The chamber of Grand Maester Pycelle smelled of vinegar, old parchment, lamp oil, and crushed herbs. It was a warm room despite the stone walls, made warmer still by the braziers set near the shelves and the heavy drapes pulled half across the narrow windows.
Shadows clung to the corners in long, wavering strips, and every shelf seemed to groan beneath the weight of bottles, scrolls, and little carved boxes whose contents no doubt promised pain, sleep, or death in careful measure.
Prince Rhaegar sat upon a cushioned stool with all the stiffness of an offended cat. His face was turned aside, his nose still bloodied, his cheek pink from his mother's hand, and his pride wounded worst of all.
Grand Maester Pycelle dabbed at him with a cloth soaked in something sharp enough to sting the eyes from two paces away.
Prince Arrax sat in silence upon another stool nearby.
He had ceased his crying long before they reached the room. The tears had dried. The ache remained.
A red cut marked the side of his face where the broken piece of wooden sword had struck him. It was not deep. Even so, that did not matter.
It had bled.
That was what gnawed at him.
Arrax kept his expression carefully dull as Pycelle muttered to himself and fussed with linen, salves, and little silver tools. His bruises had already darkened in ugly patches across his arms and chest. One cheek was swollen. His lip had split. None of that mattered either.
He had been hit harder before.
Far harder.
In another life, in another body, he had been beaten with everything from fists, glass, boot leather, and metal. He had known what it meant to break skin, split flesh, and grit one's teeth through pain while pride did the rest.
He remembered other moments, smaller moments, easy to ignore when taken one by one.
The odd pressure in his limbs. The feeling beneath the skin as if something there was denser than flesh ought to be.
The way his own weight sat differently upon his bones. The way certain knocks seemed to bruise the surface but never sink deeper.
Now, a child's broken wooden blade had opened him.
A simple splintered piece of wood.
Arrax lowered his eyes.
That did not fit.
Pycelle moved in front of him at last. The old man's beard flowed over his chest like a river of burnt straw, and his chain clinked with each little step. He smelled of booze and sleep.
"Sit still, sweet prince," Pycelle said, voice rich with practised softness. "This shall sting only a little."
Arrax said nothing.
The maester pressed cloth to the cut on his face. A faint hiss escaped between the boy's teeth. He hated that it happened. Hated the involuntary weakness of it. Pycelle mistook it for ordinary childish fear and offered a kindly nod.
"There now. A brave lad."
Arrax looked at the man's hands instead of his face.
Thin hands. Soft with age. Veined. Shaking only a little.
Hands holding steel.
His eyes drifted, not to the salves or bandages, but to the instruments laid neatly atop a folded cloth near the edge of the table. Needles. Tweezers. A narrow probe. A short, gleaming scalpel, its edge bright in the firelight.
Something colder settled within him.
Across the room, Tywin Lannister stood near the shelves, broad-shouldered and still, his hands clasped behind his back. He had said little since entering. He had not needed to.
Men shifted when he looked at them. Even Pycelle, in his own chambers, seemed to conduct his work with extra care in the Hand's presence.
Tywin's eyes moved between both princes without seeming to move at all.
Ser Oswell stood near the door. Ser Barristan stood two paces off. The maid had vanished somewhere the moment duty no longer chained her to the scene. Arrax did not blame her.
Pycelle finished dabbing salve upon Rhaegar's bruised face and directed the elder prince to hold still while a servant tied clean linen around one wrist. Rhaegar glared at everyone equally, which at least suggested consistency.
That suited Arrax.
Better anger than questions.
He let the room fade to background noise while his mind worried at the same hard knot.
'If wood could cut him, why had his own bite not shattered upon Barristan's sword?'
'If his body was merely harder than it ought to be, why did bruises bloom so readily?'
His fingers curled against his knees.
Perhaps he was mistaken. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps this flesh was only flesh and he was building castles atop madness because he had awakened in the wrong world wearing the face of a dragon prince.
