Chapter 83: Aegon's Death
AEGON II
Gold came up through the smoke, and he knew it was his own dragon, and he knew it was already too late.
He'd been having that one since Maidenpool. It always began well. Four beats, five, the sea wall going under him and the town sliding sideways out of the world, and he was laughing inside his helm, and nothing in his life had ever felt so much like being a king. Then the sixth beat, and no sound at all, and the sky turning over.
Waking was worse than the dream. Waking meant the leg.
"He's back with us," someone said, far off, in a room.
Candle grease. Vinegar. Under both of them, sweet and thick and his own, the smell that had been in the bed with him since summer.
His mother's hand was on his forehead. He knew it by the rings.
"Aegon. Aegon, look at me."
He got the good eye open. The other had been ruined at Rook's Rest, and the cheek beneath it had gone tight and shining where the fire took it, and a field outside Maidenpool had opened that same cheek to the bone. Orwyle had sewn it. Orwyle had sewn everything. Orwyle had cut the leg twice to let out what kept gathering in it, and had stopped speaking of a third time, which even a dying man could read.
"Mother."
"I'm here."
"Is he alive?"
Alicent's face did something she couldn't stop. "Who, my love?"
"Sunfyre." His tongue was a dead thing in his mouth. "Don't lie. You lie badly."
"He lives," she said. "He won't be moved from the pit. They bring him sheep and he won't rise for them."
"Then he's better company than the council." It cost him more than it was worth, but he got most of a laugh out with it, and it turned into coughing, and the coughing went into the leg like a bolt going in.
He lay still afterward and looked at the ceiling of a room he had never once chosen.
They put a crown on me and I never wanted it, and they took it back off in a barley field, and nobody had to ask me for it.
"The boy," he said. "Jaehaerys."
"He is well. He asks after you."
"He shouldn't." He turned his head half a finger's width, which was as far as it went now. "Tell him a king who runs from the room is worse than no king. Tell him that. He won't understand it yet."
"Aegon."
"Tell him anyway."
She was crying. He watched her do it and felt nothing he could put a name to, and was too tired to be ashamed of that.
The fever came back near the middle of the night. It started in the leg, went up the spine, settled behind the eye, and this time it didn't stop climbing.
"Dragons! Dragons in the fire! They're burning, they're—"
Hands on his shoulders. His own voice, from somewhere outside himself, saying words he had no part in choosing. Gold in the smoke. The sixth beat. No sound.
Orwyle pressed the milk of the poppy to his ruined lips. The screaming faded to whimpers. Then to nothing.
Aegon II, Second of His Name, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, stopped breathing at the hour of the wolf.
His mother wept.
His wife did not.
HELAENA
She sat with the body because tradition demanded it.
The room smelled of rot and medicine, months of failed treatments, festering wounds, a king dying by inches. Candles burned on either side of the bed. Someone had folded his hands and drawn the sheet to his collarbone. Under the linen the shape of the leg was still wrong.
I should feel something. Grief. Relief. Something.
She felt nothing.
Their marriage had been arranged before she was old enough to be asked. Their children had been duty. Their nights together had been obligation, performed until heirs were secured, then abandoned with mutual relief, and she remembered being grateful and remembered being ashamed of the gratitude.
He wasn't cruel to me. That was the best I could say for him. He wasn't cruel.
She reached over and straightened a guttering candle. It was the only useful thing left in the room.
The door opened. Ulf.
"The council's assembling. They need you."
"A moment."
He gave it to her without a word and shut the door from the outside. She noticed the difference between the two men, and hated that she'd noticed it here.
She stood. Looked at her husband's ruined face one final time.
I hope you find peace. Whatever the Seven grant you, I hope it's better than this.
She walked out without looking back.
ULF
She didn't cry until we reached our chambers.
Then it came, and it wasn't grief for Aegon. It was the war and the pregnancy and the complications Orwyle kept warning about in that careful voice of his, and the crown she'd never wanted sitting on a seven-year-old two floors below us.
I held her while she sobbed.
"I don't mourn him," she managed. "Is that terrible?"
"It's honest."
"He was my husband. The father of my children."
"He was also a drunk who ignored you for mistresses and only touched you when he needed heirs." I smoothed her hair back off her wet face. "You owe him nothing but a proper burial."
"The court expects."
"The court expects performance. You'll give it." I lifted her chin. "But not here. Not with me. Here you can be yourself."
She pressed her face against my chest.
"What happens now?"
"Jaehaerys gets crowned. You become regent. I become whatever you need me to be."
"And our child?"
Five months along. Growing. Dangerous.
"Our child stays secret as long as possible. Mourning clothes help. When the time comes, we'll figure something out."
"That's not a plan."
"It's the best I have right now."
She laughed despite herself. Wet, broken, but real.
"You always admit when you don't know something. I love that about you."
"I love everything about you. Even when you're crying on my tunic."
Another laugh. Smaller.
"I should prepare. The council."
"Can wait an hour. The realm won't collapse in sixty minutes."
She stayed in my arms until dawn.
THE CORONATION
Seven years old.
Jaehaerys stood in the Great Sept with the crown too large for his head, and a squire had wound cloth inside the band to make it sit. He had his mother's silver hair and his father's violet eyes, and his face was entirely his own. Serious. Watchful. Older than it had any business being.
The High Septon intoned the ancient words. The court knelt. A child became king.
Jaehaerys III. History will forget this reign, assuming any of us live long enough to write it down.
He turned his head once, before the oils, and found me among all those faces.
"Does it stop hurting?" he asked. Not loudly. Not to anyone but me.
The Septon was already speaking again and I never got to answer him.
I stood behind Helaena's chair, newly named Lord Protector of the Realm. The title had shocked Otto. The old man had sputtered protests through half a session until Criston Cole, surprisingly, backed my appointment.
"The man survived God's Eye," Cole had said. "Killed a traitor dragonrider. Stopped Blood and Cheese before that. If anyone can protect this family, it's him."
Otto's objections had died unfinished.
Now I wore the white cloak of the office and carried the authority to command armies, dismiss lords, and hang traitors from the walls of my own choosing.
Power I never wanted. Power I need to protect what matters.
Jaehaerys completed his vows in a clear voice that only shook on the last word. The crowd cheered him.
A seven-year-old king. A pregnant queen regent. A bastard Lord Protector.
The realm is in excellent hands.
THAT NIGHT
Helaena touched her swelling belly.
The mourning clothes helped. Voluminous black, layer over layer, the fabric hanging off her shoulders and telling nothing about what was under it. She'd be expected to wear them for months. Traditional grieving for a traditional widow.
Small mercies.
"Our child will be born into a kingdom at war." Her voice was quiet. Resigned. "With a mother who rules but cannot acknowledge their existence. A father who's everything but legitimate."
"Our child will be born loved." I kissed her forehead. "Protected. Everything else is details."
"Details that could get us killed."
"Details I'll handle."
"You can't handle everything."
"Watch me try."
She smiled despite herself.
"My impossible man."
"Your impossible Lord Protector."
"Gods, that sounds ridiculous."
"It does." I pulled her close. "But it gives me the authority to protect you. To protect our children, all of them. I'll be ridiculous if that's what it takes."
She leaned into me.
"Then we make them safe anyway."
"Then we make them safe anyway."