Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The Small Hall of Summerhall operated in dreadfully quiet efficiency... 

The Small Hall of Summerhall. Daeron turned the phrase over in his aching head, because the rhyme tickled something in him that the rest of the morning had so far failed to reach. He rolled his boiled egg back and forth— dry bread to the edge of the plate, edge of the plate to the dry bread —as a man might worry a coin between his knuckles, and for largely the same reason: it gave him something to do that wasn't staring at his father.

Maekar sat at the head of the table like a thing carved from granite and left there to discourage conversation.

Daeron, somehow, and not entirely to his surprise given the regrettable sequence of grievous events at Ashford Meadows, was the only child of Maekar still residing at Summerhall. Egg and Ser Duncan were somewhere in Dorne, doing something purposeful and useful and no doubt dusty and uncomfortable. His sisters were at the Red Keep with their royal grandsire. Aerion was loose somewhere in Essos, raining his particular brand of terror down on people who had not yet learned his Brightflame persona. 

Which left— wait —Aemon was at the Citadel, earning his links.

Which left Daeron. The ever present Daeron. 

The ever present Daeron, alone with Maekar, who had, in the absence of anyone else to improve, decided to make a man out of him at nine-and-ten.

Every rattle of a spoon against a porcelain bowl rang like a blacksmith's hammer. Daeron winced. The light in the Small Hall was offensively bright — cruel, even — and he had begun to suspect this was deliberate. Something Maekar had arranged. A form of discipline that left no marks.

His father had not spoken a word since Daeron had sat down. For this, Daeron was tentatively grateful. He watched his father's eyes track across the parchment. Then track back. Then track across again, at precisely the same speed, with precisely the same furrow between the brows.

Daeron had another suspicion—
There were things a man simply did not say to Maekar “The Anvil” of House Targaryen, and are you sounding out the words, Father was fairly high on that list.
His own tongue felt like a piece of dry leather left too long in the sun.

"Serving boy—" He raised two fingers in the direction of a servant no older than Egg, who stepped forward with a pitcher. "No— not that. Be a good lad and fetch me something from the cellar."

"As you wish, my lord."

Daeron squinted a smile at him. "And put it in a cooled wineskin. There's a good boy."

The servant nodded and disappeared. Daeron watched him go with something approaching genuine warmth, which was more than he could say for anyone else in the room.

"Is there a reason," his father said, still not looking up from the parchment in his hands, "to be in your cups before the morning bell has finished ringing?"

"Something to water my withering mind." Daeron pressed his fingers to his temple. "Gods, why is it so loud in here?"

It was, as a matter of fact, not particularly loud. The servants moved in their precise, choreographed patterns, vacant-eyed and efficient, drifting from table to sideboard to door and back again in a rhythm so unchanging it made Daeron's skin prickle in a way he couldn't name.

He needed to get out of here.

"If you're thinking of fucking leaving," Maekar said, "I forbid it." He set the parchment down. His knuckles had been white against it. "I've had word from your uncle."

"Which one?"

"Aerys."

"Ah." Daeron considered this. "You mean Uncle Brynden?"

Maekar lowered his brows. It was a small movement and it accomplished a great deal. Daeron did not press further.

"There is a sickness." His father's voice was flat, the way it got when he was choosing words carefully. "Spreading from King's Landing. Through the realm. Your cousins have caught it. Same as your grandsire. Your sisters remain at the Red Keep. They are well.”

"My lord." The servant boy reappeared at Daeron's elbow with the wineskin, cool to the touch, beaded with cellar-damp.

Daeron took it with both hands like a man receiving a sacrament and mouthed his thanks to the boy.

"Well," He pulled the stopper, wet his lips. "Mmm.. Then I suppose we best stay strong and well."

Maekar looked at him for a long moment.

Outside, somewhere in the yard, someone was coughing.

Chapter Text

It was a fine morning to walk through the painted corridors of Summerhall...

...And Daeron knew it the way he knew most things: theoretically, and with the dull resentment of a man who had not asked to be educated.

It couldn't be helped and the tapestries saw to that.

Ancient things, passed from youngest son to youngest son until the deep crimsons and golds had washed out to warm amber and old honey. A cherished heirloom of House Targaryen, depicting the dragons and the men small enough to ride them. Balerion, the Black Dread. Meraxes. Vhagar. Tessarion— though he was partial to that one, if he was being honest, which he rarely was before midday.

Great coiling things rendered in thread, their riders triumphant above the carnage of burning cities and broken keeps.

Daeron walked past them without looking up. 

He had never liked dragons. Not the ones on the tapestries, not the stone beasts crouched above the archways, and certainly not the painted one looming over the great hearth. The dragons in dreams saw to that and made sure of it. If the dragons in his dreams were, say, tamed and kind— offering a gentle nudge of encouragement when he needed it most— Daeron suspected they would have possessed his every waking thought.

Well, enough of that. He took a pull from the wineskin.

The Summerhall's hall, Summerhall's hall, the hall of Summerhall— Daeron shook the thought away before it could gnaw at his mind— as halls often do, made him think of his grandsire and royal namesake, who had the sense to call the castle Summerhall. 

King Daeron "The Good" Targaryen had been born on the final day of the year of the last dragon, which Daeron had always found poetically exhausting. His grandfather had built Summerhall precisely because King's Landing was loud, sweltering, and choked with people who wanted things from you.

Here the air off the Red Mountains was clean and sweet and took its time in passing. That had been the point. King Daeron II had arranged for word to travel slowly here, too. The main rookery sat in Summertown, a league away— a walk Daeron found not entirely objectionable on mornings such as this. Two raven rookeries: one small in the far southern end of the keep, one in the castle town below, and the thinking behind it was essentially leave us alone for a fortnight!

Daeron respected that enormously and out of respect took a long, appreciative pull from the wineskin.

He passed the Great Hall. Through its massive painted windows, the garden caught the morning light and threw it back in greens and golds— over statues and rotundas, and the dark geometric shapes of hedging trees cut into cones and columns. The Dornish fountain at its center sent a plume of water arcing from a carved dragon's open mouth, spraying droplets that gleamed like polished silver, and the man-made lake below caught the spray and held it like treasure. His grandsire had decided this was a reasonable thing to build, and Daeron found he had no objections.

He paused at a window long enough to drink in the scenery and drink from his wineskin simultaneously; it felt efficient

The sound of steel on steel drew him east and closer to freedom. 

What was once a pretty courtyard had been cleared and paved by his father for the sake of training and sparring; it sat in the eastern side of the keep, and Maekar was in it. Of course Maekar was in it.

Broad and relentless against the morning sky, his mace moving in short, devastating arcs while the master-at-arms circled him with the wary energy of a man who valued his teeth and his life. Sweat had turned his father's gambeson to a second skin. His footwork was immaculate. He had been at it, from the sound of it, since breakfast. 

Drowning in guilt, Daeron thought, watching him. Baelor’s death still lived in those shoulders. It lived in the hard set of that jaw, and in the way his father shattered things that could not hit him back— because hitting things that could hit back was the only other option, and the master-at-arms didn’t deserve that kind of fury.

He thought about Baelor, briefly, and then about Baelor’s funeral pyre, and then about the days that had followed; then he choked the memory and pulled the stopper from his wineskin again.

He needed to drown something, too. In this— if in nothing else —he was his father’s son.

He turned away before Maekar could look up and catch him at it.

The gatehouse sat at the end of the main approach, squat and sun-warmed, the moat beyond it green and still and smelling of spring rain. The guard on duty was a man named Pell, who had the good sense to fix his gaze intensely on a distant, unimportant cloud as Daeron passed— the only polite response to a prince with a wineskin at this hour of the morning. Daeron gave him an approving nod.

He crossed the bridge.

The air on the other side tasted different— less enclosed, less arranged, less Maekar Targaryen. He took a long breath of it and felt something in his chest loosen for the first time in three days.

He was free.

The market square of Summertown sat in the comfortable chaos of midday— loud, close-pressed, and smelling of leather, fresh bread, and the particular, heavy warmth of a space holding more souls than it was ever meant to. Wooden stalls crowded the square in crooked, stumbling rows. At its heart stood the well, ringed by women with buckets and men with opinions on the women with buckets.
Travelers from the Boneway drifted through— merchants with heavy packs, pilgrims with dusty feet, and hedge knights with sun-scoured faces and rib-thin horses— all pausing to trade and drink before the road claimed them again.

Daeron moved through the press with the languid, unhurried pace of a man with nowhere to be, his wineskin at his hip, watching.

He noticed the girl first by the sound of her—a wet, rattling cough that came from deep in the chest. She was young and dark-haired, a basket of oranges propped against one hip, coughing with the grim determination of one who had been at it for hours and meant to carry on regardless. As Daeron watched, she took three more steps, sat down very slowly upon the cobbles, then her body went limp and simply stayed there.

A half-dozen bystanders were at her side before Daeron had even decided whether to move.

He watched them— a stout woman in a flour-dusted apron, a rope-seller, a lad of twelve who had abandoned his errands to crouch in the dirt with an expression of naked concern. They were murmuring to her, steadying her. The girl blinked up at them with glassy, grateful eyes.

“Good people,” Daeron murmured to the empty air. He meant it, too.

Then he walked on.

"— they all go in the one grave." 

Dearon peeked over the walled lichyard, two gravediggers were at work— one short, red of hair, and one tall and bald, both of them deep in a hole and deeper in debate. 

"Deep as it'll go. It's less work, innit?" The short one was saying, with the stubbornness of a mule. 

"Work," the tall one spat, leaning heavy on his spade, "ain't what's on a man's mind when his kin's gone cold." 

"They'll all meet the Stranger, do they? The kin don't have to dig but we— "

The short one coughed. Not briefly.

Daeron's steps slowed.

The cough was the same kind as the girl's. Low, wet, effortful. The short gravedigger cleared his throat, spat, and bent back to his work as though nothing had happened. The tall one didn't seem to notice.

Daeron looked at the hole they were digging.

He walked faster.

The maester was a young man from somewhere north of the Neck, which accounted for both his pallor and the air of personal grievance he wore like a second robe. He had mousey hair, watery eyes, and the snuffling quality of a man who felt personally betrayed by the sun.

"Maester Albert, you look terrible," Daeron told him pleasantly.

"Berbert. It's the damp," Berbert, right of course, said with dignity, "has gotten into my bones." He blew his nose into a cloth and regarded Daeron with eyes that were very red at the rims. "These birds are filthy creatures, my lord, and this rookery is the source of half my—" He sneezed. "What is the message?"

"To Novice Aemon of House Targaryen at the Citadel," Daeron said.

He had scratched out the words that morning, the dream still sitting behind his eyes like a fresh bruise. Rats — milky white eyes, consuming each other and more joining in, growing, spreading. Any precedent. Any records at all. Send word.
He handed the scroll over. "Quickly, if you can manage it."

Alber— er —Berbert looked at the scroll. "Rats?"

"Yes. Milky-eyed rats. Consuming each other in a ball." Daeron said hoping the maester might have some knowledge on the matter. 

A long pause. "My lord," Berbert said carefully, "are you quite—"

"It was a dream— never you mind. Bind it and fly it," Daeron shrugged. 

The maester's expression was the face of a man recategorizing a concern. He attached the scroll to a raven's leg with the efficiency of long practice, moved to the window, and released the bird into the pale sky.

Daeron watched it climb.

Good, he thought. It would reach Aemon. Aemon would know if there were records. Aemon always knew.

He thanked Alberbert, who was already blowing his nose again, and set off to find something to drink. As being reminded of the dream was a sobering experience, a condition Daeron intended to rectify as swiftly as possible

The alehouse had no name.

It did not need one. It was a hole in the wall in the most literal sense — one door, one window, walls that had been whitewashed at some point in who knows when and had since developed a thick patina of grease and character. The only establishment in Summertown that had defied his father's orders and still served him.

The alewife was old and stout, possessing the heavy economy of woman who stripped her daily life down to only necessary motion. She set a jack of nut-brown ale in front of Daeron without a word and ebbed away like a slow tide.

He was on his fifth cup when the door opened and Gunter came in.

Gunter was, technically, a groom.

He was responsible for Daeron’s horse, its tack, and its general well-being— duties he discharged with a cheerful competence and a blessed lack of ambition.

