Chapter 68: Escalation - Part 2
ALICENT
Lady Meredyth Rosby was the first to say it aloud.
"Perhaps the queen's... friendship... should be formalized or ended."
The words carried across the small council antechamber, where minor nobles waited for audiences. Conversations paused. Heads turned. Somebody's boy stopped fussing with a message tube and held it still against his chest.
Alicent stood near the window, reviewing petitions. Her hand didn't stop moving across the parchment. She had been waiting eleven weeks for one of them to do it in a room with witnesses, and had assumed it would be a man.
"Lady Meredyth. You have opinions about my daughter's arrangements?"
"Only concerns, Your Grace."
The woman was bold. Alicent gave her that much. Few in this castle would put a thing to the Queen Mother's face when a whisper behind her would do the same work at no cost.
"The queen spends nights away from the royal apartments. The servants talk. The lords notice. It reflects... poorly."
"On whom?"
"On the crown, Your Grace. On the sanctity of marriage. On—"
"On Aegon?" Alicent finally looked up. "My son, who kept three mistresses in Flea Bottom. Who hasn't visited his wife's chambers in years. Who was carried out of a brothel wearing nothing but his crown, and whose reckoning for it I paid, in coin, from my own household, so that no clerk of my father's would have to write it down."
Lady Meredyth's mouth opened. Closed.
"My daughter's friendship with her sworn protector is the least of this court's scandals." Alicent returned to her petitions. "You may go."
The dismissal was absolute. The woman went out backwards, which nobody had required of her, and two of the lords by the hearth found somewhere else to look.
Ulf watched from his corner, the queen's representative, invisible until needed. He inclined his head half an inch as Alicent passed the window, and she didn't acknowledge it, because he had misread her and she preferred him to go on misreading her.
She was not protecting him. Let the man carry it home and hold it up to the light and find nothing inside it. She was protecting Helaena, who had been happy for less than a year of her life, and what she had bought this morning was time.
But time was running out. Every whispered conversation. Every pointed glance. Rosby would write to Oldtown by Friday, because Rosby wrote to Oldtown about everything, and her father read every page that came south. The court knew, and the court judged, and eventually the court would demand resolution.
And her son could end it in a morning with a quill and a septon, and he knew it, and he had known it since the spring.
ULF
A raven came in at midnight.
I was in my quarters with Helaena asleep in my bed when the knock came. A page with a sealed scroll, hair flat on one side, still half in his own dream.
"From the Riverlands, m'lord. Urgent."
I read by candlelight. The words burned themselves into my memory. Four lines in a hedge septon's hand, no seal on it worth the wax.
Daemon burns Stone Hedge. Twenty dead. Before the flames took them, he was heard asking: "Where is the bastard who killed my assassins? Where is the White?"
He seeks the Dragonslayer. He remembers Blood and Cheese.
He hadn't burned that castle to take it. He'd burned it so that men would run out of it repeating a question, and carry the question east until it found me. Twenty dead was the postage.
The candle guttered. Helaena stirred.
"What is it?"
"Daemon." I set down the scroll. "He's hunting me."
She sat up, silver hair loose around her shoulders, sleep-soft and blinking.
"Because of the assassins?"
"Because I stopped his revenge. Because I killed people he paid to kill your children." I looked at her. "He's burning castles looking for me."
"Then don't go to him."
"He'll come to me eventually. That's how Daemon works. He doesn't stop. Doesn't forget."
She was silent for a long moment. Down in the yard a horse went past on the cobbles and neither of us moved until it had gone.
"Can you beat him?"
The honest answer was that I didn't know. Caraxes is older than Silverwing and battle-tested, ridden by the most dangerous warrior alive. Daemon has had thirty years on that red animal. I have had a year and a half. My Rokushiki is strong but incomplete, and my dragon bond is new, and there is no way to hurry either of those things that doesn't involve being wrong in the air over water.
"I can try."
"That's not good enough."
"It's what I have."
She crawled across the bed and took my face in her hands, and her hands were cold.
"Then get better. Train harder. Find whatever edge you need." Her voice fierce. "You don't get to die, Ulf. Not by his hand. Not by anyone's."
"I'll do my best."
"Do more than that."
Then she got up, and lit her own candle, and sat at the table with the book she keeps her dreams in. She wrote four lines and stopped halfway down the page with the quill still touching it, and after a while she shut the book and came back to bed without saying anything, and I didn't ask, and that was a decision I made in about two heartbeats and have gone over many times since.
I went down to the Dragonpit an hour later, to the sand floor inside the outer wall where the keepers break feed for the young ones, because it is the only ground in the city I can hit as hard as I like.
Moonlight painted the stone silver.
I moved through the Rokushiki forms with desperate intensity. Soru bursts across the yard, two chained, sometimes three, the third always landing wrong. Tekkai holds until my muscles screamed and my breath came out of me in strips. Rankyaku kicks that split the air and opened a feed barrel at twenty paces, and then a second that went a foot wide and took the corner off a post.
But the combination eluded me.
Rokuogan. The ultimate technique. All six forms unified into a single devastating attack.
I'd read about it in my borrowed memories. Knew it was possible. Knew it required perfect synchronization of every technique I'd learned.
But every time I tried—
Soru for speed. Tekkai for defense. Rankyaku for range. Geppo for mobility. Shigan for piercing. Kami-e for evasion.
They slipped apart. Like trying to hold water. Like trying to catch smoke.
I set my feet and drove both fists into the granary post and got two split knuckles and a noise like a man hitting wood. On the third attempt my weight went to ten tons half a heartbeat early and both heels punched through the sand into the flagging underneath, and I stood there in two holes with my arms shaking and nothing in front of me damaged at all.
I collapsed against the wall. Breathing hard. Frustrated.
Silverwing's shadow passed overhead. She'd been watching from her perch on the Dragonpit's rim.
She landed. Lumbered over. Pressed her snout against my chest, and the heat of her came through my shirt.
A rumble. Patient. Understanding. I've been putting words to those sounds for a year and I know whose words they are.
Patience, rider. It will come.
"I don't have time for patience," I told her. "Daemon is hunting us."
Another rumble. Unimpressed.
Dragons have faced worse. So have you.
"Have I?"
She pulled back. Looked at me with those ancient eyes.
You walked through my fire. You stood when others burned. You'll find a way.
Maybe she was right. Maybe the combination would come when I needed it, not when I forced it.
Or maybe I'd die trying.
I stood. Stretched. Prepared for another round. My knuckles had stopped bleeding and started stiffening, which is worse.
One more hour. Then sleep. Then do it again tomorrow.
The war wouldn't wait. Neither would Daemon.