Chapter 132: The Hooded Advisor
ULF
Three levels under the Red Keep the air went wet and stayed wet. Ulf carried the lamp himself rather than take a gaoler down with them, and the light found standing water on the flagstones, a slick of it that smelled of old tallow, cold iron and the vinegar they scrubbed the cells with when a prisoner died. Helaena walked beside him with her skirts gathered in one fist. She hadn't spoken since the stair.
Ser Humfrey Bracken sat against the wall of the fourth cell with his wrists in his lap. He'd been a big man when they took him at the Dragonpit gate. Two weeks of black bread had left the skin loose along his jaw. He looked at the lamp first and at Ulf second.
"They said you'd come yourself," Bracken said. "I didn't believe it."
"Here I am." Ulf set the lamp on the floor between them and sat on the bench across from the bars, which put his eyes level with the knight's. "You sent word that you'd talk."
"I sent word that I'd bargain."
"Say it, then."
"The Wall." Bracken's voice was hoarse from the damp. "Not the block. I've two nieces at Stone Hedge who inherit nothing if I hang as a traitor. Give me the black and they keep their father's hall."
"That's not mine to grant."
"It is mine," Helaena said.
Bracken turned his head. He hadn't looked at her once until then, and now he couldn't stop. Helaena folded her hands and waited.
"You served her four years," she said. "You stood in her corridor and you kept your mouth shut about a man with no name, and you're still keeping it shut, and she's in a cell of her own eight doors from yours. Who is left for you to be loyal to?"
The knight's throat worked. Somewhere down the passage water dripped into water, steady as a slow drum.
"He came after the midnight bell," Bracken said at last. "Always after. I had orders in her own hand: the man in the hood passes, no name written, no name spoken. Eleven visits I stood the door for. There were more I didn't stand."
"Over how long?"
"Four months. He'd be with her an hour, sometimes till dawn. She was different after. Sharper. Colder."
Ulf kept his hands loose on his knees. Upstairs, Cole was telling anyone who'd listen that the White Demon had learned to smile at a trial and would still be a butcher in the dark. Ulf's voice stayed level. He didn't stand up.
"Give me something I can hold," he said. "Not a shadow. A thing."
Bracken shut his eyes. "The last night, he handed me back a taper. His glove was off. There was a ring on his little finger, grey metal, no stone, the face of it rubbed smooth. I took it for a mourning band and thought no more of it." He breathed once. "And he never went out the Tower stair. Not once in eleven nights. He went down. Into the lower passages, where the cisterns run."
Down. Not to a ship, not to the Kingsroad. Down, and into the same stone they were sitting in.
Stark was waiting in the guardroom with the second prisoner already brought up. She was a former chamber servant of Rhaenyra's household, a woman named Betha, too old to fight and too loyal to flee. She'd been in the black cells for two weeks since they caught her smuggling silver out of the keep, and the isolation had loosened her tongue in ways that torture never could. She sat with a blanket around her thin shoulders and a cup of water untouched in front of her.
"The hooded man," she said, her voice thin with weeks of fear. "I saw him. More than once. He came to the Queen's solar at night, always after the midnight bell. The guards let him pass without question. They'd been ordered to. Anyone who asked who he was... disappeared."
"Disappeared how?" Stark asked. He'd taken the low stool and left his greatsword by the door.
"Three of them. I knew one. A girl named Sera, seventeen years old. She asked the wrong question to the wrong guard, and the next morning she was gone. They said she'd run away. But Sera wouldn't have run. She had a sister in the city. She was saving her wages." Betha's voice cracked. "She was so close. Another month and she'd have had enough."
Ulf leaned forward. "What did the hooded man look like?"
"I never saw his face. None of us did. But I saw his hands. Once, when he reached for the solar door, his sleeve pulled back. He wore a ring. Valyrian steel. I've served in the keep long enough to know the look of it. But the sigil had been ground away. Filed down to bare metal. I remember thinking: who destroys a treasure like that? A ring that could buy a lordship, ruined."
"Someone who doesn't want to be recognized," Ulf said. "Someone who's supposed to be dead."
"Did you ever hear him speak?" Stark asked.
"Once. Through the door. He was laughing, not pleasant. Dark and bitter. He said something about 'the rats watching' and 'burning the evidence.' The Queen laughed too, but it wasn't her real laugh. It was the laugh of someone who was afraid not to. I'd heard her real laugh before, before the hooded man started coming. She was different then. Hard, still, but not cruel. The cruelty came after."
It went another hour. His height, his gait, how he favoured his left side as if carrying an old wound. Nobody touched her. Nobody raised a hand or a voice, and when it was done a guard walked her back down with the blanket still on her shoulders and bread in her fist.
They convened in the Small Council chamber on a grey afternoon. Stark brought his own man: Bennard Flint, who kept the Northern scouts and read their letters.
"Daemon Targaryen is alive," Stark said. "He's been inside this keep. He's been manipulating Rhaenyra for months. And based on the treasury records, he's been preparing for something that was supposed to happen after the war ended."
"The question is where he is now," Helaena said. "The city fell. Rhaenyra was captured. His access to the throne is gone. But he's not going to just disappear. Daemon has never just disappeared. He's patient. He'll find another way in."
"Then we find him first." Stark stood. "I'll assign my best trackers. The North knows how to hunt things that don't want to be found. And when we find him," he said, and met Ulf's eyes, "the realm will have its answer about what kind of justice the dead deserve."
Flint cleared his throat. "My lord. There's a goldsmith on the Street of Steel my men have been sitting on nine days. Last winter a customer paid him forty dragons to grind the face off a signet and never speak of it. Valyrian steel. He kept the coin and he kept his mouth shut, and he kept something else." He set a scrap of parchment on the table, a sigil copied in charcoal by an unsteady hand. "He drew what was on it before he took it off."
Helaena went to the table. She didn't sit. She studied the charcoal, then touched the parchment's edge with two fingertips.
"That's a cadet mark," she said. "The younger branch. He wore it at Harrenhal. I saw it on his hand at my father's table when I was a girl."
"Then he's ours," Flint said quietly, "and he's in the walls."
Ulf pulled the city maps down himself and had them spread while the lamps were still being lit. Stark's men would take the river gates and the ash quarter; the household would take the cisterns and the old passages under the Keep, everything Bracken had said and every safehouse either of them knew, pooled and marked and split between them before either side moved alone. Nothing was being kept back now. He'd traded the last of it for a name.
Jaehaerys was in the doorway. He'd been there long enough to hear the word cisterns.
"Bed," Ulf said, without looking up. "This isn't yours tonight."
The boy went. The door closed, and Helaena set her finger on the cistern quarter, and the first riders were out of the Gate of the Gods before the bell.