He was broad-shouldered and sun-brown, with a laugh that began in his boots and arrived at his face some moments later. He was also— and this was the part that truly mattered —the finest drink-companion in the Marches.
He laughed at everything, passed judgment on nothing, and had never once looked at Daeron with the heavy, disappointed eyes of a father.

"Figured I’d find you here," Gunter said, dropping onto the bench across from him with the ease of a man arriving somewhere he belonged. "Your horse is outside. Didn't reckon you'd be much for the walk back, not in your state."

"You," Daeron raised a cup, "are a man of rare perception."

Gunter grinned. He reached into his coat and produced a pipe. Small, clay, with a faint smell that was not sourleaf.

Daeron's eyes widened. "Is that—"

"Dothraki horse-grass." Gunter set it on the table between them with the satisfied air of a man presenting a gift he was confident about. "Trader off the Boneway gave it me. Said it’s the thing for aching joints— and aching minds, too."

"Does it work?"

"Like a charm, so he says." Gunter’s grin widened, showing a missing tooth. "Or so I'm told, m'lord."

Daeron picked up the pipe. Looked at it. Set it down again. Picked it up once more.

"My father," he said, "has forbidden me from leaving the castle grounds."

"And yet here you sit," Gunter observed.

"And yet here I sit." He lit the pipe with a smirk. "Pour yourself a cup, man!"

The evening was soft and purple-edged by the time they left, the Red Mountains fading into silhouette against the last of the light. Daeron's horse moved at a patient walk because Daeron was in no condition to ask it for anything more ambitious. Gunter rode beside him with the contentment of a man who had spent an afternoon in exactly the right way.

They were singing.

Or rather, Daeron was singing, which was a different, noisier, and more committed endeavor. The song was an old one, a tavern thing he'd learned years ago and had no intention of forgetting, and he delivered it to the empty road with the conviction of a man who had strong feelings on the subject.

"So, Sallei can wait— "

"You're flat," said Gunter.

"—she knows it's too late as we're walking on by—"

"Proper flat, m'lord."

"Her soul slides away—" 

There was a figure on the road ahead.

He was moving— just barely, a dark shape against the dimming road, lurching forward with the unsteady dedication of a man who forgotten how feet worked but hadn't stopped trying. Daeron registered him with the fellow-feeling of a man who recognized a kindred spirit.

"Look at him," Gunter said warmly. "He’s been at it harder and longer than us, I’ll wager."

“The septons say we mustn’t judge.” Daeron raised his voice and kept singing. “But don't look back in anger, I heard her say— ”

The man on the road made a sound.

It was, Daeron thought, a queer sound. It held none of the standard notes of a man sotted with wine, which he knew comprehensively. No. It was lower than that. The sound, possibly, of a man who had lost the use of the common tongue and was left only with the base sounds of his being.

But it came at roughly the right moment in the song! 

Gunter pointed a thick finger at the shadow. “He’s singing back, m’lord.”

“And so, Sallei can wait—”

The figure made the noise again— ragged and wet —at the precise interval of a response.

“He is,” Daeron agreed, delighted. He leaned forward in his saddle, nearly falling, his voice rising to a bellow. “Don't look back in anger—”

They rode past.

Behind them, the sound cut off.

Daeron twisted in his saddle, just in time to see the figure drop. Not sit. Not stumble. Drop — straight down, like a puppet with severed strings, face-first into the road, and lie still.

He stared at the shape on the ground.

Gunter stared at the shape on the ground.

"Too much," Gunter said finally, with genuine sympathy.

"Mmm," Daeron agreed.

The road was quiet. The mountains were dark. Above them, the first stars were beginning to appear, cold and indifferent, in the way stars tended to be.

Daeron faced forward. He took a pull from the wineskin.

The dream was there again, at the back of his mind, the way it always was now. Red eyes. Pale faces. The crows eating the world.

Rats, he'd told Aemon. Milky-eyed rats.

The wineskin was almost empty.

Chapter Text

The session ended when Maekar's arms told him to end it, which meant it ended later than it should have..

He dismissed the master-at-arms with a jerk of his chin and stood alone in the yard, breathing through his nose, letting his heartbeat settle into something a man could be dignified about. Sweat had soaked through his linen gambeson from collar to the hem. His shoulders ached after good work— not the bright, stupid pain of injury, but the deep, structural ache of something when used correctly. 

He picked up his mace, turned it once in his grip, then set it against the rack. 

He felt his eldest son watching him from the corridor above. He had not looked up; looking up would have required acknowledgement, and that would have required deciding what to do about it, and Maekar did not have the patience this morning for Daeron's particular levity regarding almost fucking everything. 

He knew the look his son gave him; he needed not see it. 

Poor bastard, the look would have said. Drowning in all that fury, with nowhere to put it.

The worst of it was that Daeron was not wrong. 

Maekar did not think about this any further so he walked inside. 

Lorcan was waiting for him at the inner door, which was where his steward generally was— appearing with the unremarkable consistency of a thorough man, tall and mop-headed man, his grey-blond hair perpetually listing to one side. He fell into step beside Maekar without a word, which was the correct thing to do when a man was still breathing hard from two hours of mace work. 

They had made it to the first landing before Lorcan spoke. 

"Your bath is being drawn, m'lord. I've had them heat it twice." 

"Good." 

"Maester Melaquin is expected back this evening. He came by way of Oldtown and made a stop in Dorne." A pause, precisely long enough to be respectful. "He'll have news."

"Of what kind."

"The sickness, m'lord. Word from King's Landing has been— " Lorcan chose his next word carefully, "—irregular. If it spreads further into the Reach and the Stormlands at any pace, Dorne will close the passes. Both of them. The Prince's Pass and the Boneway."

Maekar considered this. He turned it over the way he turned most problems— looking for edges. "How soon?"

"I couldn't say with certainty. Maester Melaquin will know better than I do. But if I were a Dornish Prince—"

"You'd close them already."

Lorcan said nothing, which was agreement.

They turned down the western corridor toward his solar and Maekar almost walked into the chambermaid before he saw her.

She was young, fair-haired, pressed against the wall with a bundle of folded linen, and she was coughing. Not the polite, swallowed kind. The deep, wet, dragging kind— the kind that came from somewhere low in the chest and took time getting out. She straightened when she saw him, mortified, pressing a hand over her mouth.

Maekar stopped.

"Lorcan."

"M'lord?"

"Dismiss her."

The girl's eyes went wide. Lorcan gave the smallest nod and touched her shoulder gently, steering her away. She looked back once. Maekar had already moved on.

He thought of Aegon, briefly and without meaning to. Out somewhere between here and Dorne with the hedge knight, sleeping under open skies. Away from crowded halls and shared cups and whatever this was becoming.

The boy would be fine. Aegon was sensible, in his way. The hedge knight more so.

He did not let himself think about it further.

"Lorcan." He stopped at the door to his solar.

Lorcan stopped.

"Tell the head housekeeper. Any servant found coughing. Any with watery eyes. Dismissed— today, with coin and a word of kindness, but dismissed. Do the same for your own men."

"Yes, m'lord."

"I want it done before supper."

"It will be."

Maekar went inside.

The bath was hot, which was the only thing he required of it. He stayed in it until the water started to cool and then stayed in it a little longer, because there was no one present to observe this and therefore it had not happened.

Allyn was waiting when he emerged.

The boy was the master-of-feasts' son — six-and-ten, maybe seven-and-ten, broad through the shoulders, with the thick neck and flat feet of someone who was going to be very large very soon, whether he chose to do anything useful with it or not. He moved quietly for his size. He laid out the clothes without being asked, which Maekar respected, and helped him dress with competent, unobtrusive efficiency.

Maekar watched him work.

The boy had no business being inside castle walls. That was a waste. That was the kind of waste that accumulated quietly until a man looked at his sons and wondered how it had happened.

"Boy, you spend much time in the yard?" Maekar asked.

Allyn's hands stilled briefly on the laces. "Some, m'lord."

"Watching? Or training?"

"Watching, mostly." A pause. "I help with the horses sometimes."

"Hm." Maekar turned slightly so the boy could reach the back buckle. "You have the build for it. The martial path."

Silence. Not the empty kind— the kind a person uses to choose words.

"I'll consider it, m'lord," Allyn said finally.

He went back to his work. Quiet, precise. And there it was— a swallow, low and deliberate, the kind a man made when he was holding something down.

Maekar regarded this and said nothing further.

The Small Hall was quiet for supper, which suited him.

He encountered the masterof-feasts on his way out, a round, pleasant man carrying the distracted air of someone whose afternoon had run long.

"Your boy," Maekar said. "Have him in the yard at first light. I want to see how he bears himself."

The master-of-feasts paused. Something moved behind his eyes— fond, resigned, the look of a father who had made peace with a thing. He laughed, short and genuine. "I cannot say for certain, m'lord. My boy— well." He settled on it like a man selecting the least alarming version of the truth. "He'd sooner swallow a sword than wield one."

What an odd thing to say. Maekar looked at him.

"Send him anyway."

The master-of-feasts smiled carefully and bowed then went on his way. 

Maekar sat, a servant filled his cup, and he looked at the empty chairs along the table but did not remark on them, because there was nothing to remark on. This was where he ate. There happened to be no one else here. 

"Has my son returned?" 

The nearest servant— grown, snaggle-toothed —straightened. "We'll inquire, m'lord. He's not been found in his, well, in his usual places." 

Usual places. Maekar knew of his son's usual places in the keep.

"Check thoroughly." 

They checked. They reported back. Daeron had not been found in any of the usual places because Daeron was, as far as anyone could establish, not in the castle at all.

Maekar worked his jaw, then ate his soup.

He was on his second course when Melaquin arrived.

The old maester looked like a man who had been traveling for too long and thinking for longer— papery, with the bright, slightly manic attention of someone who had arrived at the end of a long chain of reasoning and did not entirely like where it had deposited him. He appeared in the doorway with his chain catching the candlelight and stopped as if unsure of his welcome.

"Sit," Maekar said. "Eat something."

"As you will, Your Grace," Melaquin sat. A servant materialized with bread and cold meat, and the maester ate with the automatic efficiency of someone who had forgotten food existed until this moment. Maekar waited.

"The young Prince Aemon," Melaquin said, when he'd swallowed enough to speak properly. " Your son is well, Your Grace." He glanced up. "He i— he is excelling. The archmaesters speak of him. He has a gift for—"

"I know," Maekar said. He had not known. His father had known. His father had arranged it, insisted on it, over Maekar's objections, and had been correct about every part of it.

"The sickness," Maekar drank from his cup. "Tell me what you came to tell me."

Melaquin set down his bread. He was quiet for a moment in a way that felt like preparation.

Then he leaned forward, and his voice dropped.

"As you will, my prince. There are whispers at the Citadel, Your Grace. Among those paying attention. They are calling it the pale rot." He paused. "The archmaesters do not take it seriously. They have decided it is but a severe damp of the lungs and I— I find I cannot agree with them."

"Why?"

"Because of what it becomes," Melaquin glanced at the servants. Maekar tilted his head, barely, and they withdrew to the far end of the hall. Melaquin leaned closer. "Your Grace. What I am about to tell you has not been officially recorded. Aemon helped me gather the accounts. What we believe— what the parchments from the Crownlands suggest —is that this sickness is unlike anything in the Citadel’s records."

"What is it, then?"

"It causes swelling, Your Grace. The brain-matter swells against the skull." The old maester's voice had gone very flat, the way a man's voice goes when he's fighting to keep it steady. "By the time the pressure reaches its full extent, the man is— gone. Taken by the Stranger. But—" He stopped. 

Maekar waited. 

"But the body remains, it does not find its rest." 

The hall was very quiet. 

"The body remains, Your Grace. It persists for days, depending on the vigor of the body before the fever took hold. And the swelling— it drives what is left. It curdles the spirit." Maester Melaquin searched for words, his hands were tight on the table. "Some are seized by a mindless ferocity. They are swift and savage, striking out with a madness that knows neither reason nor mercy. Others lose the use of themselves almost entirely, their own limbs; they can only halt and stumble— from what I read on the accounts.  I have taken to calling them 'shamblers', for the lack of a kinder word."

He paused, the candlelight flickering in his eyes. "But they all share one dark purpose: to spread the corruption. Not in the first sign of damp, not whilst the sick man yet knows himself, but at the end, when the mind is wholly overtaken. Then the foul humors of the mouth grow dangerous. A bite is the surest way of it, for the teeth break the flesh and drive the corruption inward. Yet spit cast into the eyes, the mouth, or a fresh wound may serve as well. It is the only hunger left in them."

