Chapter 144: The Weight of a Crown
ULF
The Riverlands lords arrived at midday, a dozen men in travel-stained cloaks, faces carrying the weariness of a region that had been the Dance's primary battleground. They'd come to swear loyalty to King Jaehaerys III, and they'd specifically requested that the king receive their oaths personally.
Ulf read the request twice before he understood it wasn't courtesy. Riverlanders had buried more sons than any other men in the Seven Kingdoms, and they wanted to look at the boy those sons had died for.
Tarly's apology letter was still folded in his coat pocket, four days out of Horn Hill and unanswered. Men of substance who believe the crown's generosity has been misplaced. It could keep. There were three men in Oldtown who'd still be there tomorrow, and there was one boy who would only stand before the Iron Throne for the first time once.
The throne room smelled of wet wool and horse and the beeswax they'd burned since dawn to cover it. Corlys caught him at the foot of the dais while the herald was still counting cloaks.
"They didn't ride nine days for a boy's blessing," Corlys said. "They came to see whether he wobbles."
"I know what they came for."
"Then keep it short. A prince who tires in front of the Riverlands is a prince the Reach hears about within the month." Corlys glanced up the steps. "They called his mother mad for less."
"He'll stand."
"That is not the same as saying you are certain."
"No," Ulf said. "It isn't."
Helaena was waiting at the top of the steps with her hands folded at her waist. She didn't turn when he came up beside her.
"Brief," she said. "You promised me brief."
"The lords speak first. After that it's his to end."
"He counted the tiles from the door to the throne twice this morning. He counts when he is deciding whether to be frightened." Her thumb moved once against her knuckle. "I did the same at his age. Nobody watched me do it."
"I'm watching."
"Then watch, and do nothing." Her eyes went to her son and stayed there. "If you step in front of him today, he will be a boy who needed stepping in front of, and he will be that for the rest of his life. Let him finish it himself."
Jaehaerys stood before the Iron Throne, his spine straight, his hands steady. He'd been practicing for weeks, the words, the gestures, the gravity required of a seven-year-old receiving oaths from men who'd fought and bled and lost family in his war. Helaena stood at his right, Ulf at his left.
The herald called the houses. The gray-bearded man at the front went down on one knee with the sound of old leather giving, and eleven others followed, and the flagstones took the weight of them all at once.
"Your Grace. We buried four hundred men between the fords and the Kingsroad, and what is left of us has come to you. It is not much. It is what we have."
The boy's hands held his attention.
He'd been looking for it since the cisterns, in every dark corridor and every torch that guttered near the boy's face. The tell was in the fingers. Jaehaerys would go for his own sleeve and twist the cuff, and the whole court would read it in a heartbeat, and no amount of careful months would put it back.
The fingers stayed open at his sides.
"I am Jaehaerys Targaryen," the boy said, his voice carrying through the chamber. "Third of my name. I receive your oaths, and I promise, in return, to rule with justice. With mercy. With the memory of everything this war has cost."
The words were coached. Ulf had sat through four evenings of the boy repeating them until they went flat. But the conviction underneath was nobody's work but the boy's own, and the difference was plain enough that Ulf heard it land.
The session ran an hour and a half. The Riverlanders had grievances, and having ridden that far, they meant to speak them. Cattle taken by men in Stark colors who almost certainly hadn't been Stark's. A village that wanted its bridge back. A milling dispute at the fork, put badly by a man plainly unused to a hall this size.
At the hour mark the boy shifted his weight, once, and stopped him.
"Say the part about the millstone again. I didn't understand it."
The man swallowed. "The stone was cut for my father's mill, Your Grace. It was taken during the war and set in another man's race, and it grinds for him now."
"So it's your stone, and it's sitting in his river."
"That is the whole of it, Your Grace."
"I'll ask the queen what should be done. I only wanted to be sure I had it right first."
Ulf's jaw ached by the third petition, and twice he caught Corlys glancing up at the dais and away again. Jaehaerys stood through all of it. Shifting his weight that once was the only motion he made in ninety minutes.
When the hall finally emptied, the boy came down the steps at a walk and not a run, which cost him something, and found Ulf in the antechamber.
It was a small room off the council hall, evening now, one narrow window going blue. Someone had left a tray of cold fowl on the table and nobody had touched it. Through the open doorway Ulf could see Helaena in the passage beyond, her back half-turned, close enough to hear and far enough to pretend she wasn't.
"Was it good enough? Did the lords believe me?"
Ulf knelt to meet his eyes. Down close, the boy smelled of beeswax and of the cedar chest his ceremonial doublet lived in, and his collar had left a red line under his jaw.
"They believed you because you were telling the truth. You meant what you said about justice and mercy. That's not something you can fake."
"The one with the gray beard was crying. Not out loud." Jaehaerys turned a piece of the fowl over and didn't eat it. "Why do grown men cry when nothing bad is happening right then?"
Ulf had no answer worth giving him, so he gave none.
Jaehaerys was quiet a while. Then: "I'm not afraid anymore. When I think about the cisterns—the dark water, the hands—I still feel it. Like a cold place that won't warm up. But I'm not afraid of it. Because you found me in the dark."
Ulf had killed four men in that flooded corridor and carried the boy out through a broken grate with his own lungs burning, and he'd spent every week since certain that it hadn't been enough. You could kill the men. You couldn't kill what they'd put into a child's head. He had braced himself for the night the boy stopped sleeping, and here the boy was instead, telling him the cold place was still there and did not own him.
He'd been wrong about what mattered. Not the four men. Not the grate. He had come, and the boy had seen him come, and everything since had been built on that.
Ulf put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "I'll always find you."
Jaehaerys straightened. "I know. That's why I'm not afraid."
"It doesn't go away," Ulf said. "You should hear that from me and not learn it on your own. There'll be a night with no torch in the passage and it'll come back up your throat like river water."
"I know that." The boy said it without heat. "It came back twice this morning. I counted the tiles until it stopped."
"Your mother does the same."
"She told me."
It wasn't finished, then. The work of it would go on for years. But the court had come to measure him, and it had gone home with an answer.
Jaehaerys turned the cuff of his sleeve. Not from fear. From something nearer to embarrassment.
"Can I start training with you? Properly. Not watching from the wall." He said it fast, the way you say a thing you've rehearsed and don't trust. "I know I'm small."
In the passage, Helaena had stopped pretending. She was watching both of them now.
"Tomorrow," Ulf said. "After breakfast. Bring the wooden one."
And walking out under the blue window, he was already building it in his head, not the drills the court would want to watch a prince perform, but breath, and footing, and how to find a wall in the dark.