Chapter 93: Return to War
ULF
Grief got two weeks. The war took the rest.
The riders came in over three days and the last one came in dead, tied upright in his saddle by a comrade who'd wanted the parchment to arrive. I read what he'd carried in the council chamber, standing, with the seal still hanging off it, surrounded by lords who didn't know what I'd lost and wouldn't have cared if they did.
Helaena sat at the foot of the table in her mourning blacks and said nothing at all. Her hands stayed flat on the wood in front of her. She'd learned that trick in five days.
"Rhaenyra's forces are moving," I announced. "Three armies. Converging on King's Landing."
The chamber went silent.
"How many?" Otto asked.
"Fifteen thousand from the Riverlands. Ten thousand from the Vale. Another eight thousand from scattered Crownland supporters." I spread the maps across the table and put the dead man's parchment down beside them so they could see the blood on it. "Thirty-three thousand total, give or take."
"And our forces?"
"Twenty thousand. Maybe twenty-two if we call in the Reach lords who haven't committed yet." I traced the enemy's approach routes, the three of them closing like fingers. "We're outnumbered, surrounded, and without the dragon advantage we had before."
"Without?" Criston Cole leaned forward, and his gorget scraped the table edge. "You command two dragons."
"And they have Syrax, Moondancer, and at least two others I haven't identified. Rhaenyra herself may ride to battle." Syrax was still mending, and a queen with three armies on the road wouldn't wait for a wing to be sound. I met his eyes. "One rider with two dragons is powerful. It's not invincible."
"Then what do you propose?"
The question hung there. Everyone watching. Everyone waiting for the Lord Protector, the Dragonslayer, to produce another miracle before the wine was poured.
What I propose is to burn all thirty-three thousand of them in an afternoon and go home to my son.
But that's not an option.
"We use my advantage differently." I began moving markers off the walls and out onto the roads. "Not as a decisive weapon. As a harassment force. I strike their supply lines, their commanders, their morale. Never committing fully, never giving them a target they can concentrate against."
"Hit and run tactics?" Otto turned the nearest marker back around with one finger. "That's not how dragons have been used in war."
"No. Which is why they won't expect it." I pointed to the supply routes. "An army of thirty thousand needs constant resupply. Food. Fodder. Weapons. Medicine. Cut those lines and they starve. Burn their supply wagons and they can't fight."
"And if they force a decisive engagement?"
"Then I combine with Cole's ground forces for defense. Two dragons overhead while our men hold the walls." I looked around the table, at every man of them in turn. "But I won't burn cities. Won't massacre civilians. Won't become what they say I am."
"You set conditions now?" Otto's tone sharpened.
"I set conditions because I can." I held his gaze until he was the one deciding where to look. "You need me. The realm needs me. And I'm telling you how I'll fight."
Silence stretched over the table and nobody in that room was willing to be the man who broke it against me.
Criston Cole broke it for me.
"The Lord Protector's tactics are sound. Unconventional, but sound." He came round the table and stood at my shoulder over the map, which cost him something with Otto and which he spent anyway. "I can coordinate ground operations to exploit whatever chaos his strikes create. Force the Blacks to spread thin, respond to multiple threats, never consolidate."
Otto looked between us. Two soldiers agreeing in front of him, in his own chamber, on a thing he hadn't authored.
"Very well," he said at last. "Prosecute the campaign as you see fit. But the council expects results."
"The council will have them."
That evening Helaena found me in the dragon yard.
I had Silverwing's harness across two trestles and I was going down it strap by strap, thumbing every buckle tongue, cutting out the stitching where the salt had gone into it at Duskendale and setting new waxed thread through by lamplight. Vermithor lay along the far wall with one eye half open, watching the lamp. The yard smelled of hot stone and dragon and neat's-foot oil.
"You leave tomorrow."
"Dawn." I didn't look up. "The sooner I'm in the field, the sooner this ends."
"And then?"
"And then I come back. We bring Aegon home. We figure out what comes next."
She moved closer. Touched my arm, just above the wrist, where the strap had left a mark.
"You're using war to avoid feeling his absence."
The needle went through my thumb and I kept pulling the thread.
"Maybe."
"Not maybe. I see it in you." Her voice was soft, not accusing. "If you stop moving, stop fighting, you'll break. You'll feel everything you've been holding back."
"I can't afford to break yet." I finally met her eyes. "Not with thirty thousand enemies marching toward us. Not with you and the children in danger. Not until I've made us safe."
"Will we ever be safe?"
"I don't know. But I'll keep trying until we are."
She leaned against me, and there was less of her to lean than there had been a month ago. Her shoulder blade sat against my arm like something loose in a bag. Everything under the black wool had been spent and hadn't been paid back yet. What was underneath that was steel and always had been.
"The council today," she said. "You were impressive."
"I said what needed saying."
"You set conditions. Made demands. The lords who used to dismiss you as a bastard guard—they listen now. They fear you."
"Good. A frightened lord votes the way I need him to vote."
"Does he?" She pulled back and looked up at me, searching my face for something. "Or does he just find quieter ways to be dangerous?"
She's not wrong. Men who fear often become men who plot.
"I'll deal with plotters when they emerge. For now, the war comes first."
"It always does."
"It has to. At least until it's over."
She kissed me. Soft. Sad. Vermithor's eye came fully open at the far wall and closed again.
"Come back to me. Come back to us."
"I always do."
That night we lay together in the dark and let the candle go out on its own.
No words at first. Just breathing. Her hand on my chest and the fire down to red in the grate and the guard changing twice in the passage outside.
"I think about him constantly," Helaena whispered. "Every moment. Is he eating? Is he warm? Does Dalla hold him the way I would?"
"Harwin sends reports. He's healthy. Growing. The village is secure."
"Reports aren't the same as holding him."
"I know."
"When this war ends," she said, and the softness went out of her voice from underneath, "we bring him home. I don't care who knows. I don't care what they say."
"When this war ends. I promise."
She pressed closer against me.
"Don't die tomorrow. Or the next day. Or any day until you've kept that promise."
"I'll try."
"Try harder."
A laugh came out of me, unexpected and genuine, the first one in a fortnight.
"You keep saying that."
"You keep needing to hear it."
We held each other until dawn touched the windows.
Then I rose, dressed in the dark by feel, and went down to a yard where Silverwing was already standing with her wings half open, awake before me, waiting to be asked.
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