Chapter 107: The Shepherd's Fate
ULF
Dusk, and the fishing boat coming in was losing its argument with the tide.
I watched from the shingle while the man aboard gave up on the oars and went over the side into chest-deep water. He was young. I didn't know his face, which meant he was new to the network. Someone else's contact, handed down the chain a link at a time until the last link was me.
He came up the beach with his boots in one hand and a leather pouch held over his head, dry.
"Lord Protector." He held the pouch out at arm's length. The wax was whole. "From the capital. Three days old."
"Any trouble on the journey?"
"Black patrols everywhere. Had to detour twice." His eyes went past my shoulder to the ridge, where Silverwing lay along the sun-warmed rock with her wings folded and her head low, one pale eye following him up the beach. "They're still looking for you. The bounty's increased."
"How much now?"
"Twenty thousand gold dragons."
I almost laughed.
"At least I'm appreciating in value."
He didn't smile. Too young, too serious, too recently pulled into work where a joke costs something.
"Rest in the village. Food and shelter will be provided. Leave at first light. Don't come back for two weeks. Minimum."
"Understood." He sat down in the wet sand to pull his boots on, then stopped with one half on. "My lord. Does it end?"
Behind him his boat had already swung broadside and started to drift. I pointed him at the cook smoke rising past the net poles, and let his question lie where he'd dropped it.
He walked toward the village. I opened the pouch.
Four sheets, close-written, compiled out of a week of other men's eyes and ears. The hand was steady down the first page and began to hurry near the bottom of the second.
The Shepherd was dead.
Rhaenyra had executed him publicly. Burned alive, which had its own symmetry, given how much of the man's preaching had been about fire. His followers were dispersed, imprisoned or killed depending on how deep they'd gone in. *The riots are ended,* the copyist wrote, *and the pyres with them.*
But the damage couldn't be undone.
Five dragons had died in the Dragonpit massacre. Sunfyre. The old chained she-dragon out of the deep chamber that no rider had ever sat. Three young ones barely bigger than horses. Others were hurt badly enough that they might never fly again, and the copyist had written down which bones, as though a butcher's boy with a boar spear had earned a maester's precision.
Sunfyre. Aegon's own dragon. The mount that had carried him out of Rook's Rest half-burned and never truly flown since.
The Greens have no dragon of the king's blood left in that city.
I read further, standing, until the light went and I had to hold the last sheet up against what was left of the west. The smallfolk of King's Landing remained hostile. They'd been pardoned for their riots and they weren't grateful for the mercy. They'd seen dragons die. They'd seen Targaryens bleed in the street with the crowd's hands still on them. A hundred years of being told the sky belonged to one family, and it had taken a single night to teach the city otherwise.
Her dragons were scattered among her loyalists now, younger riders, thinner in the saddle, and Syrax had been well out of the city when the mob came through the pit gates. She still had more dragons in total than the Greens could count. What she no longer had was the city that made them safe to keep.
This is what we've been waiting for. Not a victory. An opening.
I carried the report to Helaena.
She read it by candlelight at Corwen's table, one finger tracking down the lines, her face showing nothing at all.
"Sunfyre is dead."
"Yes."
"Aegon crawled to that egg before he could walk. He outlived his rider by a year and died on a butcher's saw." Her finger stopped moving. It wasn't sympathy in her eyes, and it wasn't triumph. "That's what the last of my brother comes to."
"The Shepherd's execution was meant to restore order. Show that she punishes those who harm dragons."
"But it's too late." She set the report down and squared its edges, which she did with anything that frightened her. "They know now. Everyone knows. Dragons can be killed by ordinary people with spears and torches and enough desperation."
"The Targaryens' greatest protection was always fear. Fear that dragons were unstoppable. Fear that fire from above couldn't be fought." I sat down across from her. The candle put her shadow up the wall behind her, tall, bent where the roof beam cut it. "That fear is broken."
"Does this change our timeline?"
I'd been asking myself the same thing since the second page.
"It might. Rhaenyra without a dragon is vulnerable. Her authority rests on legitimacy and military force now. Both of those are fragile. The lords who bent the knee did it because they feared her dragons. Without that fear—"
"They might be willing to switch sides again."
"Exactly."
She turned the candle a quarter turn, watching the wax run.
"And Cregan Stark? The reports mentioned him."
"Marching south with a Northern army. His intentions are unclear. He could be coming to support Rhaenyra, or to impose his own judgment on the chaos."
"Winter from the North," she said.
"What?"
"Nothing. A dream fragment." She shook her head once, hard, and pushed the report an inch further from her. "Let me think. Let us both think. This is too important for hasty decisions."
"Agreed. But we should start planning. Seriously planning."
"Tomorrow. Tonight I want to see my children."
That night, Helaena woke screaming.
My hand was on her shoulder before I was properly awake. I'd learned the two kinds by then. Ordinary nightmares let go of her inside a minute and left her embarrassed. The other kind left her shaking and far away for hours, and her voice came out of her wrong.
This was the second kind.
"The Black Queen sits on iron throne but cannot hold it." Flat. Slow. Not quite hers. "The blade cuts her as her father was cut. Winter comes from the North, and wolves judge dragons."
I got parchment off the shelf and ink, and wrote it down as she said it, spelling nothing, catching every word.
"What else?"
"Blood on golden scales. A boy who should be king, drowned in darkness." Her eyes came back to the room by degrees, the way a swimmer surfaces. "And fire. There's always fire at the end."
"Blood on golden scales. Sunfyre? He's dead."
"Maybe. Or maybe another golden dragon I haven't seen." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "The visions don't explain themselves. They just show."
"The blade cutting her as her father was cut. Viserys died on the Iron Throne. Accidentally. Cut himself on the metal."
"Does that mean Rhaenyra will die the same way?"
"I don't know." I read my own writing back, and it was worse on the page than it had been in the dark. "Winter from the North is Cregan Stark. Wolves judge dragons. That sounds like Northern judgment on the Targaryens."
"The Hour of the Wolf," Helaena whispered. "I've heard that phrase in my dreams before. I don't know what it means."
The Hour of the Wolf. Cregan Stark. Northern judgment.
The Dance is ending. The question is who survives it.
"Try to rest. I'll stay awake, think through the implications."
She caught my arm before I could stand.
"Don't make decisions without me. This affects our children. I need to be part of it."
"I won't. I promise."
She lay back and pulled the blanket to her chin and didn't close her eyes. Down the room, Jaehaera turned over and said something to nobody in her sleep.
I trimmed the wick, sat with the parchment on my knee, and under her words I wrote three names and the number of miles between each of them and this village. The list was short. It got shorter every time I checked it.