Chapter 133: A Boy Goes Missing
JAEHAERYS
Jaehaerys slipped his guards between the changing of the watch.
He'd been planning it for days. Since the trial, since his mother and Ulf had started dropping their voices whenever he came through a door, talking about dead men and hooded advisors and a ring with the sigil filed off it. He was seven. He was a king. They'd given him a guard's duty instead of a warrior's role and told him to wait, and he was tired of being protected from truths everyone else in the keep already seemed to know.
*You guard the family.* Ulf had knelt in the cold dirt outside Dalla's cottage to say it, and Jaehaerys had walked back to the house afterward with his sword point dragging through the mud. He'd guarded them. Through the boats, through the burning, through every night in the village when the water went orange. Nobody had thanked him with a fact yet.
The lead came out of a corridor. Two of Cole's men stood under the third-floor sconce with their backs to him, keeping their voices low over a servant's report. A woman on the scullery stair had seen someone in the lower levels. Someone who shouldn't be here. They'd sent her back to her work and done nothing else, because the flooded cisterns would take fifty men three days to search. But the old passages ran under the Red Keep like veins. The servant had been dismissed. Jaehaerys had heard, and Jaehaerys had remembered.
He'd asked about those levels once already. At the war table, standing behind his mother's chair where nobody troubled to notice him, he'd asked how deep the cisterns went and whether the drains still ran to the bay. The steward answered briefly and went back to the map. Nobody asked him why he wanted to know.
The drill gave him the rest of it.
They had him at the pell in the outer bailey after the morning bell, working the same four forms as always. On the ninth pass he brought the wooden blade down wrong, on purpose, across the iron band at the pell's shoulder. The shock went up his arm and stayed there. It hurt more than he'd meant it to.
"I've jammed it," he said, and held the hand up. The knuckles were already going fat and red. He'd got that part right on purpose. Ulf had taught him a man's face gives him away, and the quickest road past a face is to say something true.
"Let me see." The master-at-arms turned the hand over once, not gently. "Two days off the pell."
"It's nothing."
"It's two days. Go up and put cold water on it."
Nobody argued with him. Nobody ever argued. They walked him as far as the inner stair and left him there, because his guards had the door and the door was the whole of it.
He counted the watch from the window seat. One of Cole's men had taught him the count, pleased with himself for teaching it. Forty, between the first pair leaving the passage and the second coming into it. Not fast. Just quiet, and low, and gone before the torches came round the bend.
The dry-larder stair behind the buttery was in his lessons. Two dull afternoons on where the keep's water came from and where it went, and he'd been made to draw it three times, so he knew the way down past the cold rooms without a lamp.
He took a torch off the bracket at the bottom. He took his wooden sword, the one he'd carried since the village, the one he'd promised himself he'd use to protect his family.
The cisterns were cold and dark and smelled of water that hadn't moved in centuries.
It was worse than he'd let himself think. The torch made a little yellow room around him and nothing beyond it, the ledges narrow and greasy underfoot, and every fourth step something dripped far off and came back doubled. His breath sounded enormous. His hand throbbed. The air tasted of iron and rot, like coins left in a puddle.
He counted turns so he could count back. At the fourth he wasn't certain whether the passage behind him had forked, and at the sixth he stopped being certain about the fourth. He reached for the wall to steady himself and his fingers came away slick. He could go on, or he could turn around and admit he couldn't find his own way back to the buttery stair, and he understood, with a cold clean drop through his belly, that he had come far enough that both of those were bad.
He went on. That was what you did.
The hands were on him before he saw them coming. He didn't hear the footsteps until it was too late. An arm came across his chest and a palm shut over his mouth and the torch went into the water with a hiss, and the dark closed up over everything.
"Quiet now, little king," a voice breathed against his ear. "Your mother's protector has been looking for us. We thought we'd give him something to find."
Jaehaera woke screaming.
There was black water and it was over her head and there was no light in it, none, not a candle, not the moon, and a crown was going down through it turning slowly with nothing to catch on. Something iron pulled. She couldn't see who. She never could see who.
She didn't wait to be asked. They always asked afterward, gently, in the voice grown people kept for dreams, and by then it had gone thin in her hands. So she said it into the dark of the nursery before her mother reached her.
"Dark water," she said. Her voice was shaking and she made it go anyway. "No light. A crown that drowns. Jaehaerys is in the dark water, Mother, they're holding him under—"
Helaena was at the bedside before the echo had died out of the rafters, her arms around her daughter, her heart going hard enough that Jaehaera could feel it through the night-robe. She did not say *hush*. She did not say *it was only a dream*, which was the one Jaehaera had braced for.
She said, "I believe you."
Then she was up and at the door with her hair loose and her voice pitched to carry the length of the corridor. "Ulf! He's gone. Jaehaerys is gone."
Maelor sat up in his cot and asked whether it was morning. Nobody answered him.
Still pulling a boot on, Ulf came into the room in a blur that knocked the candle stand over. The sound he'd made coming up the stair had been no sound at all, just air moving.
"Where?"
"Count them," he said past Helaena, before she could answer, to the men on the door. "All four children. Now."
They were gone eight heartbeats. Jaehaera counted them against her mother's chest. What came back was the older of the two, and his face had changed colour, and he said the boy's chamber was empty and the water bowl untouched, and then he said something else, slower.
"He asked me about the cistern levels. At the table. How deep they ran." He swallowed. "I thought he was being a boy."
"When did you last set eyes on him?"
"Midday, ser. He'd hurt his hand at the pell."
"Then they've had him since before supper." Ulf said it flat, and the older man looked at the floor.
"The cisterns. The flooded cells." Helaena's voice cracked straight down the middle, the Queen Regent gone out of it entirely. "Jaehaera saw it. Dark water, no light, a crown. Daemon's agents. They took him. They're using him against you, a message, a warning, something to draw you out—"
"Stay with her."
"Ulf." Helaena caught his sleeve, and her hand was white on it, and she said the word before anyone else in the room could reach for it. "Drowned. A boy who should be king, drowned in darkness. I saw it weeks ago and I wrote it down and I thought it was for some other year."
Every head in the room turned toward the floor, toward the lower Keep, toward the black under all of them.
"Stark! Cole!" Ulf was already through the doorway. "Seal the keep! No one leaves!"
Jaehaera pressed her face into her mother's shoulder and shook, and the corridor outside filled with the noise of men running with torches, boots and steel and the light swinging along the walls in strips, and Ulf was gone down the stair ahead of the last word of his own order.
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