Maekar sat with this. 

"How long," he said. "Before the body stops?"

“In the frail, a handful of days, most likely. In the strongest, perhaps a sennight or two, Your Grace.” Melaquin folded his hands, his knuckles white. “And more than seven days is a considerable span, for a thing with no sense of its body and no purpose but to spread its ruin.”

Maekar looked at the candle in the center of the table. He watched the flame dance for a moment. "What are the first signs?" 

"A cough, my prince." Melaquin spoke with heavy care. "A persistent, deep, and wet cough." 

Maekar regarded this then picked up his cup and drained the dregs. 

"Eat your supper, Maester." 

King Dearon II built the sept at Summerhall like no other septs. 

It sat in the southern gardens, wrought iron and pale stone, seven-sided, open to the air on all sides with a domed roof that let in the evening sky. His royal father had built it for his Dornish mother, who preferred her gods with space to breathe. Maekar had always, privately, found the great enclosed septs of the realm somewhat airless, cluttered with smoke, incense, and the stifling weight of other men's performative devotion.

He was not a devout man. He had never been. He had said the words when required, lit candles at the appropriate moments, and trusted that the Seven had better things to attend to than him.

He lit a candle to the Mother.

He stood in the evening air and held the taper and watched the flame take and thought about Dyanna, which he did not permit himself to do often because it was not useful and Dyanna deserved better than to be a thing he used when he had run out of other tools.

She would have known what to do. That was the thought he kept arriving at, no matter how he approached it. Not because she was softer than him— she wasn't, not really —but because she saw what he couldn't. She saw the children clearly. She saw him clearly, which had been both the most infuriating and the most essential thing about her.

She would have looked at the thing Melaquin had just told him and she would have known, immediately, which pieces to move.

He set the candle down.

He did not pray. He stood in the iron sept in the dark and he thought, which was the only version of prayer he had ever really understood.

He was halfway back across the gardens when he heard them.

Two voices. One melodic, one a steady, rhythmic thumping. And then— unmistakably —the sound of his eldest son attempting to stable a horse with the fumbling incompetence of a man half-blinded by drink...and something else. 

Maekar stopped at the edge of the torchlight and looked at the stables.

Daeron was leaning against the gate post. The groom— Gunter, the idiot —was on the other side of the horse, patting it in the wrong place for the wrong reasons and, apparently, both idiots finding this tremendously funny.

Maekar looked at them for a moment.

He did not have the fucking time for this. 

It was nearly the hour of the eel, and Maekar had not yet gone to sleep. He felt too uneasy for it. So he sat at his desk and scratched out a letter to the Red Keep while he waited for Allyn to bring his sleeping silks. His daughters were at court; they were well, or so the last raven had claimed. But well now was a different count than well in a fortnight, and Maekar was not a man who confused the two.

His aunt, Lady Seastar— He did not like this. He did not like the idea of his daughters with the lover of Brynden Rivers. He did not like the Maidenvault, but it was isolated, defensible, and his Aunt Shiera had always possessed a certain self-contained practicality that court life had never quite corroded. Besides— his youngest, Rhae, had a fondness for her. That counted for something.

He would send word tonight. It would be done.

"M'lord, I have your ro—" Allyn just arrived when the crash came.

It came from down the hall. Close— because five moons ago Maekar had moved Daeron's chambers closer, for obvious reasons, a decision he had considered practical at the time but failed to reckon with the consequences that came along with it.

Ally looked back at him. The boy did his best to hid his indifference, for he clearly heard the crash as Maekar had, yet he seemed determined to pretend very hard he hadn't. 

Maekar picked up his mace from beside the bed.

He hit the door with his shoulder and it went inward with a sound like a small siege.

The smell reached him before anything else.

Sour wine. Something burnt and vaguely botanical. Underneath both lingered the thick, sweet cloy of Myrish incense, which meant his son had done something he would shortly mean to fucking deny to his face.

Daeron was draped across the bed as if he arrived there in stages, his sandy hair plastered sideways across his face, a lute cradled against his chest and lazily strumming with his practiced fingers. His eyes were red, glassy, and currently located in a far off realm adjacent to this one.

Gunter was on the floor. The idiot.

He had, at some point, acquired a hand drum. He was playing it. Badly. With tremendous sincerity.

They had been singing.

Maekar stared at them.

Behind him, Allyn stood in the doorway clutching his robe with both hands, sweating in the way a young man sweated when he was caught between two disasters and could not decide which direction to flee.

"What," Maekar said, "in the seven fucking hells — "

Daeron shot up and dropped the lute.

It hit the floor with a catastrophic, ringing, full-bodied clang — every string contributing — and bounced once.

Gunter stopped drumming.

The silence was enormous.

Maekar stood in the doorway in his night clothes holding a spiked mace, and he looked at his heir, who was glancing up at the ceiling with the serene, unfocused expression of a sot who had decided that whatever was happening was probably not his problem.

And behind him, very quietly, Allyn cleared his throat.

It was a small sound.

A familiar sound.

Low. Wet. Swallowed hard, like a man attempting to drive something back down that had no intention of staying down.

Maekar did not turn around yet.

He stood very still in the doorway, and he thought about Melaquin's voice dropping low across the supper table, and the chambermaid in the corridor, and a sound from the valet's throat that had no business being what it was.

He thought about how a sennith— perhaps a fortnight —kept a body moving after the man inside it was already gone.

He closed his eyes for one second.

Then he opened them, and looked at his eldest son.

Chapter Text

His father was very loud for this hour...

It did not serve that Daeron was still in a heavy, dizzying haze when Maekar dismissed Gunter from his chambers with the sharp courtesy reserved for unruly livestock; screamed something at Daeron about sleep — or possibly the lack of sheep, he was not certain — and the brawny valet departed — the boy had a strange, stifled look of discomfort on his face — then Maekar bid him good night with a slammed door.

Daeron was left with silence.

He lay there for some time and let the ceiling above him be. He was familiar with this ceiling. He had a fondness for this ceiling. The plasterwork had a crack in the eastern corner that, at certain angles, with certain quantities of drink consumed, looked remarkably like a man on a horse who had lost the horse.

He looked at the crack for a while.

The walls, he began to notice, were gritty.

He wasn't sure how he had never noticed this before, but now that he had, he couldn't stop — a dry, prickling quality to the air, a roughness that settled at the back of his throat and itched there and would not stop itching.

He needed something to wet it. Simple enough.

He could defy his liege father's orders regarding the sheep. He was a man-grown. He was, technically, Blood of the Dragon. A man of resources. Plenty of it.

He sat up. This took longer than expected. He found the floor with his feet — a promising start, the floor was still there — and stood — well done. Then stepped with measured care over the lute where it lay on the floor, unwilling to disturb its slumber, and eased his door open.

The corridor was dim, just the low amber guttering of the wall sconces, and it tilted slightly to the left as he stepped into it, the way corridors sometimes did at this hour. He walked with one hand trailing the wall. It helped with the tilting.

He passed the dragon arches of the western passage — great stone mouths, jaws open, the moonlight catching their carved scales and throwing long shadows behind their teeth — and the castle was quiet around him.

The spiral stair down to the kitchens sat at the end of the passage. He took it slowly, one hand on the wall, the steps worn smooth under his bare feet.

The kitchen was dark and smelled of ash and old bread. Beyond it, the cellar door. He moved through it without a candle because his eyes had adjusted and candles required additional effort.

He lifted the latch.

The passage was cool and close — his head appreciated the cool — and he had made it perhaps two steps when something skittered over his foot.

Daeron stopped.

A rat.

He looked down at it.

Then at the second one.

Then there was a third? Then another, moving so fast he could hear the dry rapid scratch of its claws on stone. Then another. Then another in the same direction with a kind of terrible purpose. Another and another and another, filling the passage from wall to wall in a stream that kept coming, thickening, their claws scratching on the stone.

He took a step back.

In unison, they stopped.

Turned.

Every single one of them.

The eyes were white. Milky, flat, filmed over — not reflecting the light but holding it somehow, all of them fixed on him with the same expression, if rats could have expressions, which Daeron had previously not considered but was now reconsidering.

His foot found the step behind him.

In unison, they moved forward.

He took another step back.

And in unison, they moved forward.

His shoulders met something solid. He turned. The passage behind him had filled while he wasn't looking, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, the same flat white eyes staring back at him from the dark, and the walls were closer now, he was certain of it, the stone pressing inward, a low collective glow of eyes in the narrowing black.

He opened his mouth to scream.

The rats opened theirs.

What came out of them was not sound. It was something that lived below hearing.

The first rat bit into the one beside it — then they were all doing it — a frantic, joyless tearing, the sound of it wet and unrelenting. The pile of them rose, clambering over one another, a shifting mass of bloodied fur and tail and gnashing limbs. It grew until the passage was choked with it, and Daeron was swallowed in the mass. He was clawing upward through the warm, terrible weight of them, his lungs starved, drowning in the dark — up, up, and out.

His hands found open air.

He pulled himself over the top of it, gasping, and it was night — clean, clear, enormous — the Red Mountains black against a field of cold stars, the silence absolute, and he was breathing and shaking when something moved in the sky above him—

Daeron—

Small. White. It circled down with the loose, unhurried ease of a thing that had always been there, watching and waiting for exactly this moment. It descended in long, silent spirals, and as it drew closer, Daeron saw the wings — pale and leathery — and the long-jawed curve of the head. But as it opened its maw, the shape shifted; the jaw became a sharp black beak, and the pale wings turned dark. What came next was fire that was not red.

It was green—

Daeron—

The world caught, and then the stone. He caught too — pale fire climbing his legs, his hands blackening, the flesh peeling like wet tallow. He was screaming, clawing forward, always forward, if he could only—

Daeron!

Something hit him like a wall of ice, and the world went white.

"Get the fuck up!"

He opened his eyes.

The ceiling. His ceiling. The plasterwork crack in the eastern corner, the man who had lost his horse.

He was on the floor.

He was soaking wet and he was on the floor and his heart was going at a rate he felt in his jaw, in his fingers, in the soles of his feet, his whole body a single enormous panicked pulse, and for a moment he could not remember his own name.

He turned his head.

His father stood over him holding an empty bucket, dressed for the morning, looking like a man who had slept perfectly and risen early specifically to ruin someone else's day. His expression contained no sympathy. It contained, in fact, a quantity of the opposite.

“You’re needed at the yard,” Maekar said. “Once you have finished purging your stomach.”

Daeron's stomach heard this and assumed it was a command.

He moved faster than he had moved in days — nearly went down on the wet stone, caught the wall, found the basin, and arrived at it with a moment to spare.

"You have one hour," his father continued. "See that you are armed."

Daeron was too occupied with the basin to respond.

"If you are not in the yard by then, I shall have the master-at-arms drag yo— Do you even hear me!?"

The empty bucket whistled past Daeron's ear and slammed into the wall inches from his head. It rang loud enough to make his teeth ache, yet Daeron did not look up. He was still busy. He communicated his acknowledgment through the medium of a slow nod and a lazy wave of his hand, his forehead nearly resting on the rim of the basin, and then his stomach reconsidered its position and he was busy purging again.

The door slammed.

He stayed where he was, gripping the basin, his hands shaking, the tremor running all the way up into his wrists.

The fire had been green.

He straightened.

The room made one slow revolution and stopped.

Then he dragged himself to find something clean to wear.

The midday air hung thick and damp. His gambeson, stiff with the salt and rot of sweat from moons ago, did little to soothe a stomach that seemed intent on emptying itself once more. He trudged toward the eastern yard, head pounding in time with his boots against the stone.

He was late. This was because it had taken longer than it should have to find a servant willing to fill his wineskin, a task that ought to have been simple but had been complicated by the fact that there were considerably fewer servants than there had been yesterday, and none of them seemed inclined to linger.

He did not think about the cellar. He did not think about why his hand had stopped at the cellar door, or why the hairs on his arms had risen, or why he had turned around and gone to find a servant instead.

He stopped at the yard's edge, his breath hitching.

