Chapter 71: The Regent's Word
ULF
Sunfyre was still making the sound.
Not a roar. Smaller than that, and worse. A wet click at the back of the throat, once for every breath, and the breaths were coming further apart than breaths should. Golden scale lay in sheets across the churned earth where the impact had peeled him open. His left wing had folded under his own weight and stayed folded.
Aegon was beneath the shoulder of it, still lashed into his saddle.
I made myself light before I climbed. Half my weight, then less, until my boots barely creased the hide, because whatever was broken inside that chest didn't need me standing on it.
The straps had held. If anyone wanted a joke out of the day, there it was. I'd checked those buckles myself in the Dragonpit yard four mornings ago, and they'd done exactly what I built them to do. They kept a man on his dragon the whole way down.
I cut them with my knife, sawing at leather gone stiff and slick, and eased him off the horn onto flat ground.
His legs were wrong in the two old places and in three new ones. The helm came away in pieces. Fire had gone in through the visor slot and found the wool padding, and it had burned in there while he fell, and it hadn't stopped burning when he landed.
He breathed. That was the whole of what he did, and he did it.
Vhagar came down behind me hard enough to shift the field, and every horse in Cole's picket line screamed at once.
"Does he live?"
"He lives."
"Will he wake?"
"I don't know."
Aemond came around the wing with soot to his elbows and the sapphire catching low sun. He didn't kneel. He looked down at his brother for as long as it takes to count three, and nothing moved in his face.
"Say that again when Cole comes," he said. "In those words. Not *he lives*. *He may never wake.*"
"That's the truth."
"I know. That's why it'll hold."
I wanted Aegon inside the Red Keep with a maester's hands on him before the light went, and it wasn't mercy that wanted it. A king who dies in a field belongs to whoever carries the news home. I'd read that lesson in a book, in a life nobody here would believe I'd had, and it hadn't stopped being true for the crossing.
"Where's your column?" I asked.
"Four hours. Three, if his outriders push, and they'll push."
He was already looking at the ridgeline. I thought he was watching for stragglers.
AEMOND
Cole's outriders crested the ridge at the third hour past noon, and the column's dust came up behind them like a second army.
Aemond had chosen his ground before any of them were close enough to make out a face. He stood on the crater's lip with his brother laid out below him and Vhagar's bulk behind, and he waited there while a thousand tired men arranged themselves into an audience.
Criston Cole came off his horse before it stopped. He went down on one knee beside the king, and whatever crossed his face then was real; Aemond gave it a moment out of policy rather than feeling.
"Gods be good," Cole said.
"He may never wake. Orwyle will say the same in three days, and he'll be right."
Cole stood. His jaw worked. "Then who commands, my prince?"
"I do. From this hour, in the field and in the city both."
"The small council must confirm a regency. There's form to it."
"The council will confirm what has already happened, or the council will explain to the realm why the crown sat empty while Daemon Targaryen held the Riverlands." Aemond let his voice reach the front ranks, which was the entire purpose of standing where he stood. "My grandsire will want it done in a chamber. Candles, precedence, his voice first and longest. He can have the chamber. He cannot have the hour."
"And after?"
"Jasper Wylde to the laws; he's a hanging man and we need hanging done. Tyland Lannister keeps the coin, because he counts well and steals modestly. Orwyle keeps his chain, since my brother will need him alive." He paused. "The rest can find other rooms to stand in."
Cole looked at the king again. Then at the men, who were watching, who would carry whatever they saw back to a hundred hearths.
"I'll say what I saw," he said. "The prince took the field, held it, and took command of it when the king could not."
He knelt properly then, in front of three companies, and the thing was done. It had cost less than Aemond budgeted for.
The White was working ten feet away, splinting a shattered leg to two spear shafts with strips off his own cloak.
"You were nearest him," Cole said. "When Sunfyre went."
"I was above him. Vhagar was carrying two dragons at once and Silverwing was the only thing that could reach her." He didn't look up from the knot. "The wing failed at the top of the climb. Old wound, in the joint. He was past me and falling before I'd finished the turn."
