Chapter 70: Maidenpool
ULF
Sunfyre lost height on every third wingbeat, and he'd been doing it since the Blackwater dropped behind us.
I flew level with him the whole way. Silverwing hated that. She wanted the head of the formation and kept sliding up the wind toward Vhagar's shadow, and I kept bringing her down with my knees until she made a noise in her chest like stone dragged over stone.
"Slower," I told her. "We go at his pace."
Aegon never looked across. He was strapped at the thigh and the waist with harness leather I'd buckled myself in the Dragonpit yard, and each time Sunfyre's left shoulder came up short he pitched forward into the straps and hauled himself upright again. Four hours of that. He hadn't complained once, which worried me more than the straps had.
Maidenpool rose out of the Bay of Crabs at midday under a flat white sky. Red roofs. A long grey sea wall. Behind it the harbour, and in the roadstead nine galleys at anchor with seahorse banners and their decks scoured bare.
Not loading. Not unloading. Bare.
I counted the shapes bolted along their foredecks and got to eleven before I stopped counting. Scorpions, cranked up, angled along the one lane a dragon takes into that harbour with the sun at his back.
Our lane.
"Aemond!" I threw it across sixty feet of moving air. "Their decks are clear! They've ranged the approach!"
Vhagar's head came round. That one eye found me.
"Then we go in over the wall and burn the ships."
"Somebody sold them the hour we left the Pit! Take us east, come back out of the sun before dusk, and they'll be shooting at nothing!"
"By dusk Daemon's over the Trident and we've flown three hundred miles to look at a town."
"Then let him go!"
Aemond turned forward. That was his answer and he didn't waste breath decorating it.
"He's not wrong." Aegon had his visor up and the wind was dragging water out of his eyes. "I didn't get lashed to a dragon to circle a fishing port!"
"There are eleven scorpions on those decks, Your Grace, and every one of them is pointed at the air we're about to fly through."
"Then we'll be quick about it."
"You can't be quick. Sunfyre can't be quick. Stay high, stay behind, and let your brother spend his own dragon."
He looked over at me then, and grinned with the wind going through his teeth. "That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me in a year."
Then the smoke over the harbour split, and gold came up through it.
Not Sunfyre's gold. Deeper, older, the colour of a coin left in a fire, and there was a rider low against the neck in black and red.
Syrax.
Behind her, out of the lee of the sea wall, something pale and quick with a strip of sailcloth bound tight across the shoulder of one wing. Moondancer flew crooked and flew anyway, and she was already climbing, and she wasn't climbing at Vhagar.
She was climbing at me.
"That's not Daemon!" I shouted. "Aemond, that's the queen! Get above them!"
The scorpions began to crank. I heard the ratchets across half a mile of open water, eleven of them clacking out of time with each other, and that sound decided the whole battle before a single dragon opened its mouth. Nothing could live under two hundred feet in that harbour. Which meant the fight was going up, and only two of us could go up.
I hauled Silverwing over and dropped my weight to nothing.
AEGON II
Vhagar went past him like a headland breaking loose.
Aegon watched his brother commit, watched the great brown wings take three beats to do what Sunfyre needed five to do, and understood that he was about to be left below with the ships.
The White came in close on his left, close enough to be heard.
"Hold this height! That shoulder never healed straight, it won't take a climb!"
"I know what it won't take."
"Then don't ask it of him!"
Aegon looked at the ships, and at the harbour, and at his brother going up without him.
"Sōvēs," he said. "Up."
Sunfyre didn't. The golden dragon held his line and turned his head back on the long neck, and the eye that found his rider wasn't a servant's eye.
At Rook's Rest a wing joint had been opened to the bone and a year of maester's work had knitted it wrong, and Aegon knew that, because he'd been in a bed beside that dragon for the worst of the same year. Cold made it stiffen. Long flights made it stiffen. Climbing put every pound of dragon on the outside of that shoulder and asked the bad joint to hold.