'Possible.'
'Unlikely.'
Arrax waited.
Pycelle turned his back to reach for another jar. Rhaegar muttered something resentful beneath his breath. Ser Oswell answered in a low tone. As Barristan shifted his weight.
No one was looking at him.
So he slipped from the stool with the silence of a thief.
A small movement. Nothing more.
He approached the side table where the instruments lay. He did not hurry. Children fidgeted. Children touched. Children wandered. A prince's son, bruised and curious, could move three steps in a maester's chamber without inviting alarm.
His hand reached.
The scalpel felt cool and surprisingly balanced in his fingers. Fine work. Sharp work. Better made than anything he should have handled at this age.
Arrax lowered his head as if merely staring at the object in foolish interest.
Then he turned his left hand palm down and pressed the scalpel's edge to the back of it.
Just enough.
Nothing.
He frowned.
He pressed harder.
Still nothing. Not even the first thin white line of parted skin.
His pulse quickened.
He tightened his grip and forced the blade down with deliberate pressure, jaw set, breath caught shallow in his chest.
The edge bit.
Not into flesh.
Into itself.
The metal gave first.
Arrax saw it happen and almost lost hold of the thing.
The blade bent.
Not much. A slight warping near the middle, a delicate curve where there had been straightness before. Yet it was enough. Enough to turn the chamber colder around him.
He stared at the deformed scalpel and felt something deep within his mind shift.
His brother's splintered wooden blade had opened his skin. This steel, driven by his own hand, had failed and bent like cheap tin.
'Why?'
'Was it force? Intent? Some quality in his brother? Some quality in wood? In practice, weapons? In dragon blood? In children?' The question multiplied like rats.
He became aware, then, that the room had gone too still.
Arrax lifted his gaze.
Tywin Lannister was watching him.
The Hand had not moved from his place by the shelves, yet his eyes had fixed upon the prince with the narrow intensity of a man who had just seen a ledger alter its own sums.
There was no visible surprise in the lion's face. No widening of eyes. No parted lips. Merely thought, cold and immediate.
Arrax's own expression did not change. He let his fingers loosen. The scalpel slipped onto the table with a soft metallic tick.
He returned to his stool.
No one else seemed to have noticed. Pycelle turned back, carrying a jar. Rhaegar sat sulking. The Kingsguard remained at their posts. If Tywin had seen, and he clearly had, he gave no sign to the room.
That was worse.
Much worse.
Arrax folded his hands into his lap and stared at the floorboards.
Within Tywin Lannister's mind, the matter arranged itself with ruthless speed.
He had seen the child press steel to skin. He had seen no cut appear. He had seen the blade deform. He trusted his eyes. Eyes had made him powerful long before swords or titles had done the same.
'A trick? No.'
The boy was young enough to be foolish, not skilled enough to perform deceit so smoothly under scrutiny. Pycelle had been occupied. The guards are inattentive. The act had not been staged for an audience because the child had believed he had none.
Tywin's thoughts moved backwards through bloodlines, songs, chronicles, and muttered half-histories too often dismissed by practical men. Targaryens had birthed madmen, dreamers, dragon riders, stillborn monsters, pale beauties, and princes touched by strange humours of mind and body. There were old tales of babes resistant to heat.
Tales of dragon dreams that came true. Tales of Daenys the Dreamer and prophecies wrapped in smoke. There were tales, too, of Summerhall's dead and of those who sought to wake old powers from stone.
'But this?'
'Steel bending against skin beneath the hand of a child prince?'
No tale came readily to hand.
His eyes remained on the younger boy.
Arrax sat too quietly. Watched too much. There was fear in him, yes, but not the simple fear of children. This was weighing fear. Measuring fear. The sort a lord might wear before a council chamber, not a boy of four in a maester's room.
'Interesting,' Tywin thought.
'Dangerous,' a quieter part of him answered.
