Chapter 101: Refugees
ULF
Silverwing was struggling.
I felt it under me in every beat. The long pull of her shoulders had gone short and ragged, and there was a sag at the top of each stroke where there'd never been one before. Five people was too many. Far too many, even for a dragon of her size and strength.
Below us the kingswood ran black to the edge of sight. Behind us King's Landing burned, a low orange smear sitting on the horizon that wouldn't fade for days.
We need to land. Soon. But where?
The saddle had been built for one. Helaena had Maelor inside her cloak with her back turned into the wind. Jaehaerys sat behind her with both fists knotted in the leather and his spine straight, leaning on nobody, being brave the only way a boy that age knows how. Jaehaera kept her face pressed between her mother's shoulder blades and hadn't looked down once since we left the cave.
And behind us, Vermithor followed.
The Bronze Fury flew like a creature too stubborn to quit. He'd torn the healing membrane open again getting us out, and now the wing dragged at the end of every stroke, a half-beat late, costing him height he then had to climb back. He kept pace anyway. Refused to fall behind. Refused to be left.
Loyal. Even in agony.
I shifted forward over Silverwing's neck to even the load, got my knees under me, and triggered the Kilo Kilo.
1 kilogram.
My body went light. Not lighter. Light, the way a dry reed is light, and every part of me that had been pressing down on her stopped pressing. She felt it inside two wingbeats. Her rhythm lengthened. We gained a hundred feet without her asking for it.
I can't hold this forever. The strain will catch up.
But it bought us time. An hour. Maybe two.
Think. Where can we go?
Oldtown. Too far by half, and the Hightowers had been shading their loyalty since before the Keep fell. They might shelter us. They might also weigh five Targaryen lives against Rhaenyra's goodwill and find the sum simple.
The Reach, then. Scattered lords, split houses, and whichever gate opened to us became a target inside the hour.
The Vale was Black to the roots. Suicide.
Dragonstone. Silverwing coming down on Rhaenyra's own strand with the dead king's children on her back. Laughable.
What else. What else.
Then it came.
The fishing village. The one on the coast where Dalla was raising our secret son as her dead sister's orphan. Where Harwin had spent a year building a guard out of men who mended nets in daylight. Where I'd cached gold and salt meat and blankets months ago against exactly this night.
Helaena's voice out of the cave came back at me: we can't lead enemies to our son. She'd been right when she said it. She was still right. I turned east anyway.
If anyone follows us in, we hand them Aegon.
But the village sat behind a headland with one road that flooded twice a month, and nobody outside my own people knew it was there. Defensible. Remote. Not on any map worth stealing.
And Helaena would see her son.
That landed harder than the rest. Three months since the birth. Three months of a lie we'd both agreed to and only one of us had to sleep beside.
No. The cover holds. She couldn't acknowledge him without unmaking every arrangement we'd built to keep him breathing, and she knew it better than I did.
But she'd see him. She'd know he was alive and fed and well.
I brought us east.
"Where are we going?" Helaena shouted over the wind.
"Somewhere safe. I promise."
She didn't ask for more. She didn't have it in her.
Young Maelor started crying an hour into the flight.
The boy was three, and he'd held together through all of it, the smoke, the screaming, the impossible business of being lifted onto a dragon in the dark. Then it ran out of him all at once.
"Mama! Mama, I want to go home!"
"Shh, sweetling. Shh." Helaena got her hand around the back of his head. "We're going somewhere safe."
"I want my bed! I want my toys! I want—"
The rest came apart into wailing that the wind tore sideways off his mouth.
Jaehaera let go of her mother long enough to reach across and take her brother's hand.
"It's okay, Maelor. We're on an adventure. Like the stories."
"I don't want an adventure!"
"Neither do I." Seven years old, the same as her brother to the hour, and her voice held steadier than mine had all night. "But we have to be brave. Like Mother. Like the Lord Protector."
Maelor's crying thinned into hiccups, then into wet breathing against his mother's collarbone.
Jaehaerys hadn't spoken since the cave. He spoke now.
"Where are we going? Do we have a home anymore?"
The question came through the wind like a thrown knife.
I turned in the saddle to look at him. Seven years old. King of the Seven Kingdoms by any count that had meant anything yesterday morning, with his city burning behind his head.
"We're going to a village on the coast. It's safe. People there are loyal."
"Loyal to who? The Greens are—" He stopped himself. Started again, flatter. "The Greens don't have much left, do they?"
Too smart. Too observant. Too honest for his own comfort.
"No. We don't. But we have each other. We have the dragons. And we have time to figure out what comes next."
"What does come next?"
"I don't know yet. But I'll figure it out."
He looked at me a long moment. The wind pushed his hair flat against his skull.
"You always say that. 'I'll figure it out.' Do you actually believe it?"
"I have to believe it. Otherwise, what's the point?"
He weighed that longer than most grown men would have bothered to.
"Okay. I'll believe it too."
Then he turned back to the horizon and stayed quiet.
Seven years old, learning to live on faith.
Vermithor crashed two hours later.
We'd come down toward the coast, the Narrow Sea showing itself under the moon in long grey plates, when the wing quit on him. Not gradually. One stroke he was flying. The next he wasn't.
"Vermithor!"
I couldn't turn Silverwing back. Not with five on her and the water coming up at us. So I watched him go down, spiralling, one wing beating and one wing trailing behind him like a torn sail, until he hit the sand with a sound like thunder rolling under the ground.
Sand and spray went up in a wall. Nothing moved down there for a long moment, and I thought he was dead.
Then his head came up out of the crater and he roared, thin and cracked and furious.
Alive. Hurt. Alive.
"Is he dead?" Helaena had her hand fisted in my belt. "Ulf. Is he dead?"
"No. He's shouting. Dead things don't shout."
"Can she carry him?"
"Nobody carries him. He walks or he lies where he fell."
"We need to land," I told Silverwing. "Near him. Now."
She was already diving.
The village came out of the dark as we dropped. A huddle of rough buildings around a natural harbour, boats hauled up above the tideline, thin smoke standing straight from three or four chimneys in the still air.
Home. Or the nearest thing we had left.
Silverwing put down on the shingle and her legs folded under her, and she lay there breathing like a bellows, done with carrying what she was never built to carry. The children came off her in a heap, Helaena catching Maelor before he struck the stones, Jaehaerys handing his sister down.
I dismounted last, and let my weight come back, and it nearly put me on my face.
Two hours at one kilogram had cost me more than any fight I'd been in. My fingers wouldn't close properly. There was a taste like old copper at the back of my throat.
But we'd made it.
Vermithor lay fifty yards off, half-buried in the sand he'd thrown up around himself. His breathing came ragged and slow. The wing hung out and back at an angle no living joint makes.
Broken this time. Not torn. Broken.
Jaehaerys came and stood beside me and looked at the crater with his arms crossed against the cold.
"Will he fly again?"
"Ask me in the spring."
"That isn't a yes."
"No. It isn't."
Later. All of it later.
"Stay here," I told Helaena. "I'll wake the village."
She nodded and gathered her children in against her skirts, and didn't ask what I meant to do if the village didn't want waking.
I walked toward the lights.
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