Chapter 137: The Unclaimed Dragon
ULF
The harbour wall stank of tar and dead crab, and Ulf climbed the last of its steps with both hands, because his legs wouldn't do it alone. He didn't try to hide that from the men who saw. Cregan Stark's archers had already turned northeast in a long grey line, every bow strung, every face pointed at the same low shape sliding over the water half a mile out.
"Three hundred paces," Stark said. He didn't look away from it. "That is where my best bows will hold him. If the beast comes inland, I give the word, and it comes down in the shallows where we can finish it."
"Not yet."
"It carries Daemon Targaryen."
"It's carrying him. That isn't the same as serving him."
Stark turned his head then, unhurried, and spoke the sentence out flat, the same voice he used from the tribunal chair. "You will forgive me if that distinction fails to comfort me while he is still in the air. A beast under him is a beast over Winterfell in nine days. I have counted the days. I would rather count arrows."
"How many bows do you have on this wall?"
"Eighty-two. Sixty more on the Mud Gate towers, and every one of them has been told the same thing."
"Which is?"
"That if the white knight raises his hand, they loose, and if he does not, they hold, and that no Northman is to ask why in front of the southrons." Stark's mouth moved a little. It was not quite a smile. "My men have opinions, Lord Commander. I have told them to keep them behind their teeth until the water is quiet."
Ulf's ribs ground together when he breathed. The warehouse had taken a great deal out of him, and the surges had taken more, and what was left felt like a purse with two coins in it. He watched the wild dragon bank over the chop. "He spent two years earning that animal. Patience, he called it. He never once had to break it." He wiped salt off his mouth. "So it isn't his. Not yet."
"And when it is?"
"Then you get your shot."
He put two fingers in his teeth and whistled, and the sound went out across the water flat and hard and carried.
Ulf summoned Vermithor with a whistle that carried across the bay. The bronze dragon rose from the Dragonpit like a storm given flesh, his roar shaking the Red Keep's stones. He'd felt his rider's distress through their bond, the near-Master surges, the wild dragon's attack, all of it running down the line between them like water down a gutter. Vermithor was ancient and patient, but when his rider called, he answered.
Grey Ghost was faster. The wild dragon had never known a saddle, and his flight was all instinct and fury, dodging Vermithor's flame with desperate agility, folding a wing and dropping thirty feet to let a gout of fire boil the air where he'd been. Daemon clung to its back, his Valyrian steel dagger in his teeth, his face twisted with fury, watching two years of planning come apart under him.
"You can't outfly Vermithor!" Ulf shouted across the gap. "He's older, stronger, and he's been fighting wars since before you were born!"
Daemon took the dagger out of his teeth. He didn't shout back. He drew the blade across his own palm, closed the hand into a fist over the ridge of the dragon's neck, and began to speak.
Ulf knew the words before he understood them. Old ones, older than the Freehold's ruin, the kind the maesters copied out of Valyria's ash without knowing how they were meant to be said. Sagon nuha. Sagon nuha. Perzys nuha. Be mine. Be mine. My fire. Daemon's voice didn't rise. That was the frightening part. He counted the phrases off steady and unhurried, each one laid flat on the last, blood running off his wrist and down the grey scales in a thin black thread.
Grey Ghost's eyes had been the colour of wet slate. They weren't anymore. As Vermithor closed and the two shapes crossed over the deep water, The left one went pale at the rim, silver leaking inward toward the pupil, and the dragon's head stopped tracking the flame. It stopped tracking anything. It was listening.
Seconds. Not minutes. He'd read enough of Helaena's copied pages to know there was a point past which the words stopped being a request.
"Bows!" Stark's voice came thin off the wall behind him, and Ulf heard the creak of eighty yew staves bending at once.
"Hold!" Ulf shouted, and didn't wait to see whether they did.
Ulf launched from Vermithor's back, Soru leap, Geppo air-jumps, Kilo Kilo weight shifting his mass mid-flight so the air would hold him and then wouldn't. He hit Grey Ghost's back like a boulder, and the wild dragon bucked, screamed, tried to throw him. Ulf held on.
Daemon gave no sign he'd noticed. That was the discipline of the thing. A man was on his mount with murder in both hands and Daemon Targaryen kept his eyes forward and his voice level, because a stumble in the words meant starting again, and there wasn't time to start again. Sagon nuha. The silver had reached the middle of the eye.
Kill it, and this ends here. Kill it, and Daemon walks into the sea with nothing. Ulf's hand found the ridge of vertebrae under him, thick as roof beams, and he thought about how simple that would be, and he thought about the boy in the flooded cells three nights ago and about every other creature that had ever been used as a road to somebody's ambition. He wasn't going to make a corpse out of the only thing here that hadn't chosen a side.
So he waited. One beat. Two. The great wings came up, hung, and started down, and at the top of the stroke the shoulder muscle stretched thin and open under the scale.
Ulf drove his heel through the air.
The Rankyaku went out flat and clean and cut a hand's-depth line along the outside of the shoulder, thirty feet of skin and meat opened without touching bone, without touching the wing spar, without touching anything the animal needed to live. Blood came out of it in a sheet and the noise Grey Ghost made was nothing Ulf had heard from a living thing before.
The word broke in half in Daemon's mouth.
"No," Daemon said, and it was the first honest sound he'd made in two years. "No. Finish it, you stupid brute. Four more words. Four words and you're a prince's dragon and nothing on this water can touch you. Four—"
The silver went out of the dragon's eye like a candle put under a boot.
Then Ulf's Kilo Kilo spiked again, near-Master, unstable, his body screaming and his vision going grey at the edges, and he drove Grey Ghost downward toward the bay, away from the city, pressing impossible weight onto the dragon's spine. The beast fought every foot of the descent. It couldn't fight the mass forcing it down. They fell together past the fishing skiffs, past the wreck-poles, Daemon tearing loose somewhere in the last hundred feet and going out sideways into the air with his cloak snapping behind him.
They hit the water together. Steam and spray exploded across the bay.
Grey Ghost thrashed once, twice, and then Vermithor was above them, roaring, close enough that the swells flattened under the wingbeat, and the wild dragon's survival instinct overrode its loyalty to the dead prince. It dove deep, vanishing into the Blackwater's dark with a final flick of its spined tail. Gone. Not killed, driven off. It would survive, find another hunting ground, learn what men's voices cost. But not today. And not with Daemon.
Ulf surfaced, gasping, his body screaming from near-Master exertion, and for a moment he floated on his back in the cold and shook and couldn't make his hands close.
He'd hurt a thing that had done nothing to him except be wanted by the wrong man. That was the whole of it, and there was no version where it was clean. But he had opened a shoulder instead of a throat, and the animal was alive in the deep water under him, and a weapon denied wasn't a life taken. Those were two different choices. He was going to keep making the second one for as long as anybody let him.
Above him, Vermithor circled, wide and patient, throwing a shadow that crossed Ulf and moved on.
Skiffs were already coming off the harbour wall, oars going hard, Northern voices calling range and arrow-count across the water. On the nearest bow an archer stood with a shaft nocked and his eyes on the far shingle, waiting for the word he'd been told to expect.
Somewhere on the bay's far shore, stranded, dragonless, alone, Daemon Targaryen was running out of places to hide. Ulf could see him now, a dark shape hauling itself out of the surf on hands and knees, finding its feet, standing.
Ulf started swimming for the shingle. He raised one hand out of the water, flat, and held it there until he heard the oars stop behind him.
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