Grand Maester Pycelle at last finished his fussing. He bound the last strip of linen around Arrax's hand though there was no wound there to justify it, merely a bruise from the earlier fighting. Perhaps habit moved the old man more than reason. Perhaps he wished to appear diligent before the Hand. Either way, he stepped back with a laborious sigh.
"There, my princes. Both shall live."
Rhaegar sniffed. Arrax said nothing.
Ser Oswell and Ser Barristan approached at once. Both bowed first to Tywin, then to the Grand Maester, and finally gestured for the boys to rise.
"We shall return the princes to their chambers," Barristan said.
Tywin gave a slight inclination of his head.
The Kingsguard took each boy in hand, more firmly yet calmly, and led them from the chamber. Rhaegar went stiffly. Arrax went with careful obedience, though just before crossing the threshold, he glanced back once.
Tywin was still watching.
The door shut behind them with a muted thud.
Silence settled.
Only the crackle of brazier coals and the soft clink of Pycelle arranging his instruments disturbed it. The old maester fussed over his table, either waiting for Tywin to speak first or hoping he would not.
Tywin spared him the uncertainty.
"I have learned something of your inventories, Grand Maester."
Pycelle's hands paused for the smallest fraction of a moment. "My lord Hand?"
"The milk of the poppy."
The old man turned slowly, beard shifting upon his chest. His expression arranged itself into puzzled concern. It was a practised face. Tywin had seen lesser men ruined by underestimating how much of Pycelle's softness was theatre.
"What of it, my lord?"
Tywin stepped forward one pace. No more. He did not need proximity to pressure a man.
"The king has ailments," Tywin said. "He sleeps poorly. He broods. He rages. A restless mind weakens judgment, and the burden of rule is not made lighter by wakefulness."
Pycelle inclined his head, cautious now. "His Grace has, on occasion, required physic. I administer what is proper."
Tywin reached into the folds of his golden-threaded cloak and drew forth a heavy purse. He set it upon the table beside the bent scalpel. Gold rang softly within when it landed.
Pycelle's eyes dipped to it. Only for an instant.
"There will be more," Tywin said.
No change in tone. No flourish. The sentence sat between them like a blade laid flat.
Pycelle wet his lips. "I am ever the king's loyal servant."
"As am I," Tywin replied. "That is why I should prefer His Grace soothed when soothing is possible. A king in ailment ought to be relieved of suffering. You understand me."
Pycelle understood him perfectly. Tywin saw it in the minute tightening at the old man's eyes, in the way his fingers folded into his sleeves, in the care with which he chose not to look again at the gold.
"Of course, my lord Hand. His Grace's comfort is of great concern to us all."
Tywin let the silence stretch until the maester felt its weight.
Then his gaze drifted, very briefly, to the bent scalpel still lying on the cloth.
Pycelle followed that look and frowned.
Interesting.
The old man had not noticed before. Now he did. His brows twitched close together as he took in the slight warp of the blade, and Tywin stored that away as well. If Pycelle had not caused it, then the room had witnessed something unplanned by both of them.
Tywin turned toward the door.
"See that the king rests," he said.
"My lord Hand."
Tywin left without another word.
The corridor beyond was cooler than the maester's chamber. Torchlight licked across the red and gold threads of his cloak as he walked, hands once more clasped behind his back. Men bowed as he passed. He scarcely saw them.
His thoughts remained with the pale child and the bent blade.
A prince who watched too much. A prince who bled from wood but not from steel. A prince with eyes older than his years.
The realm already stood upon poor foundations. Aerys was proud. Rhaella brittle with strain. Rhaegar bookish and vain beneath his silences. The younger boy had seemed, until now, merely another complication born from dragon stock.
Tywin no longer believed that.
Something had woken in the house of Targaryen.
And Tywin Lannister, who trusted little and forgot less, intended to learn exactly what it was.
(AN: Hi all sorry for the long uploads.)