Chapter 69: The King Insists
ULF
Silverwing had been saddled since before dawn. I'd checked the girth twice, then a third time, which meant I had nothing left to do with my hands but wait for the thing I'd agreed to two months ago in a sickroom that smelled of poppy.
Wind came off the Blackwater cold for the season. The Dragonpit yard was full of people with no business in it. Grooms, two septons, most of Lord Jasper Wylde's household, a boy carrying a banner nearly as tall as the wall behind him. Somebody had told the court the king would fly, and the court had come to look at him do it.
The operation was meant to be two dragons and a lie. Vhagar low over the Riverlands, slow and visible, with Maidenpool at the end of the road. Maidenpool was the last northern harbour still feeding Rhaenyra's blockade. Daemon would have to answer for it or watch the river trade come apart in his hands, and Aemond wanted him in the air where Vhagar could reach him. I'd argued at council that two was thin. I'd lost that. I'd won exactly one thing that week, which was Hugh Hammer left behind in the city with Vermithor and a written order not to fly.
The doors under the eastern arch opened and four men carried the king out in a chair.
They'd put him in the gilded plate. Greaves buckled over legs that hadn't carried his weight since Rook's Rest, pauldrons on shoulders gone thin, the burn along his jaw shaved and powdered so it read as scar instead of wound. His hair was combed. Someone had dressed him for a vigil rather than a flight, and he knew it, and he'd let them do it anyway.
Lord Jasper Wylde got to him first and bowed until his knees cracked. "Your Grace. The realm will sing of this."
"The realm can't afford the wine to sing with." Aegon's voice carried further than his body ever would now. "Stand out of my light, Jasper."
Behind the chair, Marston and six keepers walked Sunfyre up the ramp on a bridle chain.
Gold going grey at the edges. The right wing rode wrong against his side, the joint knuckled over with old scar so it wouldn't fold flat and wouldn't open all the way, and every third step he put weight on the wing-claw to spare the shoulder. He didn't look at the crowd. Dragons don't perform.
"Can he carry a man an hour?" I asked.
Marston watched his dragon come. "He can carry him up," he said, and stopped there.
I went to find Aemond in the armoury under the north gallery, where he was doing his own buckles because he never let anyone touch his straps.
"You can forbid this with one word," I said. "He'd hate you and he'd live."
"I could." He drew the belt through and set the tongue. "I've thought about it since the maester's report, and I'm not going to."
"He'll fall off that dragon over open water."
"Then he falls off it over open water having been a king for one morning, which is longer than he's managed in three years." Aemond turned. That eye finished the sentence a breath before his mouth got there. "You want me to say something uglier than that. I'll say it. My brother in a crater outside Maidenpool solves eleven problems and creates one, and the one is a boy of six with a regency around him."
"You're telling me you won't turn back for him."
"I'm telling you I won't see him go down. I'll be looking at Caraxes." He took his helm off the rack. "And if you turn back, everyone in the sky will see who you turned back for. Be certain you want that written down."
"Written down where?"
"In the same place your name already is." He went past me into the light. "Check his straps yourself. Nobody else in that yard will do it honestly."
ALICENT
She was waiting at the mouth of the tunnel where the wind funnelled, and she had come without her ladies, which was how he understood it wasn't a court matter.
"Stop him," she said.
Ulf didn't insult her by asking who. "Your Grace, he's the king."
"He is a cripple in a chair with a headache he treats with poppy, and my father has stopped pretending otherwise, and my son Aemond stopped pretending a year before that." Her hands were folded. Her voice stayed level and it cost her to keep it there. "I have spent thirty years asking the wrong men for things. I asked Otto. I asked Aemond. I have watched who leaves a room and what happens after, and what happens after is whatever you decided in it. So I am asking you."
"Aemond commands the flight."
"Aemond wants a funeral with wings on it." She waited until he looked at her. "You could stop this. You simply will not."
He said nothing, which she had expected, and it still landed like a slap she had walked into deliberately.
"Then I will stay and watch you help him up," she said. "I want to be able to describe it accurately. Later. When someone asks me how it happened."
AEGON II
They lifted him out of the chair by the arms and under the knees, and the world went white at the edges as it always did when the left leg went past a certain angle, and he didn't scream, because there were four hundred people watching and he had decided in the night that this was the last day he would be pitied.
Orwyle was still talking. Something about the shoulder joint and the load a scarred membrane would carry. Aegon had signed a paper an hour ago saying the Grand Maester had objected. It had seemed important to Orwyle.
Sunfyre went down on the good side and they got him across the saddle horns.
He couldn't grip. That was the whole of it, in the end. A rider holds with his thighs and his heels and the small muscles nobody names until they're gone, and his were bone and pins and a knee that pointed slightly wrong, so they lashed him in. Chest, waist, one strap under each thigh, a fifth across the pommel. Cargo went onto a mule by the same method.
A groom fumbled the buckle at his hip and Aegon hit him across the ear, hard, and hated himself before his hand came back down.
The last time he'd sat in this saddle they had carried him off a burning field on a door. He remembered the fall better than the battle. He remembered the ground arriving.
Sunfyre turned his head and looked at him with one eye and didn't move.
"I know," Aegon said, quietly, so nobody else in the yard could have it. "I know what I'm asking."
ULF
I went up the ramp and checked every strap on him myself.
Chest, snug. Waist, two fingers of play, which I took out. The thigh straps were on backwards and would have worked loose in an hour of turbulence, so I unthreaded both and reset them, and my hands did it well, and that is the part I have never been able to put down since.
"You're very thorough," Aegon said.
"You'll want to be tight when he banks."
"That's not what I meant." He was sober. That was the horror of it. "You could have told my mother you'd stop me and then stopped me. She'd have forgiven you by supper."
"You'd have ended your sister's arrangement by morning."
"Yes." He almost smiled. "I would have. It's the only lever I've got left and I've used it on the one man who didn't have to care."
I pulled the last buckle through and set it. "Don't lean into the turns. Let him carry you."
Helaena's window across the city was dark. It had been dark since the second watch, and she hadn't come down, and I understood that better than I wanted to. She'd dreamed something four nights back and stopped writing halfway through the page.
I mounted. Aemond raised one gauntlet and Vhagar took the yard's air out with her.
"Sōvēs," I said.
Three dragons went east over the Bay in the early light, Vhagar leading, Silverwing high on the flank, and the gold one behind us both. Sunfyre climbed. He held for a hundred wingbeats and then the scarred wing began to cheat, opening a fraction late on the right, and every third beat gave back a little of the height he'd taken.
By the time the shore of Crackclaw slid under us, the gap between him and the rest of the flight had opened to a quarter mile, and it was still opening, and I flew on watching it widen.
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