Chapter 74: Signs and Portents
HELAENA
Two moons. She'd missed two moons.
The first time she'd blamed stress. War. Fear. Her husband's broken body in the room down the hall, and the smell that came off the dressings when the maesters changed them.
The second time, denial became impossible.
Grand Maester Orwyle's chambers smelled of vinegar, crushed mint and old parchment. Ravens shifted in their cages along the far wall. One of them muttered something that was almost a word and then thought better of it. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched the old man work.
He pinched a dried leaf between finger and thumb, crushed it, smelled it, set it down. He unrolled a chart across the table, marked with moons and forty years of small crabbed notes, and ran one yellow fingernail along it twice.
"Your Grace is certain of the timing?"
"I'm certain."
Orwyle set down his instruments. He had served three kings and buried two of them, and whatever moved behind his face didn't come through to the front.
"Then congratulations are in order. You are with child."
Outside, a cart went by on the cobbles and a man swore at his mule. The world kept making its ordinary noises. Helaena listened to them and waited to learn whether what had opened in her chest was joy or the floor giving way.
"How far along?"
"Approximately two months, based on your description."
Two months. She set it against the other calendar, the one the whole court kept without ever writing it down. Two months ago Aegon had already been in his coma. His body was being rebuilt one painful piece at a time, bone laid against bone, and it had been that way long before this child took root.
"This information stays between us."
"Of course, Your Grace."
"I mean it, Orwyle." She met his eyes and kept them. "Not the King. Not the Prince Regent. Not my mother. No one."
He rolled the chart. His hands were steady doing it, and that steadiness told her he had already worked the sums himself, probably before she'd finished her first sentence.
"I understand, Your Grace. My discretion is absolute."
He understands the implications. Anyone with a calendar can do the mathematics.
"Does the king dream, do you think?" Orwyle asked. He wasn't looking at her. "In that sleep. I have wondered."
She didn't answer him. There was nothing she could say to that which wouldn't frighten them both.
She rose. The room tipped sideways and she flattened her fingers on the table until it came level again.
"If anyone asks, I consulted you about sleep difficulties. The dreams have been troublesome."
"The dreams have been troublesome," Orwyle repeated. "That will be my only memory of this visit."
She left without looking back. In the corridor a guardsman stood where no guardsman had stood a month ago, and he found something interesting on the floor as she passed, which frightened her more than staring would have.
ULF
"I need to tell you something."
Helaena's voice was strange. Controlled in a way that meant she was anything but.
I'd been holding myself at ten times my weight since noon, working the forms slow, the boards under me groaning at every step. When she came through the door I let it go. The floor went quiet. That was how badly she'd scared me, and she hadn't told me anything yet.
We stood in my chambers. Ours, really, though we kept up the fiction of separate rooms for servants who'd stopped believing it long ago. Afternoon light came through the window in a hard yellow slant and lay across the rushes. A normal day. Nothing in it to say the world was about to move.
"What is it?"
"I'm pregnant."
The words didn't make sense. Then they did.
Pregnant. A child. Our child.
I went still. Completely, absolutely still.
"How long?"
"Two months. Maybe slightly more."
Two months. Long after Aegon's injury. Long after he stopped being capable of fathering anything.
"Does anyone else know?"
"Orwyle. I've sworn him to secrecy."
She hadn't come any further into the room. She stood with her back near the door like a woman who'd left herself a way out.
"I practised it three ways on the stairs," she said. "Coming up."
"What were the other two?"
"Lies. Better ones."
My mind ran the ground anyway, because it always does. Succession. Legitimacy. A birth date that any clerk in the realm could count backward from. The scandal that would come out of it, and who would use it, and how fast.
Then I stopped thinking.
"A child." The words came out wondering. "Ours."
"Yes."
A smile broke across my face. I couldn't stop it and didn't want to. With everything stacked against us, with the danger and the arithmetic and the whole rotten city grinding away outside, joy came up in me like unexpected sunlight.
"A child."
Helaena watched me carefully. She was waiting for the other reaction. The fear. The cold assessment. The part of me that measures things and finds them wanting.
For one moment I let myself just be happy.
Then the rest of it came back.
"This changes everything. If Aegon dies, the child's bastardy will be obvious. If he lives, the timing is impossible to explain."
"I know."
"We need to plan. We need to—"
She crossed the floor and put her hand over my mouth.
"Tomorrow. Plan tomorrow. Tonight, just..." She pressed her palm flat against my chest, where the heat of the forms hadn't left me yet. "Tonight, be happy with me. We have so little happiness."
I pulled her close and held her against me.
A child. Despite everything, a child.
"I'm terrified," I admitted.
"So am I."
"But also..." There weren't words for the rest.
"I know." She kissed me. Soft. Certain. "I know."
THAT NIGHT
Helaena's screaming woke me.
She thrashed in the bed, tangled in the sheets, one arm striking the post hard enough to bruise. Her voice came out torn.
"Fire! Fire everywhere! The child—the child stands in ruins. Silver hair and dark eyes. Building something new."
"Helaena!" I got her shoulders and shook her, gently. "Wake up!"
Her eyes snapped open. Wild. Seeing nothing in the room.
"The path is blood and fire. So much fire." Her voice wasn't entirely her own. It had gone down into that flat prophetic register I'd learned to be afraid of. "I see them grown. Standing where kings fell. Building from ashes."
"See who? Our child?"
"Our child." Tears ran off her jaw onto my wrist. "Born of dragon and shadow. Rising when everything falls."
She collapsed against me and sobbed. I held her and let her shake it out. Somewhere below, a sentry called the hour across the yard and another answered him, and neither of them knew a thing about it.
"We'll protect them. No matter what."
"That's what frightens me." Her voice came muffled against my chest. "What you'll have to become to keep that promise."
"I'll become whatever I need to be."
"I know. I've seen it. The man who walks through fire. The monster who kills monsters." She lifted her head. "But the child in my dreams... they love you. They're proud of you. Whatever you become, they see it differently."
Our child. Pride. Love.
I had nothing to say to that, so I just held her.
Dawn came eventually.
I stood at the window and watched the light spread over King's Landing, roof by roof, the Blackwater turning from grey to brown. Helaena slept behind me. Worn out by the vision, by the fear, by carrying an impossible future in a body that didn't show it yet.
Down in the yard the watch changed. One of the men glanced up at our window while he took his spear back, and then made himself stop.
My hand rested on her stomach. Still flat. Still hiding what it held.
I've fought assassins. Survived dragons. Killed in war.
Fatherhood frightened me more than any of it.