He knew it. That was the part he'd think about afterward, in the dark, on the good days when he could think.
"Sōvēs!" He hit the saddle horn with his fist. "You gold bastard, up!"
Sunfyre climbed.
Four beats. Five. The town tilted and slid away beneath them and for a moment Aegon was above the sea wall and above the masts and rising, and it was the best thing he had ever felt, better than wine, better than the crown, and he was laughing into his helm.
On the sixth beat the shoulder went.
There was no sound to it. That was what he never got over. It simply stopped being a wing on the left side and became a weight, and the sky went over, and the straps he had begged for held him exactly where he was while everything else in the world turned.
ULF
I had three seconds and I didn't use all of them.
Above me: Aemond, alone, with Syrax on his flank and Moondancer breaking off from her climb to join her. Vhagar could kill either of them and couldn't watch both.
Below me: gold, turning over, dropping through eight hundred feet toward the fields outside the walls with a man lashed into the saddle.
Silverwing was fast enough. I could have gone down, got under him, taken the fall at a thousand kilos and broken every rib I owned and maybe, maybe, dragged the angle out of it.
Then Vhagar dies, and the Greens have one dragon and a corpse.
"Sōvēs!" I screamed it. "Naejot!"
I went up.
The impact came behind me somewhere around the fourth beat of the climb, a flat thud that came up through the air rather than the ear, and I felt it in my back teeth.
I kept flying.
AEMOND
He saw the silver come.
Syrax had opened him along the flank and Moondancer was coming under his belly where Vhagar couldn't turn fast enough to answer, and Aemond had already made his peace with paying for the queen with his own dragon's blood if that was the price of her.
Then his brother's dragon fell out of the sky on his right, and the White didn't follow it down.
He came up.
Aemond understood the arithmetic instantly, the way he understood every arithmetic, and the understanding sat in him cold and clean and useful. Ulf had been given a king and a prince and one dragon's worth of time, and had spent it on the prince.
"Her wing!" he roared, knowing the man couldn't possibly hear him. "The queen's wing! Open it and she runs!"
Vhagar opened her mouth and the harbour turned white.
ULF
I unhooked my straps at four hundred feet.
Rhaenyra broke left away from Vhagar's fire and that put Syrax's underside across my line for the length of a breath, wing joint open, the pale skin behind the shoulder stretched thin.
I stepped off Silverwing's back into nothing, dropped to almost no weight at all, and kicked twice against the air to hold myself there.
The third kick wasn't for holding.
Rankyaku.
The blade went out flat and took Syrax at the base of the left wing where it met the body. Not through. Nothing goes through a dragon that size. But something in there let go, and the joint folded, and the queen of half the realm went sideways across her own saddle screaming a command I couldn't hear.
Syrax ran. Low, crabbing, west, dragging that wing.
Silverwing came under me and I caught the saddle horn and let my weight come back all at once, and the drop of it drove my knees into her shoulders hard enough to make her scream.
Moondancer was already there.
The girl came in at my flank with the sailcloth strap trailing loose off her dragon's wing, and I saw her face for perhaps a second and a half. She was shouting. I couldn't hear a word of it and I didn't need to.
I kicked low and wide, meant to cut air across Moondancer's nose and turn her, and the pale dragon rolled to take it on her armoured shoulder the way a good rider would have taught her.
The strapped wing didn't survive the roll.
Moondancer came out of it inverted over deep water, corkscrewing, and something small came off her back and went down into the grey.
I brought Silverwing around and put her low over the swell and made two passes, close enough that the scorpions began to fire and one bolt went through the membrane above my head with a sound like a drum splitting.
Chop. Foam. A drifting length of sailcloth.
No body.
I said that to myself twice, out loud, into the wind, so I would have it exactly right later. No body.
Then I turned east over the wall to the fields, where the barley was flattened in a long brown scar and a crater at the end of it was full of golden scale, one wing lying flat and open like a dropped sail.
I set Silverwing down forty feet from it and walked.
Inside the wreck, something was still making a sound.