Briefly — a flash of milky eyes, the sound of claws on stone — then the foggy field at Ashford, blood and mud, the shattering lance against his chest and the sound of metal finding flesh and bone —

Daeron’s hand was inside his mail shirt before the rest of him had caught up. He found the wineskin. He resigned himself to the fact that the pain would persist. So he drank. It was the thing that made it bearable. 

He stoppered the skin, took a jagged breath, and forced himself across the yard.

Maekar was already there— of course Maekar was already there —standing with his arms folded at the far end, watching the boy.

Allyn.

The boy stood in the center of the yard looking precisely the way a young man looked when he had been placed somewhere he had not asked to be and given something he did not know what to do with.

"You're late," Maekar said.

Daeron raised both hands up— the universal concession of a man who knew better than to offer a reason.

He stood in position in front of the boy.

He remembered standing roughly where Allyn stood— when he still had the excuse of youth for being terrible at things. His father a dark shape in the morning issuing corrections that arrived like hammer-blows. Elbow. Your feet! Again. Shield up! Again. Block. Again.
The master-at-arms had been kinder. His father had not permitted the master-at-arms to be kind for long.

That had been before the dreams. Before the first dream, when the world was still a place that operated on knowable principles and a boy could want to be a knight because he did not yet understand what knights were for.

He looked at Allyn, and the boy looked back at him with the wide, polite terror of someone who had been told a prince would be sparring with him and had not yet determined whether this was an honour or a punishment.

"Right," Daeron said. He drew the blunted sword from the rack and held it loosely — his weight settled on one hip, the point dipped toward the dirt, his whole posture a study in the appearance of not caring, which was not entirely an act but was not entirely honest either, because his body remembered things his mind had tried to drink away.

"Guard up," he said. "Like this."

He demonstrated the boy a basic ward — the first one, the simplest one, the one his father had drilled into him until he could do it asleep, until he could do it drunk. He moved through it slowly, each position held long enough for Allyn to see, his limbs loose, the motion stripped of anything that might have been mistaken for enthusiasm.

Especially by Maekar.

Allyn copied him. The boy's arms were too high, his feet too close, his grip a knuckle-width off, but the basic shape was there. 

"Adequate," Daeron said.

He could feel Maekar watching. 

"Step forward. Lead with the right. Commit — otherwise you're asking, not telling."

Allyn stepped. It was tentative and it was slow and it was everything Maekar would have corrected with a bark, but Daeron said nothing, because the boy was trying, and trying deserved the courtesy of not being shouted at.

They went through the forms. Basic cuts — high, low, across — the kind of thing Daeron could do with his eyes closed and frequently wished he could not, because the fact that his body had retained years of training was a personal insult from the gods that had declined to let him forget anything useful. He demonstrated each one at half-speed, his wrists doing the work from memory while the rest of him wished profoundly to be elsewhere.

Allyn lunged.

It was sudden and earnest and aimed roughly at the centre of Daeron's chest, which was flattering in its optimism. Daeron's body did the thing it had been trained to do — weight shifted, back foot turned, the sword came up just enough to guide the boy's blade wide — and Allyn's own momentum carried him stumbling past.

Daeron had not moved more than a step. He had barely moved at all. The motion was old and deep and it had not required his permission.

"Good," he said, which was generous, but not entirely untrue. The lunge had been committed, at least. "Again."

They went again. Allyn was slower on the return, which Daeron attributed to nerves. And again — slower still. And again — and this time the boy stopped mid-form, his sword arm drifting down to his side, and stood very still.

Daeron watched him.

"Rest if you need it," he said. "No shame in —"

Allyn's knees folded.

Not buckled. Not stumbled. Folded — the way a thing folds when the mechanism inside it stops — and the boy went straight down, face into the packed dirt, without a hand out to catch himself.

The sound his breathing made was wrong.

Daeron was standing over him before he knew he'd moved. The boy lay face-down, his mail pressing into the dirt, his ribs working in shallow, laboured hitches — the raw rattling effort of lungs that were no longer doing what lungs were supposed to do.

He heard his father's boots behind him.

He looked up.

Maekar's face was — controlled. The jaw set, the eyes steady, everything locked into place with the precision of a man who had decided what he was looking at and what he intended to do about it before Daeron had even straightened.

"Get him inside," Maekar said.

They lifted him together — Daeron and his father — and the boy was heavier than he looked, the dead weight of someone whose limbs had stopped contributing, and as they carried him through the eastern door and into the dim of the corridor, the first fat drops of rain hit the yard behind them.

Daeron heard them strike the packed earth. Heavy, singular, each one distinct — the sound a storm made before it decided to stop being polite about it.

The corridor had been a blur of his father's shouting for the maester, servants rushing in rising panic, and the inconsolable mutterings of the boy’s father. By the time they had Allyn on a table in the lower hall — mail stripped, gambeson pulled off, the boy breathing in wet, shallow draws that fogged the air above his mouth — the rain was falling in earnest, hammering the yard in silver curtains and turning the dirt to dark mud.

Daeron stood in the doorway, watched it come down, listening to the boy's breathing. 

Chapter Text

The rain had not stopped but it was thinning…

A steady drizzle where two days ago it had been a hammering grey wall blown south from the Stormlands. The clouds still sat low on the Red Mountains, but there were breaks in them. Maekar stood at the window of his solar and watched it fall and counted the things he could not control, which was a longer list than he preferred. He suspected by tomorrow the rain would stop. Though the roads below Summerhall would mire any travel— the red mud in the Marches had a way of staying wet —but the sky would clear.

Two days without ravens, for the winds over the mountains had been too fierce for any bird with sense to fly through. Two days of silence from the Red Keep, from the Citadel, from anyone who might have told him something useful. 

But he put the hours to use. 

Guards at the gatehouse with standing orders: any soul seized by cough, or the flush of fever, or watering eyes, shall not pass.

Lorcan and Wylla, his steward and housekeeper, had followed his earlier command to dismiss those under them who showed signs of the malady. They did so firmly with coin, for cruelty outpaced sickness and he would not have the smallfolk besetting his walls. The household staff had been thinned to those who remained healthy. The kitchens operated with half their number. The corridors were quiet in a way they had not been before.

Even in such weather, Maekar thought, Daeron's formidable talent for self-destruction would lack the spirit to seek it. Regardless, Maekar had also set a watch upon Daeron.

Not guards— that would have been an insult his son would have found a way to exploit with a mummer’s farce —but servants with clear instructions. Watch Daeron’s usual places. Watch the doors. Watch the gatehouse. If the prince makes for any of them, bring word to Maekar directly, and only him. 

These were the things he could manage. The larger problem, he could not.

The Allyn boy had not opened his eyes. 

Two days, and the lad had not woken. The fever held— hot and stubborn. His breathing was a low, wet rasp that could be heard from the corridor. Yet it did not break into a cough. Not the deep, dragging, persistent thing Maester Melaquin had described. It was something in-between, and Maekar did not know what to do with half-measures. 

All he could do was to have the old maester observing the master-of-feast’s son. A thought of his own son occurred to him.
Daeron had been conspicuously absent from any useful activity since Allyn’s collapse in the yard. Which was not a change in his son's behavior, but given the current circumstances, it was more grating than usual. Maekar had not survived the rearing of four sons by assuming the best of any of them.

He went to find him. Daeron had not been seen since yesterday evening. He knew his son’s usual places in Summerhall— the cellar, the kitchens, the other cellar near the southern end, the window seat in the western passage where the light was good for sleeping and bad for everything else…

There was one more.

The library tower sat in the northern corner of the keep, buttressed into the curtain wall. Maekar’s royal father had designed it—a tall, narrow space lined with shelves, the stairs spiraling along the inner wall to open at each level onto a landing with a window and a reading alcove.

The collection was his father’s. Histories of the realm, ancient scrolls, maps, charts, and accounts Maekar had never cared to read—the dry records of a king who sought to rule through diplomacy, leaving the fire and blood to Baelor and himself.

Maekar climbed the stairs. He was not a reader. He had never pretended to be. Baelor had been— effortlessly, the way Baelor had done most things. Aerys had been, though what Aerys read and what he understood, in Maekar’s opinion, were two different quantities. Rhaegel had read poetry, which Maekar did not count. 

He wondered, briefly, if his brothers’ fluency with books would have served him now. If there sat upon these shelves a record or some crumbling account from a long-dead maester that would name the horror in the boy’s lungs or some vile mutation of the damp of the lung?

He did not know how to look.

That was the truth of it. He could command an army, hold a shield wall, and read a battlefield as his father read a ledger—but this room defeated him simply, without malice, by being what it was. 

He reached the second level.

Daeron was on the window sill.

He had folded himself into the alcove in the manner of a man who had been poured there — long limbs arranged with the boneless ease of someone who had ceased to operate under the normal constraints of posture. His head was tipped back against the stone. An open book lay across his face like a tent, rising and falling with each breath. His breathing, at least, was normal. His wineskin dangled from one hand, leaking a thin, steady trail of red onto the stone below, where it had formed a small pool, passed over by a household that had grown too thin to notice.

He was asleep. Or something adjacent to it.

Maekar looked at him. The castle was thinning around them. The Allyn boy was wheezing his lungs out in the lower hall. And his heir was unconscious in a window with a book on his face that he used as a visor. 

He almost turned away. Aegon's black cat slunk past his boots. And then he saw them.

Not as they were, but as they had been. This room, when the shelves were the same but the bodies in front of them were small. Aerion had wrapped himself in a red cloth and was terrorizing his brothers from behind the reading desk with the absolute conviction of a boy who believed he was a dragon, because Aerion had always believed he was a dragon, even then, even before the cruelty had calcified into something Maekar could not reach. Daeron with wooden sword in one hand and a small shield in the other— was standing between Aerion and Aegon, who was two and occupied with the serious business of conducting court with his kittens, the black one his Hand. Aemon sat atop the reading desk, narrating Daeron's heroics while Daella hummed a tune as if she were a minstrel.

Dyanna had been there, heavy with Rhae. He could not see her in the memory, but he knew the shape of where she had stood.

“My lord?”

Maekar's hand went to his side. The voice had come from behind him — soft, female — and for a moment he thought—

Maekar turned. 

Wylla, the head housekeeper. A lean woman with grey-streaked hair pulled back in a severe knot, standing on the landing below with her hands clasped and the particular expression of a servant who had been looking for him and had found him in a place she had not expected.

“What is it?”

“Maester Melaquin, m’lord. He’s asking for you.”

Maekar looked back at Daeron, still deep in his drunken sleep and wine leaking onto the floor.

“Have someone clean up after him,” Maekar said.

“As you wish, m’lord.”

He descended the stairs without looking back.

Wylla fell into step behind him. He suspected there was something else.

Maekar found the fair-haired chambermaid in the western corridor. She was standing against the wall— the same wall, Maekar realized, where he had first seen her coughing.

“She’s returned. Says her fever broke. Eyes are clear, no cough. I looked at her myself before I let her through the gate.” Wylla’s voice was careful. “We could use any hands we can get, m’lord."

Maekar looked at her for a moment.

She looked well, her color was good, and her breathing was even and quiet. 

“Then you’ll come with  me,” he said. “The maester will see you first.”

The girl’s face went white, then she nodded.

They crossed the keep to the southern end— past the lower hall, through the passage that ran along the inner wall, to the cluster of rooms where Melaquin kept his study, his stores, and the small private rookery that Maekar’s father had built for messages that did not need to travel through Summertown first. The windows here looked south towards the foothills of the mountains. The rain continued to streak down the glass. 

Lorcan was already there. He straightened when Maekar entered, which meant he also sought an audience.

"This girl has gotten better," Maekar announced, suspicion weaving in between the spaces.

Melaquin sat behind his worktable— parchments spread before him, his chain pooling on the wood. He looked up at Maekar, then at the girl. 

“Sit, my child,” Melaquin said to her gently. She sat. 

He checked her the way he checked everything— methodically, without haste. Eyes. Throat. The glands beneath the jaw. He listened to her breathe, pressing his ear to her back, then her chest. 

“When did the cough begin?” he asked. 

"Three days ago, m'lord— er —Maester Melaquin." She corrected herself. "The morning after I was dismissed."

"And it stopped?"

"After a day. Perhaps less. I sweated through the night and by the next morning I felt well." She looked at Maekar. "You see, I’ve gotten better, m’lord."

"The fever," Melaquin said. "How hot, my dear?"

"Hot enough that I soaked through my shift. But it broke, and it has not returned."

Melaquin leaned back.

