Chapter 64: The Girl on the Pale Dragon
ULF
Burnt tar and salt. That was Duskendale an hour after dawn, and I was standing in the middle of it with the last of the gate chain running out through my gloves.
The Sea Gate hung open behind me. Cole's men were already through it, boots loud on wet cobble, shields up, taking the quay street house by house without one torch between them. Somebody in the fish market had started ringing a bell and nobody had thought to stop him.
I let the chain go. It rattled down into the winch pit and lay still.
Then the light on the water changed.
She came in low out of the east with the sun behind her, so low her wingtips tore two white lines across the swell. Pale green, near to white where the scale had worn thin, no longer than a river barge. Nothing I'd seen in this world moved like that.
Moondancer.
The girl on her back was fifteen. I knew the number and had no honest way to explain how I knew it.
Silverwing was a hundred yards up the quay with her head down in a burst grain sack, and a hundred yards is a very long way when the sky changes owner.
Boots came down the harbour steps behind me. A boy in Darklyn blue, fourteen at most, carrying a spear with a strip of white linen knotted under the head.
"My lord Staunton asks terms." His voice broke on the last word. "He'll open the inner yard himself. He asks that the town be spared."
"Keep your men off the walls and off the roofs. Nothing in their hands with an edge on it. Tell him now, not in an hour."
"He asked for terms from a prince."
"He's getting them from me."
The boy didn't move. He looked at my hands, still black with winch grease. "Is it true you can't burn?"
Vhagar came over the roofline before I could answer, and the answer stopped mattering.
Her shadow put the whole quay in the dark for two heartbeats. Slate cracked off a roof and slid down into the harbour. Aemond stood in his stirrups with one fist on the saddle horn, and he didn't send a herald.
"THE GIRL IS DAEMON'S." Thin at that height, and perfectly clear. "KILL HER. I WANT IT SEEN."
I was already running.
DAERON
Tessarion had held her circle over the Hollard hills since the first horn, and Daeron had counted every pass. Nine. Nine slow turns above the same brown fold of ground while men died three miles west of him.
Reserve, the White had called it at the war table, and Aemond had agreed, which told Daeron exactly what his brother thought he was.
Then the smoke over the harbour went from grey to black, and something small and pale crossed under it.
He didn't wait for the horn. There wasn't going to be one.
"Sōvēs!"
Tessarion went down the sky like a thrown spear, cobalt and joy, screaming her challenge before he'd finished saying it. She was faster than Vermithor. She was faster than anything the Greens had put in the air.
She wasn't faster than the thing coming off the water.
The pale dragon turned inside her. Turned in a space Daeron would have sworn was too small, came up under Tessarion's belly, and opened her flank from wing root to hip with both hind claws. Membrane split with the sound of a sail giving way in a gale.
Then the sea was above him and the roofs were below him, and his chest strap was the only thing keeping him in the saddle, and his beautiful blue dragon was screaming.
Nine passes, and he had learned nothing in any of them.
ULF
Silverwing took the climb hard, wings biting, the harbour dropping away under us in one long grey smear.
Below, Cole's infantry were packed four deep in the quay street. Two thousand men in a space the width of a cart. One bad exchange of fire over that street and Duskendale becomes the day the Greens burned their own army.
So I kept it high, and I put Silverwing between the pale dragon and Tessarion's fall.
Tessarion caught herself at forty feet, ploughed a wave flat, and staggered out over the bay trailing a red line. Alive. Daeron still strapped to her.
Then Baela came for me.
She came the whole way in silence. No war cry, no horn. She flew that dragon like a knife is used, close and economical and mean, and she was better at it than anyone in Aemond's camp had allowed for, and she had picked me out of the sky on purpose.
I unhooked and stepped off Silverwing's back into the wind.
Two steps on the air, Geppo, my body slammed down to almost nothing so the air would hold me. Moondancer's wing came across my sight like a wall of green glass and I put every ounce of leg I owned through the joint at her shoulder.
Rankyaku. The blade went through membrane and into the joint behind it.
Moondancer folded. She dropped forty feet before she caught herself on the one good wing, the other trailing wrong, and the girl on her back hauled her out of the spin by main strength and nothing else.
