Chapter 146: The First Anniversary
HELAENA
Helaena had been awake since the hour of the wolf, and she hadn't lit a candle.
For six days the household had stepped around the date. The cooks stopped singing over the pots. Ser Criston Cole doubled the watch on the nursery stair without being asked and without saying why. On the fourth morning Maelor wanted to know why nobody would talk, and nobody answered him, which was an answer.
The bells began at first light. She dressed in the black wool she'd chosen a month ago and hadn't looked at since.
They went up Rhaenys's Hill on foot. Ulf had argued for horses and lost. "If they walk, we walk," she told him, and he didn't push it, only sent riders ahead to open the road and then climbed at her left shoulder the whole way, his white cloak going grey with ash before they reached the top.
The Dragonpit was still a ruin dressed up as a building site. Scaffolding webbed the broken dome. Half the roof stood open to a flat white sky, and the smell came off the stones as it had all year, old burning the rain never took out of the mortar.
Her memorial sat at the foot of the hill, on the ground where the crowd had come through the gates. She'd ordered it low on purpose, waist-high, a ring of pale stone a person could put a hand on without looking up at anything. The masons had cut the names in as they got them, and they'd run out of room, so the last names were smaller than the first.
The offerings were already there when the family arrived. Flowers, mostly cheap ones, sea-lavender and marigold browning at the edges. Candles in clay cups, hundreds of them, so the whole ring smelled of tallow and wet wax and the smoke kept going sideways in the wind off the bay. And the painted stones. Those she couldn't look at for long. Families had carried them up from the alleys behind Fishmonger's Square, river pebbles painted with a name, or a boat, or nothing but a colour somebody had liked.
Jaehaerys took his place beside her at the ring's north face. She put out her hand for him without thinking about it.
"No." He wasn't sharp about it. He'd thought it through beforehand, she could hear that. "I'll stand."
"It's going to be long, sweet boy."
"I know how long it is." He folded his hands behind his back. Ulf's stance, copied badly, a seven-year-old's shoulders trying to hold a grown man's stillness.
Jaehaera settled at the far edge of the ring with her paints, cross-legged on the cold flagstones. Nobody moved her. A year ago Helaena would have worried what the lords made of a princess sitting on the ground at a solemn thing. That fear had gone out of her somewhere in the winter.
She spoke when the sun cleared the scaffolding.
"A year ago today, this hill was loud." Her voice went further than she expected. The wind was behind her. "Then it was quiet, and it has been quiet since, and I think we have all been very careful with each other about why."
Nobody coughed. She went on.
"Dragons died here. Shrykos, in the sand, under men with hammers. Morghul, chained. Tyraxes in his den with his chain around him. They were not ours to spend and they were not the war's to take, and they screamed for a long time, and I will not pretend it was anything but what it was."
She put her palm flat on the stone.
"And the people died here. Fishermen. Cordwainers. A woman who sold pies at the Gate of the Gods and had four sons, and three of them came up this hill with her. Their names are cut here in smaller letters than they deserve, because there were more of them than we had room for, and that is my failure and I own it. They were not soldiers. Nobody asked them to a war. The war came down the street and found them."
A gull went over, and she waited for it, and let the noise pass.
"I am not going to tell you the crown will make this right. It cannot. I am going to tell you that this ground is yours today, until you are finished with it. Not until we are."
They had planned an hour. Grand Maester Orwyle had drafted the order of it, the bells, the procession, the offerings laid in ranks, all of it neat on parchment.
The city didn't read the parchment.
They kept coming. Past the hour, past midday, up the hill in a slow unbroken line that thickened rather than thinned, and they did not want to be ranked. A man knelt in the middle of the path with a child's shoe and stayed there so long the line simply divided around him. Two sisters argued out loud over where to set their candle. An old woman put her stone down, picked it up again, moved it a handspan left, and only then let go of it.
Orwyle came to her elbow in the afternoon. "The septons ask whether we might close before dark, Your Grace. There's a matter of the torches. And the Crownlands lords have been standing since dawn."
"Then they've been standing since dawn."
"Your Grace, the appearance of it. A ceremony that runs past its own end can look like a crown that has lost hold of the day."
"It runs until they're done." She kept her eyes on the line. "Every one of these people has been asked to be finished with this for a year. By me. By the bells, by the taxes, by the harvest. I asked them to be finished so I could stop carrying it for them. That was mine to be ashamed of, not theirs."
Orwyle bowed his head and went away to find torches.
She had come up the hill believing grief was a wound in the city she had to bind, quickly and cleanly, before it turned. She stood there until dusk and understood she'd had it backwards the whole time. Nothing was being managed. Six thousand people were standing on a hill in the cold, sharing something honestly, and it was the strongest thing she had seen the city do since the war.
Jaehaerys stood the whole of it. Ten hours. Near the end his knees were going and she saw it, and she put her hand out again, and again he shook his head, and he didn't take it. When the torches were lit he was still on his feet at the north face, chin up, white with cold. Ulf looked at the boy once and said nothing, and Helaena knew that particular silence, and it was pride.
They came home to the Red Keep after full dark.
Jaehaera didn't eat. She took her paints into the nursery and worked in the corner under the lamp, kneeling, her tongue between her teeth, and she wouldn't answer questions until it was done. Maelor tried twice and got nothing and went to bed insulted.
It was near midnight when Helaena crossed the room to look.
A dragon. Pale gold, done in thin careful strokes, its wings out and its neck turned back on itself. There was blood on the near wing, painted wet and heavy, running down toward the joint. And low in the gold, so small Helaena had to bend to find it, a figure with its arms up, going under, drowning in the gold.
She went still.
"Blood on golden scales," she murmured, and heard how quiet her own voice had gone. "I've seen this. A dragon not yet born. A bond not yet forged."
Ulf had come in behind her. He didn't ask her to explain. He looked at the little drowning figure a long moment, then at the door, counting exits in a room where nothing was happening.
She met his eyes. "Whatever this is, it's going to matter. Someday."
Then she knelt down beside her daughter, on the floor, in her mourning black, and made her voice ordinary. "Jaehaera. What is it?"
Jaehaera looked at the painting rather than at her mother. Her brush was still in her hand and she'd got gold on three knuckles.
"I don't know yet."
"Did you see it? The way you saw the dark water?"
"Not like that." She gave it real thought before she answered. "That one was loud. This one is just there."
The last time this child had made something she couldn't explain, it had been dark water and no light and a crown that drowns, and Helaena had nearly lost a son to a cistern four days later. She waited for more. Nothing more came. Jaehaera put her brush down, rubbed the gold off her knuckles onto her shift, and let herself be put to bed, and was asleep inside a hundred breaths.
A maid came in to clear the nursery, the candle-ends, the cold plates, the day's clutter, and reached for the painting with the rest of it.
Helaena took it out of her hands. She waited until the door shut and the boys' breathing evened out across the room, and then she propped the thing against the wall where the lamp couldn't reach it, and sat down on the floor in front of it with her knees drawn up, still in her mourning black, watching the gold dry.