"You may go," Maekar told her. "Wylla will find you a place."

The girl left with Wylla. Lorcan closed the door. 

"What do you gather?" Maekar said.

Melaquin folded his hands.

"She appears well, my prince. Genuinely well. The lungs are clear. The fever has broken cleanly." 

“Then it was not the—”

"Or it was, and she recovered." Melaquin paused. "Which the accounts do not describe. Not once. Every case in the parchments from the Crownlands progressed. None reversed."

"Then the accounts are false?"

“Um…Your Grace—” Lorcan interrupted. “A knight has arrived from Blackhaven. He has word from the Lord Dondarrion.”

“Tell him I will see him after I conclude my matter with the maester.” Maekar said curtly.  

“Yes, Your Grace.” Lorcan left the room and shut the door.

Maekar eyed the maester. “Are the accounts false? I cannot fucking risk this uncertainty and cause madness!”

"My prince. The accounts Aemon and I gathered came from a small number of sources. From King’s Landing to Lannisport. Scattered reports. Secondhand. The archmaesters dismissed them as common malady, and I—" He stopped. "I cannot tell you with certainty that they were wrong too."

"You told me you were certain."

"I told you I disagreed with their assessment that it was a severe damp of the lungs. I stand by that. But whether what I described to you— the swelling, the violence —whether that is the full truth of it, or a partial truth, or a distortion passed through too many hands—" He met Maekar's gaze. "I cannot say with confidence."

Maekar looked at him for a long time.

"The boy," the Maester said. "Let us see the boy."

The lower hall was dim.

A small fire in the hearth, burning low. A few candles on the table. The air was thick with the smell of tallow and something underneath it— foul and greasy —that had been growing for two days.

Allyn lay on the table where they had placed him. His father sat beside him on a stool, hunched forward, one hand resting on the boy's arm.

The master-of-feasts stood when Maekar entered. He was a different man from the round, pleasant figure Maekar had spoken to four days ago. Thinner in the face. Dark beneath the eyes.

"My prince. I— thank you. For the maester. For everything you've done for my boy."

Maekar held up a hand. The man stopped.

"Has he improved?"

The master-of-feasts looked at his son. The answer was in the looking.

"No, m'lord. The same. He does not wake."

The breathing was worse. Maekar could hear that. Thicker. Each breath a deliberate, effortful thing, as if the air had to be dragged through a passage that was slowly closing.

Melaquin moved to the table. He checked the boy— throat, glands, listening. The master-of-feasts watched every movement.

"Has the boy had contact," the maester said, not looking up, "with anyone outside the castle who was ill? Anyone coughing. Feverish."

The master-of-feasts was quiet. A color rose in his neck.

"There is— a friend," he said. He chose the word the way a man chose a path in unfamiliar ground. "A farmer's son. From the holdings north of Summertown. My Allyn, they were—" He stopped. Started again. "They spent time together. Often."

"Was this friend ill?" Maekar asked. 

"He later died, Your Grace." The words came out flat. "Three days ago. The sickness. His father sent word."

Melaquin looked at Maekar. Maekar looked at the master-of-feasts.

The man had moved back to the stool. He sat down, reached out, and brushed the damp hair from Allyn's forehead with the back of his hand.

"I should have kept him closer," he said quietly. "I should have — he was always going off to see that boy. I knew what it was. I've known for —" A short, broken laugh then he laid his head down on his son's chest and wept.

Maekar stood in the doorway and did not move. Melaquin had stepped back.

The father wept, and the fire cracked, and the candles guttered.

And then the boy opened his eyes.

Maekar saw it first—the lids peeling back with a dry, papery rasp, slow and mechanical, as if pulled by invisible wires rather than muscle. The eyes beneath were dead milk, flat and pupilless, swallowing the candlelight without giving a spark back. They were not eyes; they were clouded stones set into a mask of flesh.

The master-of-feasts did not see. His face was pressed against his son's chest, his arms around the boy's neck, and he was saying something — words, a name — and he did not see.

Allyn's hands came up.

They moved fast. Faster than a body that had not moved in two days had any right to move — the fingers seizing, the arms locking around his father's head with a force that was not the boy's, that was not anything's, that was the blind mechanical grip of a thing operating on the only instruction left to it.

The master-of-feasts gasped— not in pain —in surprise, in relief, his arms tightening around his son, pulling him closer, because his boy was moving, his boy was awake, his boy was—

Allyn’s mouth found his father’s throat.

The sound was wet and rhythmic, like a dog at a trough.

The master-of-feasts made a noise that had not yet become a scream, and then the blood came, sudden and dark, running down the collar of his tunic in a sheet, and his hands were pushing, clawing, but the boy's grip did not relent, the jaw working with the mindless, repetitive motion of a thing that had forgotten how to stop.

They hit the floor together. The stool went sideways. A candle toppled. The master-of-feasts was on his back, his hands at his son's face, pressing, pushing, and the sounds he was making were not words.

Maekar moved.

His hand found the fire iron at the hearth— heavy, blunt, the right weight —and he crossed the room in three strides.

He swung.

The iron connected with the side of the boy's skull, and for one instant he was not in this room. He was at Ashford. The dust and the shouting and the give of Baelor's helmet under his mace.

The boy went sideways. Hit the stone. His limbs jerked— sharp, disconnected spasms, the fingers opening and closing on nothing.

He was still moving.

The milky eyes turned toward him. The mouth opened, red and wet and working.

He brought the iron down again.

And again.

He did not stop until the movement stopped.

He stood over what was left of it, chest heaving, his hands slick with sweat. The master-of-feasts lay on the floor beside his son. His eyes were open. The blood had stopped spreading.

Maekar looked at his hands. The fire iron was still in his grip. He set it down. It took effort.

He saw Baelor's face.

“Lock this room,” Maekar said flatly. He looked at the father on the floor. 

The maester's face was grey, his mouth open.

“He was bitten, Your Grace.” 

He picked up the iron. Crossed to the father. The man's eyes were still open, his hand still raised, and the blood at his throat was dark and wet and wrong.

Maekar did what needed doing.

Chapter Text

He simply collided with the pages of the book…

Because it was on his face and Daeron did not know how else to delineate the sensation of waking from a dreamless sleep. One moment there was a merciful, black nothingness and the next there was a strange passage of text before him:

…younger brother cast her down and slew her…
…proclaiming himself the Bloodstone Emperor…

His faculties were stalled and had no sense of how much time had passed.
The grey print swam over yellowing pages, unfocused, before it resolved:

…dark arts, torture, and necromancy…
…a reign of terror…

Well, that’s unsettling. He peeled the book off his face—the grisly thing must have belonged to his Uncle Aerys. His neck was in ruins and the ache was creeping down his spine, but something warm and dense seemed to anchor him in place.
He blinked, shifted his gaze downward, and saw a large shadow atop his chest had taken a solid, velvet form. It was Nightpaw, Egg’s black tomcat.

Daeron accepted his situation with the grace of a man who knew when he was outmatched and was prepared to embrace his neck’s undoing when a sound spooked Nightpaw away. It wasn’t the sound of the wind rattling the window. The rain was still persistent but faint. No— footsteps. Several pairs, urgent, from below. 

He patted the floor for his wineskin — the stone was dry, the wineskin gone. Someone must have taken it. He would need to make his way to — another round of footsteps, heavy, from somewhere down the corridor. He rolled off the window sill, his head swimming as he stood, and made his way down to the first landing of the library. 

He opened the door and looked right down the corridor. The hurried footsteps were gone. Daeron shrugged it off—out of hearing, out of thought—then stole away to the southern end cellar. 

It must have been to Maekar of House Targaryen's profound displeasure that he had inherited a castle with two cellars. Daeron's grandfather— the second Daeron of his name, the good— no —the better Daeron, the Daeron who had the decency to build things worth inheriting —had possessed a well-documented appreciation for a dense book and an expensive vintage to accompany it. Daeron found no fault in capitalizing on what had been set before him. It was, if anything, a filial obligation. He drew his hood up and set forth.

The small mercy was that the cellar in the far southern end had not been tainted by dreams of rats. The small unkindness was that the path to it required cutting through the grand gardens that faced the Great Hall and past the small rookery and the maester's quarters — where his father, as of late, had been spending a conspicuous amount of time.

“Oi!”

Daeron ducked down behind a column-shaped hedge. Wet footsteps started toward him, so he crawled — with some urgency and no dignity — through the soaked earth.

"M'lord?" Gunter loomed over him, rain dripping off the edge of his hood. "I won't ask what possessed you to crawl through mud, but I would like to know where you're crawling to. And can I join you?"

Daeron raised a hand. Gunter lifted him to his feet, was kind enough not to mention he looked like shit, and they continued on.

They were nearing the small rookery when Daeron noticed the brazier had not been lit. He stopped.

"It's an hour or two before supper. Why are the braziers not lit?"

"Short of staff," Gunter said. "Did you hear your father?"

"You know very well that I try not to."

"Well, m'lord, anyone showing signs of the damp's been dismissed. With coin, at least."

Daeron regarded this. It was, he had to admit, the sensible thing. He had seen what happened to the Allyn boy in the yard — the lad had been clearly unwell and should have been resting, not swinging a blunted sword at a prince who didn't want to be there either. But something gnawed at him. He could not name it, which was the worst kind of gnawing, because a man could not ignore a thing he could not identify.

Once they reached one of the many open arch-ways of the southern corridor, he told Gunter they would need to be discreet. Gunter received this information with the steady nod of a man who had been discreet on Daeron's behalf many times before. Summerhall was quiet enough that footsteps carried — which was, for once, a kindness. Plenty of time to duck behind the hedge fencing or into one of the empty rooms that lined the passage.

A door creaked behind them. They both jumped and scrambled behind the hedges.

Through the gaps in the foliage, Daeron could make out two pairs of guards leaving the lower hall, hauling what he presumed were two large bodies— each wrapped in a tied sack of waxed canvas. He glanced at Gunter. Gunter shook his head. He had no idea either.

"Your Grace, you must have a herald go to town and warn —" It was Maester Melaquin. He came into view looking as though he might faint on the flagstones.

"Gather your wits." His father stepped into the corridor. "Has anyone survived the cough without turning? Has anyone turned without coughing? Anyone? Or would you have me crack the skull of every fucking wretch who contracts a damp in the lung or runs a fever? I won't put a town to terror over something we don't even know is certain. I won't do it."

Gunter leaned in. "Did your father just kill —"

"I don't fucking know," Daeron whispered. "The man is capable of a great many things."

"When you are able, maester." Maekar looked down at the trembling Melaquin. "A knight from Blackhaven requests an audience. No doubt he brings more wonderful tidings." Then he stalked off.

Daeron found, surprisingly but not for the first time, that he had lost his thirst for expensive vintages. And by the look of the maester, he was not the only one disinclined to further the ire of his father.

"M'lord, the rain's letting up. Maybe we should rid ourselves of this place?"

Daeron nodded. "Get the horses ready."

They had not spoken since the gatehouse.

The trail through the foothills was narrow and wet, and neither rider was in any particular hurry to arrive at a destination they had not agreed upon. Daeron suspected this was because the shape of what had been inside those canvases was still sitting behind both their eyes.

He was hearing his father's voice — crack the skull of every fucking wretch — and he was trying very hard to file this under things he did not need to think about, which was a system that had served him well for nineteen years and was now, he suspected, reaching its capacity.

Their horses moved at a walk through mud. The canopy above them dripped. Daeron’s hands were not steady on the reins.

Gunter broke first.

“Two bodies.”

“I saw.”

“In sacks.”

“I also saw that.”

“Waxed canvas. That’s what you use when you don’t want what’s leaking—” 

“Gunter.”

“Right.” A pause. “M’lord, maybe we should see the maester. The young one from the North. He was here as a stand-in for Melaquin while he was traveling. He's been in Summertown the whole time — might know something about what's going on."

Daeron blinked. “You mean Maester Albertbert?”

Gunter looked at him with an expression of a man who was fairly certain that was not the name.

“Ah! Bertbert. Right. That’s what I said.” It was still wrong. 

“Aye, him.” Gunter grunted, producing a pipe from his doublet. With practiced ease, he packed it, lit it with a flint, drew twice to get it going, then passed the pipe across the gap between the horses. 

Daeron, impressed by the casual skill, took the pipe. The smoke was warm and sweet and settled into his chest like a hand pressing gently on something that had been clenched too tight.

