Chapter 138: The Last Confrontation
ULF
The cistern under the old seawall had been cut to hold the city's winter water, and it hadn't held anything but the tide for sixty years. Ulf came down the last of the steps into water that reached his shins, cold enough to burn. Somewhere above, the bay was finding a way in through stone the Conqueror's masons had laid, and the sound of it filled the vault like breathing.
Behind him, up the flooded gallery, the fallen arch shifted and settled and men's voices came through it, Northern and close.
"We can have this open inside the hour," Cregan Stark said through the stone. Not shouting. He never had to.
"Don't." Ulf's own voice came back off the walls, three of it. "You bring twenty men in here and the roof comes down on all of us."
A pause. Water ran somewhere, patient. "Then it's yours," Stark said, and that was the whole of it. No orders, no terms. The Northmen stopped digging.
Daemon Targaryen stood at the far end of the vault, on a shelf of old brick where the water hadn't climbed yet. His dark leathers were torn and burned along the left side from the warehouse fire, and his Valyrian steel dagger was still in his hand, hanging loose at his thigh. Grey Ghost was gone, driven deep into the Blackwater and out of his service forever. The shadow network was broken. The treasury was frozen. Two years of quiet, expensive work had come apart in nine days, and what was left of it was standing ankle-deep in seawater with one blade.
Ulf's hands wouldn't hold still. He'd spent everything on the dragon: Soru until his legs stopped answering, Kilo Kilo pushed past near-Master twice in an hour, and the ability sat in him now like a struck bell that wouldn't stop ringing. He could feel the tremor in his jaw. If it came to it, he had one good push left, and then nothing.
"It didn't have to end this way," Daemon said without turning. His voice was tired. Not defeated, but exhausted, worn thin from being awake too long. "You think you've won. You think you've built something permanent, peace, family, a realm that will heal. But peace never lasts. Families break. Realms fall. The only thing that endures is the blood, the Targaryen legacy, the dragonlords' right to rule. Everything else is temporary."
"Blood." Three steps closer, and the water climbed his shins. "Your blood put a boy in the dark under a keep and let the tide come up on him. Rhaenyra's blood burned the riverlands. Aegon's blood pissed itself on a throne it couldn't hold. I've watched what your family's right to rule actually does when you leave it alone with a realm for two years."
"And what have you got instead? A woman's bed and a wolf's tolerance." Daemon turned then. In the dark his eyes weren't violet, only pale. "You've built on nothing that's yours. Every stone of it is borrowed. Dreamfyre is hers. Vermithor came to you because a dead man stopped feeding him. Your seat at that council table sits there because the Queen Regent says it does, and a queen can unsay a thing in a morning. Blood you can't unsay. That's the difference, and you know it, because you count it every time you sit down with those men."
He wasn't wrong, and that was the trouble with him. Ulf had sat at that table for two years with his back straight and his hands under the wood where nobody could watch them shake, and some part of him had never once stopped waiting for a lord to ask, politely, what exactly he thought he was doing there.
"I did count it," Ulf said. "You're right about that. I'd sit down and count who at that table would still nod at me if Helaena died tomorrow, and the number was never good."
"Then we understand each other."
"No. You just got the question wrong, and I did too, for a long while." The water was at his knees. Above them a crack went along the vault with a sound like ice on a river, and grit came down through the torchlight in a slow curtain. "Nobody at that table can tell me I belong. That was never theirs to hand out. What they can tell me is whether the walls held, whether the grain moved, whether their sons came home. I did those things. I'll do them again next year, and the year after, and when I stop being able to do them somebody better should have my chair. Your kind never has to be any good at it. That's not strength. That's just nobody being allowed to check your work."
Daemon smiled at that, faintly, and came off the shelf into the water.
He was fast even now, even spent, and the blade came in low toward the hip where a man's plate never quite closes. Ulf caught the wrist and dropped forty stone into his own forearm and felt something tear in his shoulder for the privilege. The dagger went out of Daemon's fingers, skipped once off the water, and rang away into the dark. Daemon hit him twice in the ribs with his free hand, hard, and Ulf let him, because letting him cost less than moving.
Then Ulf turned him and put him against the wall with his forearm across the man's collarbones, and there it was. The whole back of Daemon's neck, offered. One Shigan, one finger, done in less than a breath, and the Rogue Prince ends in a basement with no witnesses and no argument left in him.
He didn't. He held him there instead, and holding him there took the last of everything, and Ulf understood while he was spending it that he'd never get it back tonight.
"Then why are you still fighting?" Ulf said into his ear. "If everything is temporary, why spend two years bleeding a realm you don't believe can be saved?"
Daemon was silent. The water lapped at their waists now, and the vault groaned above them, and behind the fallen arch the Northmen had started digging again and Stark hadn't stopped them this time.
"Because I was born to fight. It's the only thing I've ever been good at." He said it without pity for himself. "When the God's Eye swallowed me and the world moved on, I had a choice: stay dead, or come back and finish what I started. I chose to come back. And now I'm choosing something else."
"What?"
"To stop."
Ulf's arm came off him because there was nothing left in it. Daemon walked away through the rising water toward the seaward end of the vault, where the wall had already gone, a bite of masonry torn out of the seawall by the tide with the night behind it and the bay coming through in a long cold slab. He stooped in the shallows on the way, found the dagger, and carried it out onto the strip of silt below the breach.
He dropped the dagger. It landed in the wet sand.
"Not because you've beaten me. Because I'm tired. Because the realm doesn't need a Rogue Prince anymore. Because the world you're building, the peace, the family, the mercy, is something I was never capable of creating." He looked back once, and he was smiling like a man who'd decided how this went before he ever came down the stair. "I'm too tired to keep trying to destroy it."
He walked into the water. The bay rose to his knees, his waist, his chest. The waves closed over his shoulders. His silver hair floated on the surface, and then he dove, and the water swallowed him, and Daemon Targaryen vanished for the second time.
Ulf got as far as the breach and no further. His legs simply stopped, and he went down on one knee in the sand with the cold coming up through it, watching the bay settle back into itself.
Stone came apart behind him. Boots, then torchlight, then Cregan Stark climbing out through the ruined wall with his cloak black to the thigh with seawater, taking in the dropped dagger, the empty bay, the man kneeling.
"He went in," Ulf said. "Wouldn't be taken."
Stark looked out at the water. No body. No proof. The manhunt would drag the bay for days and find nothing, and the record would say presumed dead, whereabouts unknown, and the legend would grow another telling out of it.
"The God's Eye took him and gave nothing back," Stark said. "Now this." His breath showed in the torchlight. "That's twice Daemon Targaryen's gone into water in front of witnesses, and twice there's no body to show a council. I'll say exactly what I saw and nothing more, and the lords can make of it what they like."
Behind them the cistern hall let go, one arch and then the next, and Stark had Ulf under the arm and was hauling him up the sand before the second one hit the water.