Chapter 58: Ash and Silver
ULF
They sanded the floor before dawn. I stood in it with my boots sinking half an inch while two keepers raked the last dark patches flat, and I thought about how little sand it takes to make a killing floor look new.
Marston came down the gallery steps with the day's roll and didn't hand it over.
"Nineteen," he said.
"Nineteen."
"And a queen's writ read out over them, so the Faith can't say we did it in the dark." He looked at the raked sand. "Your lady's name is on that writ."
"I know whose name is on it."
"Then whatever we carry out tonight goes under it." He gave me the roll at last. "I've kept dragons forty-one years. Yesterday three men died in my house. I'd like it recorded that I asked you to stop."
"It's recorded."
"Where?"
"With me."
He made a sound in his throat and went to check the chains on Shrykos's collar, which was the only argument he had left.
The galleries had been half full the first day. Overnight the city learned that a smith off the Street of Steel had walked into Vermithor's fire and come out the other side of it grinning, and now every carter, dyer and gutter-priest in King's Landing was pressed against the rail four deep, shouting odds. Somebody had brought a drum.
So I made rules, because rules were the only thing I had that Otto hadn't already spent.
A chalk line thirty feet from each dragon's chain. Two keepers with hooked poles and buckets at every station. Nobody past the line without my hand up. And a silver stag from my own purse for any man who reached the line, looked at what was waiting there, and walked back out.
Nine of them took the stag before the sun cleared the dome. I'd have paid gold.
The tenth wouldn't. A cooper, Roggo, with forearms like barrel staves and a Lysene grandmother he'd never met.
"Look at her head," I said. "She hasn't lifted it since you came in. She doesn't want you."
"She hasn't seen me yet."
"She's smelled you since the gate."
"Then she knows I'm coming." He wiped his palms on his thighs, twice, and I watched his hands shake and watched him decide the shaking didn't count. "My girls eat turnip four days in seven, m'lord. You want me to take your silver and go home to that?"
I had no answer worth what he was about to spend. I let him go. Shrykos opened her jaws before he was ten strides past the chalk, and it was finished in the length of a breath and a half.
One.
The second was a rope-maker's widow who got closer than anyone expected and died against the far wall with her neck wrong.
Two. Yesterday had been three by this hour. I stood in the sand doing the arithmetic that lets a man keep going, and I hated myself with a kind of professional detachment, and I called the next name.
OTTO
From the royal gallery the floor looked orderly, which was the entire purpose of the floor.
Otto Hightower had spent thirty years learning what a crowd sounds like just before it becomes something else, and this crowd wasn't that. This crowd was a fair. They jeered the ones who took the bastard's silver. They roared for the ones who walked. Between deaths they bought sausage.
"Two this morning," said Lord Rosby, who had been sweating since the cooper.
"Two." Otto did not look away from the sand. "And yesterday the Crown acquired a dragon it did not previously possess. Bread is four times its spring price, my lord, and not one man down there is thinking about bread."
"The White is slowing it deliberately."
"Of course he is. He is paying men out of his own purse to leave." Otto found this admirable and entirely irrelevant. "Let him. He will hand me riders regardless, and he will hate having handed them to me, and a man who hates what he has done for you is steadier than a man who enjoyed it."
Below, the bastard raised his hand and stopped the floor for the fourth time in an hour. The galleries whistled at him.
"He holds the queen's writ," Rosby said. "He could close the gates with it."
"He could." Otto watched him standing down there in the churned sand, sleeves pushed back, arguing with a rope-maker's widow as though argument had ever moved anybody starving. "Then he would have to explain to nineteen hungry men why the door out of Flea Bottom shut on the very day he finished walking through it. He will not. He has not the stomach to be hated by his own."
He signalled the herald for the next name.
ULF
It was called and nobody answered, because by then Wick was already past the chalk.
He'd been on the roll two days and I still hadn't found the words for it. Nineteen years old, Lysene-fair, a burn scar down his jaw from a brazier when he was eight, and he had carried my messages since before I understood what I was building. I had put him nowhere near a dragon. Somebody else had.
He wasn't walking at Shrykos. He was walking at the silver.
"He rides her!" Wick had a good voice on him. He'd learned it running errands in a market. He turned as he went, arms wide, playing to the rail, and the galleries loved him for it. "The White rides her, and the White's no better blooded than me! If she's gentle enough for him she's gentle enough for—"
I was sixty yards off with a keeper's shoulder in my chest.
Soru, twice. The second one tore something in my calf and I didn't care, and it still wasn't enough, because Silverwing had lifted her head off the stone, and Silverwing doesn't warn twice.
She warned once. She always has. A stranger walking at her out of a shouting crowd got precisely what a stranger gets.
The fire came out of her in one long note and took Wick off his feet and put him against the base of the wall inside it.
"Daor!" I got it out with the heat already in my throat. "Ñuha riñar, daor!"
She stopped. Not for love of me and not out of obedience: she stopped the way she stops when the matter is settled to her satisfaction. The flame died back and left a shape on the floor that was still moving.
Tekkai. Everything I had of it, chest and arms and face, all at once.
Then I went in.
The fire on the sand burned low and blue and cared nothing for what I could take. My cloak went before I was three strides deep. Hair. Brows. The backs of both hands, which I wouldn't be able to close for six days. There is a point past which tolerance is only a word used by men who have never stood in it. I found that point four feet short of him, and kept going, because the alternative was standing in front of nine thousand people watching a boy burn.
He was on his side with his arms up. That saved half of him.
I took a grip in his belt and the back of his collar and brought him out at a walk, because running through burning oil with a man in your arms is how you drop him.
The galleries had gone quiet enough that I could hear my own boots on the sand.
Marston's keepers reached us with buckets before the chalk. Somebody dragged a soaked cloth over my head. I got Wick down and turned him, and his left side was a thing I won't set down in words, and the eye on that side was gone, and the right one opened and found me.
"Water. Not on his face. Wine if it's warm, and fetch Orwyle."
Otto was on his feet up in the gallery. He was speaking. What he was saying had the shape of a speech about courage.
I left Wick with Marston and walked to the inner gate.
The Dragonpit's gates run off a chain drum the size of a wine tun, with a ratchet pawl a man can kick clear if he knows where it sits. I knew where it sat. I kicked it out, took hold of the counterweight arm, and went heavy — eight thousand pounds and then past it, until the drum shrieked and forty feet of iron-strapped oak came down into the sand hard enough to jump the buckets.
The crossbar took both hands and everything left in me. It went into its brackets, and I bent it there so it would stay.
Otto was still speaking when I did it. Then he wasn't.
"The trials are ended," I said. To him. To the herald. To the rail. "By the queen's writ, which is the same writ that opened them."
Nobody cheered. High on the third tier two of Marsh's runners stood watching me, boys I'd fed since they were seven, and when I found their faces they turned and went down the stair and out into the street.
I went back for Wick myself. Nobody offered to help.
The wicket in a barred gate is narrow, and I had to turn sideways to carry him through it, past Otto's silence, past nine thousand faces, out into the white morning on the hill.
He was awake the whole way. He got his good hand up against my chest, weak, pushing.
"Don't," Wick said.