“He might have a better understanding,” Gunter continued, “of whatever the fuck is truly afoot, m’lord.”

Daeron exhaled. The smoke curled up through the wet canopy and disappeared.  

"I am trying," Daeron said, "not to give my father further cause to crack my— our skulls. Worse, a foot whipping. That is the full extent of my ambition at present."

Gunter nodded slowly. "You know he told the staff to keep watch on you."

"Of course he did."

“Guards at the door. Servants in the keep. The whole arrangement.” Gunter took the pipe back and drew on it. "Though, if I'm being honest, m'lord, we're so short of hands right now I don't think anyone noticed us leave. Half the kitchen's been dismissed. The one of stableboys is gone. Do you know how to saddle? Because I had to saddle both horses myself."

"You're telling me my father's surveillance has been undone by a staffing shortage."

"That's about the shape of it, m'lord."

Daeron considered this. It was, in its way, the funniest thing he had heard all week, and also the most unsettling, and he found he could not separate the two. He took the pipe back.

"What is happening," he said, and it was not entirely a question. The smoke left him in a long, slow breath. "What in the seven fucking hells is happening."

Gunter had no answer for this. He was wise enough not to invent one.

They rode on. The trail crested a low ridge and began to descend toward the road that ran along the foothills — the main track between the Boneway and Summertown, wide enough for carts, rutted deep by years of traffic. From the ridge, Daeron could see it winding through the valley below, pale mud against dark scrub.

It was not empty.

He pulled up. Gunter pulled up beside him.

There were people on the road. Not a handful— a column, stretching back around the bend and out of sight, moving north. Merchants with laden mules. A young priestess in muddied red robes. A family on foot— father, mother, three children, the youngest carried. A pair of women in Dornish silks, now rain-stained and heavy, walking with the fixed expressions of people who had been walking for too long. Hedge knights with gaunt horses. A wagon with a broken axle being pushed by four men who clearly had not stopped the argument about whether to abandon it.

All of them heading the wrong way.

Dorne was south. The Boneway was south.

Daeron nudged his horse forward. Gunter followed.

They intercepted a man near the front of the column— lean, weathered, with a lute case strapped across his back and the resigned air of someone who had made peace with his doomed schedule.

"You there," Daeron said. "Where are you coming from?"

The man looked up at him. Took in the horse, the cloak, the bearing. Made a correct assumption. 

"Blackhaven, m'lord. Been stuck there two days on account of the rain. Before that I was meant to be at Yronwood by the fortnight." He adjusted the lute case on his shoulder. "I'm a minstrel. Was booked to play for Lord Yronwood's son’s nameday. Good coin, too."

"Was?"

"Dorne's shut the Boneway, m'lord." The minstrel said it the way a man said a thing he had already said too many times. "Sealed it. No one in, no one out. Prince's orders, so they say. We got to the pass and they turned us back — the lot of us, merchants, pilgrims, everyone. Didn't matter who you were or what business you had. The Dornish had spears across the road and they were not in a negotiating temper."

Daeron looked at the minstrel. Then he looked past him.

The column went on. Around the bend, up the road, more were coming— on foot, on horseback, in carts. He could not see the end of it. Two hundred souls, perhaps more, all of them funneling north because the south had closed its door, and there was only one place on this road for them to go.

Summertown.

Chapter Text

He stood over the washbasin and scrubbed his hands with vinegar until the skin stung…

Then rinsed them with boiling water. Fire was in their blood, but blood could carry corruption all the same. He repeated the process once more before he changed into fresh garments. 

He made for the Great Hall. It was the proper place for the Prince of Summerhall to receive visitors and hear reports, and in times like this a man needed to hold on to what was proper. The rest of the castle was coming apart; he would not let the heart of it do the same. 

Maekar took his seat at the high table. Lorcan stood to his right, solid and silent as ever. To his left Maester Melaquin had gone statue-still, the only way the man seemed able to keep from shaking. By the doors waited Pate with two guards. The master-at-arms stood with his thick arms folded across his chest, face set, patient. The man would hold, no matter what word came through that hall.

The knight from Blackhaven had been waiting since before the incident in the lower hall. Someone had fed the man and found him a place to dry his cloak. He looked presentable enough — as close as his thick build would allow.

Heavy-set, thick through the chest and shoulders from bread and honest labor rather than the lists. Straw-colored hair, redder at the roots. Low brows over eyes set too close, bridged by a dark ridge of hair that gave his face a look of permanent, earnest concentration.

“Ser Patrek Starstaff,” Lorcan announced. “In service to Lord Dondarrion of Blackhaven.”

The knight approached and dropped to one knee.

“Rise,” Maekar said. “Speak.”

Ser Patrek rose. He cleared his throat — not from nerves, but with the careful pause of a man who knew his tongue would tangle and had learned to give it time.

“My p-prince. I bring word from Lord Dondarrion and the maester of Blackhaven.” He steadied himself. “I was meant to arrive two days ago. The rains on the mountain road made s-sure of my d-delay.”

“Noted,” Maekar said. “What word?”

“D-Dorne has closed the passes, my prince. The Boneway and the Prince's Pass. Both."

Maekar waited.

"This was done a s-s-sennight ago."

Maekar’s jaw tightened. A sennight ago the Red Keep had sent word of the sickness and he received it. Less than a sennight ago he had been sitting in the Small Hall, waiting for his eldest son to drag himself home from whatever gutter or whore he had chosen for the evening.  

“The passes are held with s-spears, my prince. Lord Dondarrion sent a rider to treat with them and they turned him back. It is not a crossing any longer. It is a l-line, armed, and h-held.”

“They barred the pass.” Maekar regarded this. A line held by Dornish spears meant the Prince of Dorne had decided what was spreading across the Seven Kingdoms was far worse than the cost of isolation. Grave enough to risk starvation over infection. 

“What of trade?” Lorcan asked. 

“C-ceased. Passes and ports. Lord Dondarrion bids me tell you that the Marches m-must now look to the Reach and the Stormlands for supply.” Ser Patrek worked his mouth, he chewed the inside of his cheek. “He does not s-say so directly, but the meaning is plain enough. If the sickness spreads further, r-resources may not hold.” 

The hall fell quiet. Every man in the hall let the words settle. 

“What else, ser?” Maekar asked. 

Ser Patrek’s eyes shifted. The earnest concentration on his face grew heavier.

“T-there have been i-incidents at B-Blackhaven, Your Grace.” Ser Patrek took a deep breath. “Men and women fall ill. Some catch the cough and recover. Some p-perish, as expected of a strong fever and c-cough. Others—” He stopped. “They d-die — or we believe they die — and then they do not stay dead. T-they go mad.”

Maester Melaquin and Lorcan exchanged a glance. They understood exactly what the knight was alluding to. Pate stood motionless.

Ser Patrek continued. “A violent i-infliction, my prince. Lord Dondarrion lost ten guards to one dead man.” Ser Patrek’s voice stayed steady, though it cost him. “The S-Stranger lost its grip a-and rose moments later.. He went mad and attacked the men nearest to him before they understood what was happening… t-ten were dead or bitten.”

Pate unfolded his arms. It was the first movement the master-at-arms had made since the audience began.

“The others who fell ill,” Melaquin said carefully. “Those who turned violent — did they all present with a cough beforehand?”

Ser Patrek’s brow furrowed. “I c-cannot say with certainty, maester. Some did. Some — I don’t recall hearing of a cough for all of them. But it happened fast, and I was not the one t-tending to the sick—”

“Has Lord Dondarrion taken measures?” Maekar cut in. 

“He has, my prince. Those s-showing signs a-are quartered apart. Violent ones are dealt with.” Ser Patrek said this without flinching, which told Maekar something about the man. “But we cannot t-tell which of the sick will turn violent and which will simply die. Even some had recovered.”

“Some?”

“A few, my prince. More than a few. Which makes the whole matter—”

“Uncertain,” Maekar said.

“Just so, my prince. B-But Maester Edwyn m-may have kept a closer account than I did.” Ser Patrek reached into his cloak and produced a rolled parchment sealed with the lightning bolt of Blackhaven. “He asked that I deliver this to the m-maester of Summerhall. He has thoughts on the matter that he preferred to put to ink.”

Maester Melaquin stepped forward and took it, his hands not entirely steady.

He broke the seal and read in silence. The hall waited.

Maekar watched his face. The maester’s eyes moved across the text, stopped, then moved again—slower this time.

“What does it say?” Maekar asked.

Melaquin looked up. His voice was flat. “The Maester Edwyn believes there may be two distinct maladies at work, Your Grace. Not one sickness presenting with different severity—but two. Two afflictions moving through the same population at the same time, sharing similar early signs but progressing toward very different ends. One is barely survivable. The other—”

He did not finish.

He did not need to.

The chambermaid had coughed, burned with fever, and recovered. Allyn had shown no cough. He had simply declined, then risen with milky eyes and teeth that sought flesh.

Two sicknesses wearing the same mask.

“He also writes,” Melaquin continued, “that he plans to send his findings to the Citadel and hopes they will provide further counsel.”

Maekar’s jaw tightened. The Citadel. The same archmaesters who had dismissed the sickness that plagued the realm as a severe damp. He said nothing.

“Is there more, ser?” Lorcan asked Ser Patrek.

The knight straightened. “My prince. Blackhaven is turning away the travelers. Those who were caught on the road when Dorne sealed the passes—merchants, pilgrims, common folk—Lord Dondarrion cannot take them in. He will not risk more s-sickness in close quarters.” He paused. “They are being sent north, my prince. And the only holding of any size between Blackhaven and Storm’s End is—”

“Summertown.”

Ser Patrek took a step back and set his gaze down.

Maekar looked toward the tall windows. Through the painted glass the gardens lay grey and wet. The rain had thinned to mist.

Hundreds of people were coming up the Boneway. Some coughing. Some not. No way to tell which carried the sickness that killed and which carried the sickness that made the dead walk.

He thought of the fire iron in the lower hall. The weight of it.

He could not do that two hundred times.

Maekar turned to Lorcan.

“Fetch Ser Jason.”

Chapter Text

They always said a cool, wet spring promised a parched, scorching summer...

Daeron held no affection for either season. Why should he? He was born upon the cusp—last day of autumn or first of winter, none could rightly say. Yet it was remarked upon that a white raven arrived at the Red Keep, bringing word of winter on the very morning of his birth. Then six years passed. His lord father, having dutifully delivered his own kin to the Stranger in that most hallowed Targaryen tradition, established his seat at Summerhall. Over a league away, where once only scattered hamlets stood, now a blooming service town took root.

He and Gunter picked their way through the stragglers of travelers toward Summertown. They were forced to ride through the weeds as the road was a choked mess of humanity. Mud and rain made a soup of their cloaks and boots, but at least they fared better than their mounts. It was a small mercy that horses don't have the common tongue to tell a man exactly what they think of him in the rain.

Well, they can certainly fucking buck him off, but Daeron wasn't about to remind his destrier of that option.

Stragglers of travelers… Travelers stragglers. The thought tickled some private corner of his dulling mind, but he rapped a knuckle against his brow to drive it away.

He needed his wits sharp for the night’s errand. The single errand he and Gunter agreed they’d ridden to Summertown for. A matter of breaking through the fog of uncertainty. A matter that would answer all their questions. A matter that—

“Remind me again,” he said, extending a hand toward Gunter for the pipe. “Is the man named Bertbert or Burburt?”

“Seven fucking hells, m’lord,” Gunter huffed, nearly flinging the pipe at Daeron’s chest. “It’s Maester Berbert! Ber-bert. It’s a frightening marvel you can tie your own laces, let alone retain the man’s name for a single ride.”

Daeron offered no retort. Instead he let out a heavy plume of smoke directly into Gunter’s path, leaving his companion hacking and cursing in the damp air as he rode on.

By the time they rode into the market square, Summertown was flooded by activity. The inns had long since bolted their doors to newcomers. The alehouses—the very ones Daeron was barred from patronizing by his father’s decree—were packed to the rafters with hungry mouths and shouting drunks. Stalled merchants had drawn their wagons into a tight knot on the southern verge of the square, some hawking their wares to folks walking by. Nearby, on the lip of the walled lichyard, the rogues and hedge knights had found a cold common ground, sharing the warmth of a large fire and stories.

