Chapter 62: First Blood
ULF
Three dragons flew over a burning world.
Vhagar led. She was old enough that her shadow crossed a whole hayfield at once, and when she passed above us the sun went out and came back. Aemond rode high in her saddle with his back straight and his chin down, and in an hour he didn't look up once.
Vermithor flew off my right shoulder, bronze and scarred along the jaw, and Hugh Hammer sat him with his boots loose in the straps and his head tipped back into the wind. He'd flown like that since his first morning. Loose. Like a man on a cart going to market.
Below us, Cole's army marched. Ten thousand men reduced to insects by altitude, strung along the Rosby road with their dust standing up off it in a long brown wall. Their banners snapped in the wind. Green colours, Targaryen dragons, the quartered arms of houses that had sworn inside the last month.
Silverwing flew steady beneath me. She'd done this before, I realized. Carried riders to battle. Watched the world burn from above.
How many wars has she seen? How many riders has she lost?
"Magnificent, isn't it?"
Hugh's voice carried across the wind. He'd brought Vermithor in so close that Silverwing dropped a wing's width to keep clean air, without being asked.
"What?"
"All of it." He swung an arm at the country under us, the woods and the strip fields and the far grey shimmer of the bay. "We can burn any of it. Kill anyone. Nothing can stop us."
"Everything can be stopped eventually."
"Not dragons." His grin was wide. Wrong. "Dragons are gods. And we ride them."
He peeled away and put Vermithor up into the thin cold air where the whole column could see him.
I watched him go.
He's losing himself. Or he was always this, and the dragon just took the lid off it.
Three hours on, the woodland under us opened into strip fields, and the village came up without warning. A cluster of cottages along a stream, a mill wheel, a pen of geese by the ford. Fifty people, near enough. Farming folk who'd never seen a dragon except in a bad dream, badly told.
Hugh dove.
"What is he—"
Vermithor's fire came before I could finish. The first cottage went up whole, thatch and rafters together, and the second took from it across the lane in the time it takes to say so. He came back along the stream and gave the rest of them the same.
People ran. Screamed. Burned.
Aemond's voice cut through the air above me, one word, an order. Hugh never turned his head.
I put Silverwing down in the stubble short of the mill and went in on foot. Went light for the run and got a burning door-beam off a man's legs with two fingers, and he was dead already and had been for some while. There were nine of them alive behind the geese pen. A girl of about twelve held the smallest one and looked at my chest and my hands and the silver dragon standing in her father's field, and never once at my face.
By the time Vermithor climbed back to formation, the village was ash.
We camped that night in a clearing four miles on, the dragons bedded around it in a ring no enemy would walk into on purpose. I found Hugh at a fire with a skin of wine he'd requisitioned from somewhere.
"That village. Those people."
He looked up. Unconcerned.
"Practice."
"Practice for what? Murdering farmers?"
"Practice for war. Fire doesn't care if it burns soldiers or peasants." He took a long drink. "Better to know what it feels like before we meet real enemies."
"Those were real enemies? Women and children?"
"They were Black sympathizers. Everyone in the Riverlands is."
"We're not in the Riverlands. We're twenty miles from the Kingsroad on the king's own land, and those were the king's own smallfolk, and you burned four months of somebody's harvest to see what it felt like."
"I don't care." He stood, corked the skin, and walked off toward Vermithor. "We're weapons now, bastard. Might as well enjoy it."
I watched him go.
He's going to become a monster. Might already be one.
The fire cracked and settled. Out in the dark Silverwing made a low sound in her chest, the one she made when I came back off the wall of the pit with my hands shaking, and I couldn't take the comfort in it.
What have I become part of?
AEMOND
The war council convened in Aemond's tent, with Vhagar breathing on the other side of the canvas and the whole tent lifting a little every time she did.
He spread the map and put a dagger on one corner and a wine cup on the other. Duskendale sat inside a red ring. The Dun Fort on its hill. The harbour drawn twice, once by a scout who could count masts and once by a scout who couldn't.
"Thirty miles of open water from that harbour to Dragonstone," he said. "One hour's flying. The Lady Baela is on Moondancer, and Moondancer is fast."
"One dragon against three?" Hugh laughed. "Easy."
"Not easy." Aemond did not look up from the map. "The last time I brought three dragons to a field, the Princess Rhaenys came up off Rook's Rest on Meleys with the odds worse than that, and she took a year out of Vhagar's wing before she died. The Red Queen. Old. Experienced. Deadly. She knew aerial combat. She knew where a dragon is thin." Now he looked up, and the single eye came to rest on Hugh. "And she never once burned a village for practice."
Hugh's smile faded slightly.
"Cole's army assaults at dawn on the sixth day. When something comes off that island to answer, we strike." Aemond's finger moved out over the drawn water. "Vhagar takes primary engagement. You two flank. Cut off retreat, harass her if she tries to run."
"And if she stands and fights?"
"Then we overwhelm her with numbers. Three to one. Nothing that small lives through it."
Ulf had been studying the map since it was opened. "You're using Cole's soldiers as bait."
"I am using every advantage available." There was no apology in it. "Those men know what they signed up for."
"Do they? Did anyone explain that they're live bait for a dragon trap?"
"They fight for the crown. That's explanation enough."
"Then buy them something with it. Hold Daeron back."
Aemond's hand stopped on the map.
"Tessarion is the fastest thing either side has, and she's the only piece on this table your sister can't count from Dragonstone. Put her in the line at dawn and she's just a fourth dragon over a wall. Keep her grounded three miles off and she's the reason we still have an army at noon."
"He will hate it."
"He'll hate it less than we'll hate needing her."
Aemond rolled the map slowly and put the dagger back in his belt. "Tessarion stays on the ground until I send for her. Get some rest, both of you. Four more days to the sea. Then we prove our worth."
He went out. Hugh followed him, still talking about how easy it was going to be, and the canvas fell shut behind them.
ULF
I stayed by the fire until it was more ash than fire.
Soldiers as bait. Villages burned for practice. And this is just the beginning.
I thought about Helaena in the godswood with her needle-marked fingers. Jaehaerys knocking the bronze dragon into the silver one and laughing. Jaehaera reading. Maelor asleep with his fist shut around her sleeve.
Is this what I'm fighting for? This?
No. I was fighting for them, and everything else on this road was the price of it, and the only question worth asking was whether the price would eat the thing I was paying it for.
I put the fire out with my boot and slept against Silverwing's foreleg. Somewhere after midnight the wind turned and brought the smell of the village down the road to us and left it there, and at dawn the column formed up and marched into it.