Every word of it was true. Aemond had watched silver come up under his belly at the moment he needed silver there, and he could measure, to a wingbeat, how much of that turn had been the sky's doing and how much had been a choice made by a man with two things in front of him.
He said nothing. A lie a prince permits is a lie a prince owns, and he had few enough holds on this one.
"Did he fight?" Cole asked.
Nobody answered him. The White pulled his knot tight and reached for the second shaft.
ULF
Cole wanted a litter and four days of good road.
"He'll die on the second day," I said. "Every rut in the Kingsroad goes straight up through those ribs."
So I buckled him onto that dragon for the second time in one day.
Sunfyre wouldn't be moved off him regardless. Twenty men with ropes and poles tried to shift the wing enough to work under it, and the golden head came around low and slow across the ground, and twenty men found other duties. He let me close. He'd watched me handle the straps in the Dragonpit and he remembered, and that was the only credential I had.
Aegon went across the saddle on his belly, chest padded with rolled cloaks, wrists and thighs strapped, head turned so his ruined cheek rode clear of the leather.
I was checking the last buckle when the noise behind me stopped.
Caraxes stood on the ridgeline with the sun behind him.
That long red neck came up out of the treeline and kept coming, further than a neck has any business going, and the shadow of it fell across the top three ranks of Cole's column. Men who had spent the morning cheering a victory stopped making any noise at all. Somebody's horse bolted and nobody chased it.
Daemon didn't shout. There was no herald, no challenge cried across a battlefield, none of the things the songs promise. He sat his saddle at four hundred yards and he looked, and he wasn't looking at Vhagar, and he wasn't looking at the king strapped to a dying dragon.
He was looking at the white-haired man beside them.
It went on. Long enough for Aemond to reach Vhagar's foreleg. Long enough for Cole's archers to string wet bowstrings that would have done nothing. Long enough for me to run the arithmetic and hate every line of it: Vhagar half-blown, Silverwing spent to the bone, a broken dragon on the ground that neither of us would abandon, and Caraxes fresh.
He'd have won. He knew the number as well as I did, better, because he'd been counting dragons since before I was born into this body.
Caraxes turned. Not fast. He took the ridge in three long strides and went up, and the two of them went west with the light on them, toward the Trident, toward Harrenhal, toward whatever he was sitting on and waiting for.
He'd come to see me. Then he'd gone away to keep the appointment for a better day, and he'd let me watch him choose it.
At Stone Hedge he'd asked for the White by name. I'd taken that for a boast. Standing in that field with my hand on a strap, I understood I'd been put on a list, and that Daemon Targaryen didn't burn through his lists in any order but his own.
We flew at half a dragon's pace and it still took until dusk.
Sunfyre couldn't hold a line. He'd fall off to the left, catch himself with a sound I felt in my teeth, drag back up. Silverwing flew under his damaged side the whole way, close enough that our wingtips crossed on the downstroke, and she stayed there without being told. Vhagar led. Behind us the column marched home the slow way with a victory to sell.
Somewhere over the Bay I started counting my money.
The bread riot had eaten most of what I had, and what was left sat in one strongbox, under one floor, in one city that had just changed hands in an afternoon. A regent can empty a man's purse with a sentence and a seal. So I went down my list of quiet men and quieter rooms, a septry cellar, a tanner's yard, a hollow under a pier on the Blackwater, and I began deciding how to break one box into seven.
It's an ugly way to spend a flight home with a king strapped across the saddle in front of you. I did it anyway.
The Dragonpit came up black against a green sky.
Sunfyre didn't land so much as stop flying. He hit the sand short of the marks, skidded, went down on his chest, and the noise the crowd made had nothing triumphant in it. Dust rolled up the tiers and out through the doors.
Helaena was on the steps before it settled.
She hadn't been told; nobody had outflown us to tell her. She stood in the doorway of the pit in a grey dress with her hands loose at her sides, and she was looking at the golden shape and the small strapped thing on its back, and I knew she'd been standing there since morning.
I had every fact of the day in my mouth and no version of it I could give her.
I unbuckled my harness and swung down into the dust.