Daeron could not ignore the prickle of excitement rising within him as he surveyed the sodden, churning mass of people populating the main square. He had never seen Summertown so lively—saturated by the rain, now mist—but lively all the same. He marveled at how the torches and braziers made the mist shimmer around them. The lane leading to the main rookery had become so crowded that he and Gunter were forced to dismount, leading their horses by the bridle as they shouldered through.

They reached the foot of the rookery, where Gunter threw their reins over the hitching rail. He knotted them tight before giving each beast a reassuring pat on the neck, a promise of their return.

Daeron knocked, loudly.

What followed was a clattering of sounds by the door, then a violent sneeze.

“It’s unlocked— Hachoo! Oh, please come in!” Followed by another loud sneeze.

The solar of the rookery tower was a different world than the shit-caked loft above it. Quieter, for one. Warmer, for another. The young maester who received them bore so little resemblance to the sniffling—well, he was still sniffling—feather-crusted pale man Daeron had last encountered that he nearly reintroduced himself to the maester. His eyes were clearer, not as red-rimmed as before. The perpetual sheen of snot on his upper lip had finally vanished. Maester Borbert was—and Daeron would grant himself the thought but only once—a rather comely fellow. Bartbert possessed the high northern cheekbones and a strong straight jaw, all of it wasted on the dull drudgery of ink-stained parchments and the squawk of ravens.

Gunter, who had apparently never met a soul in Summertown he could not claim as a bosom companion within two breaths, had already settled himself into the better chair. He was filling the maester’s ear with a frankness that bordered on a mummer’s farce.

The sickness. The keep. The bodies hauled out, bundled in waxed canvases. The words his father spoke out loud to Maester Melaquin.

Berbert—it was Berbert, Daeron was nearly certain now—listened with his fingers worrying the heavy links of his chain. His mouth was a tight line, the sort of expression that in Daeron’s personal experience preceded either deep thought or a long lament regarding the weather.

“I expect more ravens tonight,” the maester said. “The storms these past two days—winds out of the east, and hard. Ravens are strong flyers, my lord, remarkably so, but even the sturdiest bird will roost rather than—”

“Right. Right,” Daeron cut in. “Birds. Wind. Roost. What do you know of the sickness?”

Berbert blinked, reordering his thoughts with the weary patience of a man long accustomed to the boorish interruptions of his betters. He had received messages—three, perhaps four—from maesters in neighboring holdfasts. The sickness was spreading, and spreading fast. On its origins, no one could agree. Some pointed to King’s Landing. Others said Oldtown.

Daeron’s chest tightened at that. His father had sent word before the storms to shelter his younger sisters within the Maidenvault. But as was the curse of the middle son, Aemon was entirely forgotten in Daeron’s thoughts until now. Aemon was at the Citadel. Two-and-ten years old, slight as a reed, but incredibly brilliant. He would be hunched over some text right now, oblivious, a candle burning too close to his sleeve—

“Don’t trouble yourself too much, my lord. The Citadel has protocols for such times,” Berbert offered, as though reading his thoughts. “Students are confined to their quarters. Monitored. The archmaesters are not careless men.”

Daeron nodded, because there was nothing else to say to that.

It was Gunter who leaned forward. “Two locations, though. King’s Landing and Oldtown. Could some nasty rot be blown in from Essos? Something the sailors brought over in their bilges? Or is this already cooked up in our own realm?”

Berbert rose without answering and crossed to a shelf so cluttered it appeared as though the storm itself had spent two days there. From its lowest rank he produced a book so tattered that its binding seemed held together more by a prayer than by thread—a compendium of animal-caused maladies, he explained, one he had consulted rather extensively on account of his own unfortunate constitution when it came to ravens. He set it on the table and opened it to a page dense with illustrations of livestock, each bearing small inked annotations in a hand not his own.

“Sickness need not begin with men,” he said. “Animals carry afflictions across great distances. It would explain the speed, and the confusion over origin—” Berbert caught himself, perhaps sensing Daeron’s patience fraying at the edges. “The root may well be an animal vector. Cattle. Sheep. Birds. Rodents—”

Daeron went white.

It happened all at once, the way a sail loses the wind—one moment full, the next slack and useless. His mouth went dry. His fingers, still curled loosely around the pipe he hadn’t lit, went rigid.

The rats.

The pale, wrong-eyed rats in the dark, moving with a purpose that rats should not possess. He had dreamed them before he had seen them, yet he had never seen them before he had dreamed them—it no longer mattered because the weight was the same.

He was on his feet before he’d decided to stand, crossing to the maester in two strides. “The message,” he said, and his voice had shed every last scrap of its usual lacquer. “The one I sent nearly a sennight ago. To Aemon. You remember it?”

Berbert frowned. “The… milky-rat dreams?”

Gunter shifted his gaze between them, wearing the uncertain look of a man who’d just heard a jape but failed to understand it.

“Yes.” Daeron braced both hands on the edge of the table, leaning. “That’s the one. Tell me everything you know about rats.”

Berbert opened his mouth.

“But—over wine, maybe ale—” Daeron added, straightening. He tugged at his collar as though the space had narrowed. “Perhaps in this particular case something potent enough to ease the thoughts, as mine just became… deeply unpleasant.”

Gunter stood up as well. “I reckon the alehouse, the one with no name, is open. We can go there.”

Daeron’s groom had somehow cajoled the maester into joining their table for a cup and a hot supper. The man warned them he was a poor drunk, claiming after only a few measures that his wits dwindled to those of a simpleton.

Mother have mercy, Daeron thought, watching him. I should pray for such a gift. To be a fool would be a kindness compared to the rot currently occupying his own mind. He would be so much happier.

The alehouse with no name was normally a quiet hole where a man could drink without having to shout over his own thoughts. Tonight was different. It was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with the overflow from the Boneway pass. Travelers, merchants, hedge knights, and smallfolk all crammed together, smelling of wet wool, mud, and desperation for a drink.

The boys managed to claim a corner table that rocked every time someone bumped it.

The alewife—still old and stout, but now moving with a fresh vigor and doing all the necessary motions—slapped down three cups and a platter of meat pies without ceremony. “I’ve got wine and some pies left. That’s more than most houses can say tonight. Especially with this new hoard from the pass.”

Gunter thanked the alewife and she hurried off.

Daeron lit his pipe, took a long swig of the sour red, and let the smoke curl out. The warmth of the wine did little to loosen the knot in his gut, but it would do for now. He passed the pipe to Berbert, who declined, then handed it to Gunter.

“Tell me what you know about rodents spreading illness.”

Berbert wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and launched into a boring, practical lecture. Rats could carry all manner of maladies. Through fleas, through their saliva, through their droppings—any of it could pass sickness to men, livestock, even birds if the vectors aligned just right. He spoke like a man reading from one of his own dusty tomes, voice steady and dull.

Gunter handed him the pipe. Daeron took another pull. “What about the milky-white eyes?”

“Those sound like the eyes of a man who’s gone blind. Or one that’s already passed,” Gunter snorted.

Berbert nodded, swaying a little as the second cup began its work on him. “Aye… blind, or dead. Or something worse.”

The maester was well into his cups now, cheeks flushed, words starting to loosen and slur at the edges. He then pawed at the pipe, asking for a turn. Gunter obliged and lit it for him. Daeron and Gunter were surprised by how skilled the Northman was at the massive hit of smoke that came out of the maester’s mouth.

Berbert lamented, with the sudden melancholy of a drunk, about his time as an acolyte at the Citadel. How he had struggled for his iron link—the one for ravens—while other lads seemed to master it without effort. One night, a group had been dragged before the Seneschal’s Court and punished outside in the open yard. Other acolytes had pelted them with rotting vegetables until the stink clung for days.

Daeron raised an eyebrow. “What crime did they commit?” He smirked, unable to help himself. “Did the lads smuggle a girl into the Citadel? Seven knows that place could use one or two.”

Berbert blinked slowly, then gave a sloppy, honest grin. “Vivimancy.”

The word dropped like a stone into still water.

“It’s a banned practice of controlling, manipulating, and altering living flesh.” Berbert gestured with his fingers for the pipe. Daeron passed it over.

A bloom of smoke covered their corner. Gunter tried to wave down the alewife for another round, but Berbert kept talking, voice dropping into a drunken drawl.

“In Oldtown there are rat pits. You can find them in the slum districts of most big cities—Flea Bottom in the shadow of the Red Keep, even some of the Free Cities across the Narrow Sea. They throw rats into a pit. Get it? Rat Pit? They make them fight for sport. Men gamble on which mangy critter will tear the other apart first.”

Daeron’s fingers tightened around his cup. “And what do rat pits have to do with a pack of acolytes getting pelted with cabbages?”

Berbert took another deep swallow, his northern cheekbones now a bright, unsteady red. “Easier to get wounded rats from the pits than wounded men. Vivimancy needs a living body. Necromancy… that’s for corpses.”

He leaned in, breath thick with wine. “In the end, the court couldn’t find enough evidence the acolytes were truly practicing it. But one of the things they presented as proof…” He paused, eyes glassy. “Was a rat. A rat with milky-white eyes. A vicious thing. Nearly drew blood from the Seneschal.”

The words landed heavy in Daeron’s chest. His breath grew shallow. And rapid. 

Then came the sound from the far end of the alehouse—two men collapsing in a sudden, ugly heap of limbs and overturned benches. Shouts rose. A woman screamed. The whole room surged with an energy that felt thick and ready to ignite.

Gunter stood quickly, his hand already on Daeron’s shoulder. “Time to go, m’lord. All these people flooding in… everyone’s acting queer tonight. Best we get back to the rookery before someone decides to start a proper brawl.”

Daeron left a dragon on the table.

They rounded the bend only to be met by a clatter of wood and the sharp, rhythmic cursing of a girl at war with a length of canvas. The pavilion was a wretched, half-born thing, and at its center stood a breathless maid, no older than Daeron—perhaps a year or two his junior.

She was small; that was her first and most structural failing. The center pole demanded a reach she simply did not possess, forcing her into a series of desperate, leaping thrusts. Each heave drove the wood skyward for a hopeful heartbeat before the canvas sagged back with a heavy, mocking sigh.

Her silks—red, all of them, a red so feverish it bordered on the divine—tangled around her shins with every jump. The wind caught the heavy canvas, wrapping it across her face like a shroud. She clawed herself free, spat a sharp string of words at the fabric in a tongue that sounded like grinding stones, and went at it again.

The folks gave her a berth wide enough to drive a cart through, Daeron noted. It was not out of courtesy, but that prickly Westerosi suspicion reserved for things that did not belong—foreign goods, foreign gods, and foreign girls performing impossible feats in revealing silks.

“Is she—” Berbert broke the daze first, sounding faintly more sober than before.

“Struggling,” Gunter offered.

“On fire,” Daeron muttered—an observation that, while not yet true, felt a looming certainty given the scores of candles she’d somehow kindled within the half-collapsed pavilion.

She leapt.

“Oh, come on now, you stubborn thing,” she said in the common tongue, her voice bright and breathy with a thick, musical accent none of them had ever heard before.

She leapt again. The pole held. She let out a cry of triumph so raw, so delicious, it startled a passing man clean out of his persistent cough. The man cleared his throat and hurried away.

Then her heel snagged the hem of her silks and she went down hard into the muck. The entire pavilion collapsed over her like a great burial shroud, the light of her scores of candles snuffed out in a single, suffocating instant.

None of the three men moved.

This was not, Daeron later reflected, a lack of chivalry, but because the sight had cleanly severed the connection between their eyes and their legs.

She was—and this was the only word for it, and he would spend the better part of the evening failing to find a better one—spectacular.

The mud and the canvas had conspired to ruin her robes in ways the Faith of the Seven would have deemed a heresy—the sort of scandalous display for which a man might be gelded right there and then, and perhaps gladly so.

The red silks had ridden up past her knees—well past them, if he were being honest, and he was suddenly a very honest man—to a territory of bare, tanned thighs that made the drizzle abruptly hot.

She was small, yes, but what there was of her had been distributed with a generosity that bordered on a miracle. Hips that gave the ruined silks something to cling to; a waist that made the hips an event. And her breasts—well, they were undeniably present, of course.

