Chapter 66: Return to King's Landing
HELAENA
She heard the dragons before she saw them.
That deep thrum of wingbeats, shaking the air itself. Three shapes coming down over the Hill of Rhaenys, and the pit's ruined dome throwing the noise back up at them until the flagstones buzzed under her slippers.
Helaena had been waiting since dawn.
The servants had tried to dissuade her. Improper for a queen to wait at the Dragonpit like a common wife, my lady, and there is a smell to the pit, my lady, and the wind is off the river. She'd let them finish, and then she'd sent for a stool, and then she'd sat on it for six hours.
*He came back. He's alive.*
Silverwing landed first, folding down through the broken roof with all the fuss of an old woman sitting into a chair. Vhagar came onto the outer yard and the whole hill moved. Vermithor last, hard, the way he did everything now.
Then a figure on Silverwing's shoulder, sliding down her foreleg, and it was Ulf.
He looked different. He stood with his weight further back than he used to. He checked the doorways along the pit wall before he checked the people, and he checked the people before he found her, and there was a moment in the middle of that where he wasn't anybody she knew.
She ran.
Propriety be damned. Protocol be damned.
She crashed into him, arms around his neck, face pressed against his chest. He smelled of tar.
"You came back."
"I promised."
She pulled back and took stock of him. Burns across the knuckles of both hands, small ones, already scabbed. A bruise along the jaw, purple going yellow at the edge, and too fresh to have come from the fighting. Something had happened after. And under his eyes the grey that came from not sleeping rather than from being hurt.
"You smell of fire and death."
"War smells that way."
She kissed him. Right there, in front of the dragonkeepers, in front of two Kingsguard, in front of Hugh Hammer's flat contemptuous stare from the Vermithor pit, in front of the four Rosby men who had somehow arranged to be at the Dragonpit that morning with no errand.
He was alive. Everything else could wait.
THE NURSERY
Jaehaerys bounced with excitement.
"Did you fight? Did you burn enemies? Was there glory?"
Ulf knelt to meet the boy's eyes. Six years old, and already dreaming of battle.
"There was no glory."
The excitement dimmed. "But you won, didn't you?"
"We won. But winning doesn't mean glory." His voice stayed gentle and didn't bend. "War isn't glorious, Jaehaerys. It's necessary sometimes. But men die screaming. Children lose fathers. Mothers weep over empty places at tables." He put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Remember that before you wish for battles."
Jaehaerys went quiet, working at it.
Jaehaera watched from her corner, book forgotten open in her lap. Violet eyes that gave a four-year-old no business being that still.
"Mother said you'd come back changed."
"Did she?"
"She said the fire would burn some things away." The girl tilted her head. "What did it burn?"
*Innocence. Hope. The belief that war could be clean.*
"Nothing important."
Jaehaera didn't look convinced. She went back to her book anyway, which was its own kind of verdict.
Maelor toddled over with his arms up. Ulf lifted him and settled him on his hip.
"Uff!" The boy's version of his name.
"Hello, little prince."
Maelor took hold of his face with both sticky hands and examined him at close range, seriously, the way he examined a beetle.
"Sad," the child pronounced.
*Two years old. And he can see it.*
"A little. But being here helps."
ALICENT
The summons came that afternoon.
Ulf found the Queen Mother in her solar, penned in by correspondence, a wax jack burning down beside her elbow and three seals already broken. The room smelled of ink and cold hearth.
"You wanted to see me, Your Grace."
"I wanted to understand you." Alicent set down her quill. "You protected my daughter's children from assassins. You've won a battle for my son's crown. Reports suggest tactical brilliance and unexpected mercy." She touched the topmost letter. "You also left Duskendale standing. The septons have made a great deal of that. The Faith would rather praise an unburned town than ask who ordered the fires that did get lit."
"I serve the realm."
"You serve Helaena." No accusation in it. An observation set down like a coin. "Everything else is secondary."
"Is that a problem?"
"That depends." She stood and walked to the window. Below, the Reach levies were still filing out of the mud fields toward the Rose Road, banners in the wet, marching to meet Daeron at Oldtown. "You're still a bastard. Whatever victories you win, whatever dragons you ride, that doesn't change. The lords will never fully accept you. The Faith will never bless whatever arrangement you have with my daughter."
"I'm aware of my position."
"Are you?" She turned. Sharp eyes, calculating, her father's exactly. "This morning she kissed you at the Dragonpit in front of half a hundred people. By supper it was in the Red Keep. By tomorrow it will be in Rosby's letters, and by the week's end it will be in a sept, in a sermon, with her name in it and not yours."
"Then I'll answer it."
"You will not. You'll ride your dragon and hold your tongue, and I'll answer it, because I've been answering that kind of talk since before you were born and I know what it costs." She sat back down and squared the letters. "It cost me two appointments and a marriage I did not want to arrange. I'll spend more. I'd like to know I'm not spending it on a man who leaves."
"You're not."
"Everyone says that." She pulled a fresh sheet toward her. "Prove it. Not today, not tomorrow. Prove it over years. Protect her when protecting her costs you everything. Stay when leaving would be easier. Be what she needs even when you're not what anyone else wants you to be."
*She's giving me permission. Or a warning. Maybe both.*
"My place is wherever Helaena needs me to be. That's the only place I care about."
Alicent studied him a long moment.
"I believe you," she said finally. "Gods help me, I believe you."
She dipped the quill and went back to her correspondence, and he understood the dismissal. At the door he stopped.
"There's a man's letter in my coat. He died at Duskendale asking me to tell his boy. The name's Willem, and the boy's somewhere in this city, and I don't know how to find one child in Flea Bottom."
Alicent didn't look up. "Leave it with my steward."
She never gave him warmth. She wasn't going to; he had made her daughter's life complicated past forgiving. But she took the letter, and she would find the boy, and they both now wanted the same three children kept breathing.
*Helaena. Always Helaena.*
THAT NIGHT
She tended his wounds in silence.
A damp cloth for the burns. Salve for the bruise. Careful hands that knew his body now, that knew where pressure helped and where it hurt.
"Hugh hit me," he said eventually.
"I saw the bruise." She didn't ask why.
"He wanted me to kill Daemon's daughter. I had her in front of me and I let her go."
"Why?"
"Because..." He hunted for it. "Because she was fifteen and her dragon was already ruined. Because killing her would make her a song. Because I'd done enough killing before breakfast."
Helaena set down the salve and climbed onto the bed beside him.
"Tell me about it. The battle. All of it."
So he did.
The gate chain running out through his gloves. Hugh's tar barrels and the drying sheds going up. The pale dragon coming out of the sun so low her wingtips cut the water. Tessarion's flank opening from wing root to hip, and the sound it made. The girl with the dagger, crying, telling him to finish it or get out of her sky. The old lord with a bolt still in his shoulder, laying his sword flat on both palms. The dying man in the fishing quarter who'd grabbed his ankle.
He talked until his voice went hoarse. Until the words ran out.
She listened. Didn't interrupt. Didn't judge.
When he finished, she kissed his forehead.
"You did what you had to."
"Did I?"
"Yes." Her certainty was absolute. "You won. You survived. You came back to me."
"I came back different."
"Different isn't bad." She curled against him. "Different is alive. Different is here. That's all that matters."
He held her until sleep finally came.