I came down onto Silverwing's neck light as sailcloth and let my weight back into me.
Then we were level, twenty feet apart, and I could see her.
Silver hair torn out of its braid. Her father's jaw. A cut across her cheekbone from her own dragon's spine plate. She had a dagger out. Fifteen years old, on a crippled dragon, over open water, holding a dagger at me because it was the last thing left within reach.
She was dead. She had been dead from the moment the joint opened. Aemond was somewhere above us with his mouth already shaping the order again, Cole was watching from the wall, and two thousand men had their faces turned up.
"Fly east," I said. "Keep the wing still. Don't climb."
"Then finish it." She was crying and furious about it. "Finish it, or get out of my sky."
"Fly east."
She spat at me. The wind took it long before it reached anything.
I gave Silverwing her head and drove Moondancer seaward, all that white bulk crossing the smaller dragon's line again and again, herding, never once opening her jaws. Baela fought it for half a mile. Then she stopped fighting it, because she had a wing that was going to fail her and a long way to go on it.
HUGH HAMMER
Hugh watched all of it from three hundred feet above the fishing quarter, with the quarter burning nicely underneath him.
He'd been promised the harbour. The harbour had been taken by a man on foot with his bare hands, which was a joke Hugh intended to make later and louder. So he had taken the nets and the drying sheds and the tar barrels instead, and the smoke of it stood up in a column you could see from Rosby.
Below him the little pale dragon went east with one wing hanging, and the White's silver bitch went with her, and no fire came out of either of them.
He had heard the prince. Every man on that wall had heard the prince.
Hugh had walked into a dragon's flame with his skin coming off him to earn the beast he was sitting on. He had earned it. Nobody handed it to him for being clever at a table. And the man who had been handed everything had just been given a kill in front of the whole army and had turned it loose over the water like a bad tenant.
There was no reading it two ways. Hugh had never been much good at reading. He was excellent at this.
He put Vermithor's head down toward the quay, and the old bronze bastard went, and hated him the whole way.
ULF
Lord Staunton came down the harbour steps himself, which I'd expected, and came alone, which I hadn't.
He was sixty and built like a dock bollard, and somewhere in the morning he'd taken a crossbow bolt through the meat of the shoulder and hadn't had it seen to. He laid his sword flat across both palms.
"I held the Stepstones garrison six years," he said. "I know when a thing is finished. It's finished."
Cole reached the bottom step at the same moment I did, white cloak filthy to the knee. "Prince Aemond will take the surrender."
"Prince Aemond is over the bay." I took the sword. "My lord. Your garrison stacks arms in the fish market inside the hour. Your household isn't touched. The town isn't burned. You go to King's Landing under guard and you answer for it there, in a hall, with a maester writing it down."
Staunton looked at the sword in my hands a moment longer than a proud man should have needed to.
"My daughter is in the inner yard," he said. Flat, no plea in it, a fact set down between us. "She's eleven."
I had nothing to give him for that, so I gave him nothing, and he seemed to prefer it.
"By whose authority do you set terms," Cole said.
"Mine. Until the prince lands."
"I'll be reporting the hour of it."
"Report the hour of it."
He didn't look away when I caught him watching me, and that was new. Cole had been cold since the Antlers. This had a floor under it.
Vhagar came down on the outer mole and shook grit out of every wall on the waterfront. Aemond crossed the quay on foot with his cloak still full of wind and stopped when he saw the sword across my forearm and the old man standing free beside me with no rope on him.
"You've taken it."
"It's taken."
"I gave an order about the girl. In the hearing of my whole army."
"You did."
He looked out at the bay, where there was nothing left to see except weather. When he spoke again his voice had gone flat and reasonable, which with Aemond was the register to be afraid of.
"My brother charged out of reserve without leave and very nearly lost me a dragon. He flies for Oldtown at first light. Tessarion goes with him. The Hightower host needs a Targaryen at its head more than I need a boy in my sky."
"That leaves three of us."
"Three. Myself, yourself, and the smith." There was nothing in the word *smith* but contempt. "See that all three of you can still count to three when it matters."
Vermithor hit the quay behind me hard enough to crack the flags, and Hugh Hammer came off the saddle before the wings had settled, gauntlets still on his hands, and started walking.