Chapter 81: Ashes of Victory
ULF
Nine men around the small council table, and every one of them stared at me like I'd risen from the dead.
Maybe I had.
I sat in the witness chair. Battered, bandaged, running on nothing but willpower. Both forearms were wrapped from wrist to elbow and neither hand would close all the way, so I kept them in my lap where the table hid them. Three days since God's Eye. Three days of nightmares and questions and Helaena's gentle hands keeping me together.
"You're the only dragonrider who returned." Otto's voice carried calculation beneath the shock. He let the sentence sit until the room had finished hearing it. "Tell us everything."
"Hugh attacked me first."
"Attacked you?" Criston Cole leaned forward, both fists on the wood. "Another Green rider? Ours?"
"He'd been planning treason for weeks. Wanted to kill both princes, seize power with the dragons." I met their eyes, one after another, and made them be the ones to look away. "I stopped him."
"By killing him?"
"By surviving him. He fell from Vermithor during our combat. The dragon went berserk, attacked everything. By the time I subdued him, the princes had already—"
I stopped.
Falling. Locked together. Swords flashing.
"Had already killed each other." Otto finished. "As you reported."
"Yes."
Nobody spoke. Otto turned the ring on his finger, once, twice.
"A man does not simply fall from a dragon," Cole said. "Not a rider. Not Hugh Hammer, who I watched break a horse's neck with his hands. How does a man kill a dragonrider in the air and come home with nothing worse than his arms in linen?"
I let that one lie where he put it.
"And Vermithor?" Otto said.
"Injured. Confused. He flew here. The dragonkeepers say he's been circling the pit for two days, calling for Hugh." I shook my head. "A riderless dragon is dangerous. Someone needs to claim him soon or he'll need to be put down."
"Put down." Cole said it flatly. "The Bronze Fury. Half our strength."
"Then find him a rider. But I'd not send a man to try it this week."
"We'll discuss that later." Otto turned to Orwyle. "The king?"
The Grand Maester's face was grave. He had a wax tablet in front of him and hadn't written on it.
"Infection has spread through the burns beneath the plate. The fever will not break. Days, perhaps. A week at most, and that only if he takes water."
Nobody asked whether the king could be moved, or spoken to, or shown a document. They had already stopped counting him. Three days ago he'd been a wound they were nursing. Now he was a date they were waiting on.
Aegon dying. Aemond dead. No one left to lead.
"The realm needs guidance," Otto continued. "A regent, until Prince Jaehaerys comes of age."
"The boy is six," Cole said. "We'd need regency for years."
"Then we'll have regency for years." Otto's eyes swept the table, gathering nods before he asked for them. "I propose a council of regents. Myself, the Lord Commander, the Grand Maester—"
"And the queen."
Everyone turned.
Helaena stood in the doorway. I hadn't heard her enter, and neither had the guard who should have announced her.
"I am Aegon's wife. Mother to his heirs. If there's to be regency, I will be part of it."
Otto recovered quickly. "Of course, Your Grace. No one would suggest otherwise."
He'd have kept her out of this room entirely if he could have found one lord willing to say it aloud.
She took her seat at the table. The chair scraped. Her hand found mine beneath the wood. A quick squeeze, then gone.
Four months pregnant. No one knows. No one can know.
"The war continues," she said. "What forces do we have?"
The council shifted into planning. Grain counts, the Riverlands crossings, which houses would answer a summons from a dying king and which would discover a reason not to.
"We hold the crossings," Cole said. "Let them starve on the far bank until the frost does our work."
"We hold them with what?" Otto did not raise his voice. "Half the river lords have gone over, and the other half are waiting to see who is left standing with a dragon. That question has one answer at this table, and he cannot presently lift a cup."
Every head came round to me. I left my hands where they were.
"He can fly," Helaena said. "That is what you want him for."
I sat and listened and tried not to think about falling bodies and burning water.
THAT NIGHT
Helaena's chambers. Candlelight, and the shutters closed against the smell of the river.
She sat on the bed with her hand pressed to her stomach. There was fresh linen folded on the chest by the window, and a basin beside it that a maid had carried out and brought back scrubbed, and neither of us looked at either.
"It's getting worse."
"What is?"
"The bleeding. The pain." Her voice was steady, but I could hear the fear beneath it. "Orwyle came this morning. He says the pregnancy is risky. The child might not... might not survive to term."
No.
I crossed to her. Knelt at her feet, which took longer than it should have.
"What can we do?"
"Rest. Reduce stress." A bitter laugh. "Easy, in the middle of a war with my husband dying and assassins and—"
"I'll handle the war. I'll handle everything."
"You can't handle everything."
"I can. I will." I took her hands as well as I could take anything. "You focus on our child. On getting healthy. Everything else falls to me."
"Ulf."
"I survived God's Eye. I killed Hugh Hammer. I watched two princes die." I pressed my forehead to her stomach. "I didn't do all that to lose our baby now."
She stroked my hair. Her fingers found the burnt ends of it and worked them apart.
"I dreamed about her."
"Her?"
"A girl. Dark eyes, silver hair. Standing in ruins, building something new." Her voice caught. "But the path is fire. Always fire."
"Then we walk through fire. We've done it before."
"You say that as though the fire has agreed."
"It hasn't. It doesn't get a say."
She pulled me up onto the bed. Into her arms. The candle guttered and neither of us got up to see to it.
"I'm scared."
"So am I."
"I don't want to lose her."
"You won't. I promise."
Another promise. Another thing I can't guarantee.
But I'll die trying to keep it.
Sleep took me between one breath and the next. There was no rest in it.
That night, I dreamed of God's Eye.
Hugh falling, turning over slowly with his arms open. Aemond and Daemon locked together, still cutting at each other as the water came up. Steam off the shallows where Vhagar lay dying. The lake swallowing everything and going flat and grey again, as if none of it had happened.
And through it all, a ribbon of silver hair floating on dark waves.
I woke gasping, hands out, one bandage split and bleeding.
Helaena was there. Soothing. Steady. She caught my wrists before I could do worse to them and held on.
"Just dreams," she whispered. "Just dreams."
Yours are never just dreams.
But I don't say it. I lie back down, and she keeps her grip on my wrists, and across the city Vermithor starts calling again, and no one answers him.
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P.S. — in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com. just saying. that timeline also has more chapters.