aegon's head and start doing sums. He'll be able to do them, too. He'll have four hundred years of fire between his knees and nothing behind him worth losing."
Nobody said anything for a while. Gulls, out over the water.
"That is a sermon," Otto said at last, "not evidence."
"No," Aemond said. "That was certainty. Men speak of what may happen. He has told us what will."
"I told you what I'd wager on."
"You told us what you know." He smiled with half his mouth and sat down, and the sitting down frightened me more than the smile.
Otto drew the roll toward him and signed the foot of it.
"Thirty-eight," he said. "Two days."
THAT AFTERNOON
Helaena was painting a beetle she'd found dead on the sill. She put the brush down when she saw my face.
"You've come back white," she said. "Whiter."
"The roll's closed."
"And there's a name on it."
"There's a name on it."
She waited. She's better at waiting than anyone I have ever known.
"I've met men like him," I said. "Not him. Men like him. They wait their whole lives for one good day, and when it comes they take everything that isn't nailed down and call it justice. For them it very nearly is."
"Then let me strike him." She said it flatly. "The trials are under my name now. I signed for them in front of the whole court. Otto would have to tell me why not, out loud, with my mother in the room."
"He'd tell you. He'd be right, as well. That's the trouble with him."
She picked the brush back up and didn't use it.
"Do you dream about the ones you haven't killed yet?"
I didn't answer that. She didn't seem to need me to.
AEMOND
The carpenters were still working when Aemond came down to the pit yard at dusk, hammering hurdles into the packed earth to pen thirty-eight men overnight. It smelled of fresh pine and old dung.
He had spent the afternoon going back through the council, question by question, as he did with a bout he had nearly lost.
The bastard had argued badly. That was the interesting part. He never argued badly. He had walked into the chamber with one thing to get and thrown away his footing for it inside four sentences, and every road in the argument, followed to its end, arrived at the same door.
Not the king. Not the crown. Not the war.
His sister. The ash on her name. The signature at the foot of the page. When Orwyle read the roll, the white-haired man's eye had gone to Helaena's seal, and never once to Aegon's.
That should have been treason. Instead it was only a fact about a weapon, and Aemond had learned young that a blade cutting in a single direction is still a blade, provided you never forget the direction. Let him love her. Let him kill for her. The war would want a great deal of killing done and the man would do it gladly, and on the day the war ended Aemond would know exactly where to stand and exactly where the thing would break.
Boots on the yard stone. Ulf came out of the tunnel mouth, looking at the pens, counting them under his breath.
"Two days," Aemond said.
"Two days."
"I will be watching the smith." He let his eye rest on the hurdles a moment, then moved it, and his voice didn't change at all. "And you."