When she finally bucked free of the canvas and looked up blinking, her black hair in a loose heap of waves that the damp had only improved, her almond eyes so large and ink-black that Daeron felt a brief, irrational certainty that she could see right through the back of his skull. He wasn’t the only man who had forgotten the need for air. Beside him, Gunter had gone deathly still and Maester Berbert appeared to be attempting to swallow his own tongue.

Gunter recovered first, because Gunter always did. He was halfway across the muck before Daeron had even remembered how to breathe, calling out something tiresomely gallant about tent stakes. Berbert followed a half-step later, which surprised Daeron—he’d not thought the maester capable of such haste, especially in his state.

Which left Daeron standing alone in the drizzle, watching his two companions fall over themselves to assist a foreign priestess who could not, by any reasonable assessment, erect a tent.

She thanked them all at once, and at great length, in a common tongue that was technically fluent and practically incomprehensible—the accent thick as honey, rolling her consonants in a way that belonged to no Free City any of them could name. Gunter guessed Myrish; Berbert suggested Lysene. Daeron privately decided it did not matter, for she could have been reading harvest inventories aloud and he would have found it arresting.

“You are too kind,” she said for the fourth time, as Gunter hammered the last stake and Berbert gripped the center pole with knuckles so white it suggested he was supporting not a tent, but the entire structural integrity of his own inebriated composure. “In my temple, men are not so—how do you say—freely helpful.”

“Can’t imagine why,” Daeron murmured, grateful the wind caught the words before they could betray him, as he laid down the last rug to carpet the ground.

Selyra was her name. She told them she had come across the Narrow Sea to bring the light of La-nore to the people of Westeros, whatever that was.

“So, you are Daeron, Gunter, and Boobert?” She pointed at each of them, tasting each name with that thick accent that made them sound far more exotic than they were.

“Yes, my lady. I’m Maester Boobert,” Berbert smiled, stupidly.

Daeron settled into one of the camp chairs circling an iron brazier that breathed out thick, perfumed incense. Beside him lay a small feathered bed heaped with cushions; he found himself wondering, with a sudden and unbidden concern, if she would be warm enough when the night chill truly set in.

She tilted her head, her smile so sweet it possessed a jagged edge that caught in his chest. “Please,” she urged, “take your ease and warm yourselves.”

Gunter and Berbert—or Boobert, as the man now answered to—collapsed into their seats instantly.

The girl sprinkled a pinch of powder over the coals. The flames surged, hungry and bright, dancing with a sudden, unnatural vigor that cast long, flickering shadows against the red silk walls.

“I came here to spread the love and word of the Lord of Light. R’hllor.” She gave each of them a nod with the earnest conviction of someone who had been trained to say it at every opportunity and had yet to learn the art of reading a room. “As you know,” she began, her voice dropping into a practiced lilt, “the night is dark and full of terrors.”

A heavy silence settled within the silk walls, broken only by the faint, wet echoes of coughing in the drizzle outside.

“Terrors,” Gunter repeated, the word hanging in the air.

“Yes, terrors. I have seen them dancing in the flames.” She peered deep into the flames of the brazier, her gaze snapping up to lock onto Daeron’s with a sudden, unnerving intensity.

She rose and moved toward him.

She had no idea. That was the truly damnable thing. She had absolutely no inkling of the havoc she was wreaking upon the three of them, because if she’d known, Daeron could have dismissed it as craft. This was not craft.

He was entirely unprepared when she lowered herself to straddle his lap, and he was struck utterly dumb when she did not notice the sudden, rigid heat of him beneath her silks.

She cupped his face, her touch light, and pressed her button nose against his. Her dark eyes danced with a strange, flickering light as she drifted into a trance of her own making.

Daeron sat frozen, needing every ounce of his resolve to remain still. In the periphery of his vision, he could see Gunter and Boobert; the two of them were actually nodding in idiotic approval, their faces wearing the dazed grins of men watching a show they had no right to witness.

Every shift of her weight, every brush of those feverish silks, sent a jolt through him that sparked dangerous urges.

He gripped the arms of his camp chair until he felt his knuckles go white, fighting the desperate need to either pull her close, kick the two gaping idiots from the tent, and see her safely to her bed—for the night was indeed full of terrors, and he found himself suddenly eager to offer his services.

Or, most likely, bolt from the tent before he did something truly stupid.

“I’ve seen you before. I saw you through the fire,” she breathed, her voice a low thrum that brushed his lips. She smelled of cinnamon and peppermint.

Her eyes grew dark with an expression Daeron could not read.

“Violet eyes through grassy flames. Snow covering the smoky summer ground.”

She moved her hands down to the nape of his neck, cradling his head back. She studied his eyes with a terrifying intensity, and then, slowly, tears began to well in her dark gaze.

“A white dragon needs to rise. Through its blood comes the light that will break the cold night,” she murmured, her voice breaking. “The dragons will have to pave the path. A black one crushed by a great mountain. A red one drowns in fire. A dragon old and grey floats away and curls to sleep. And…”

Tears were now streaming from Selyra’s eyes. She was still holding him. “The first one to go is a green dragon. It finds peace and finally closes its eyes.”

He felt cold sweat run down his back and it woke him from his trance. Daeron stood up at once, nearly upending the chair and the girl alike. He muttered a jagged apology as she slid to the carpeted floor he’d laid out earlier. His hands already seized the collars of his two stunned companions. With frantic strength, he urged them toward the flaps of the tent, barking that they had overstayed their welcome and must attend to business elsewhere. His voice sounded thin even to his own ears.

Before he shoved Gunter and Maester Boobert out into the biting drizzle, Daeron stole one final glance back. Selyra sat amidst her snuffed candles, her smoky brazier, and damp silks, weeping beautifully against the soft weave of rugs. Her lips moved, mouthing a silent I am so sorry that felt heavier than any curse.

He said nothing. He turned his back on the tent and fled into the cover of the night.

Chapter Text

It was nearing the hour of the wolf and soon the morning bells would toll…

And the sun would break through the remaining heavy clouds and cast its light to reveal the beauty of the Red Mountains that framed the grandeur of Summerhall. A reminder—to Maekar's great disappointment and frustration—he would have to make do with the limited resources his seat had to offer.

His royal father had likely tasted the irony of it when Maekar accepted the seat. Of all his sons, the youngest and most martial had made his home in a palace built for ease. Maekar was young then, newly wed, with his firstborn still in his swaddling clothes, and hungry to pave his own path. He never cared for ironies. He was not a man who dwelled in his own thoughts.

Maekar preferred the present and what was before him, but that was then…

Dressed in a black gambeson with a mail hauberk with front buckles over it, his mace already strapped, Maekar turned once in the saddle to look back. Summerhall stood behind him, outlined by the night, already shrinking with every stride of his mount.

He, Ser Patrek, his captain of the guards Ser Jason, and twenty riders were bound for the mouth of the Boneway. They were to meet the next wave before it could spill into Summertown as the first had.

That left Maekar with his own thoughts of the council and the words they had chosen, paper shields against a rot already on the move.

It began three hours earlier in the Small Hall of Summerhall. A yawning servant had stirred up the fire, but not enough to beat back the damp that seeped in from the storm. Maester Melaquin stood closest to the hearth, with a hot cup of nettle tea to keep him alert. Lorcan remained beside the table with one hand braced against its edge, his ledger wide open. Master-at-arms Pate stood and murmured something to the captain of the guards, Ser Jason of House Horpe.

Ser Patrek was seated with a cup of warm brown ale, his eyes focused on the map Maekar had spread before them.

Summertown, the Boneway pass, and the fields, farms, and folds of the land south of the town. Ink lines. Measured distances. Neat scratchings that offer no comfort to messy situations. 

“How many men could be spared to hold a line by morning?”

“Of the hundred, I’d wager perhaps eighty I’d trust to stand in harness all day and not fall over coughing by the next,” Ser Jason answered. The captain of the guard was a hard-bitten man of seven-and-twenty, tall, broad, and heavy across the shoulders, deadly with a crossbow, but with a drollery to his tongue that had provoked more than one man to draw steel.

“The sworn swords are at fourty, so I reckon thirty-five. Less, if you mean to spare men for the gates, the hall, and the prince’s own guard.”

That reminded Maekar. “Lorcan. Where has my son wandered now?”

Lorcan gave a slight start at the question but recovered quickly. “The servants caught sight of the prince heading to the south cellar and have not seen him come out since, Your Grace.”

“Leave him to his cups, then; he shall answer to me when the sun is up.” A thin, bitter smile quirked Maekar’s mouth—the smile of a father who found no joy in being right.

“So, we do not have enough?” Pate reeled the conversation back.

“Enough to guard the castle? Aye, if that be our prince’s command. To guard the town, the roads, the field choked with the sick or the frightened, appropriately— perhaps both, and the poor bastards who might rise in a madness once the breath has left them? May the Maiden above fuck me, absolutely not.” Ser Jason yawned, then sat down by Ser Patrek to survey the map.

Maekar studied his captain and found himself wondering if this was how his own firstborn might have looked, had the boy been more martially inclined.

“Fuck it. We shall not pretend at what we cannot accomplish,” Maekar said, straightening in his chair. “We have the men we have, and we shall make do. I’ll hear no more of camps or blockades; we have not the strength to hold them.”

“I expected as much, Your Grace,” Maester Melaquin said, with a solemn inclination of his head. “But even a lost cause is worth the discussion, if only to see where we stand.”

“What we have,” Maekar went on, “is enough men to stop the next wave before it settles in the town as the first has done. Enough men to drag some order out of the mess already there. Enough men to burn the dead. That is all.”

Lorcan bent over the map and planted two fingers south of Summertown. “Your Grace, if the town is already fouled with newcomers, then the next arrivals cannot be allowed into the square. We stop them here, or here.” He tapped the road where it widened before bending north. “Open enough ground for wagons. A few fires. Water near enough to fetch. Far enough from the farms.”

Pate was already nodding. “Field boundaries.”

“The ground is a mire in the rains, but it’s open,” Maekar said, looking up from the map. “Best we keep the sick away from the running water. What say you, maester?”

Melaquin cleared his throat. “If they are to be camped outside the town, they must be divided at once. Those with fever apart from those without. Those coughing apart from those not. The dying—”

“The d-dying,” Ser Patrek cut in, “g-go where?”

“We must have partitions. One for the healthy. One for the fevered. And the final yard for the dying.”

Lorcan pinched the bridge of his nose. “You speak of sections as if we have fences grown from the dirt, maester. Lest we forget, there is already a horde of them mixed and muddled in the town, and they’ll not be sorted easily.”

“Seven Hells, why must every breath be a struggle?” Ser Jason gave a heavy, dismissive huff. “Tell the folk a new breed of wights has breached the Wall and laid claim to the south. Then we bar the gates and let the lot sort it out amongst themselves. Our concern should be of the castle, and nothing more.”

The Small Hall fell deathly quiet. Maekar stared at the captain, his jaw tight. For a heartbeat, he saw not Ser Jason, but his other idiot son, Aerion, with the same mocking smile.

“No.” The maester’s voice was low and sharpened. “If a herald is sent into Summertown to proclaim that the dead shall rise, you will unleash another plague before the sun peeks over the horizon, the plague of panic.”

The maester moved closer to the hearth to poke the fire. “We tell them what they, presumably, already know. There is a grave malady, the damp of the lung, and the dead must be burned immediately to prevent spread of the damp. No funeral rites—”

“Thank the gods, the septon is not here to argue against this…” Lorcan muttered.

“Forbid crowded gatherings, no shared cups, no shared bedding. Might have to shut down taverns and alehouses.”

“Mother have mercy, shut them down, and we shall deal with riots,” Pate gasped.

“It will be necessary to do so to prevent the corruption from spreading,” Melaquin pressed on.

“Ser Jason. Pate.” Maekar eyed them both. “Your men are to be told the truth of this malady, and nothing more. Only slay those who have risen from death. We cannot know which of the fallen is tainted until they draw a cold breath and stand again. Do you take my meaning?”

“Strike for the head,” Melaquin cut in, his voice trembling. “The corruption bloats the brain. I shall set down instructions on where the steel must land and what should be avoided. I must make haste with my parchments for the herald…” The maester checked himself, his chain clinking as he turned back to Prince Maekar. “Only if it pleases Your Grace?”

Maekar gave a curt flick of his hand, his eyes already returned to the map.

The maester hurried off.

“Ser Patrek,” Maekar turned to face him. “You shall ride with me to the mouth of the Boneway. We need to start partitioning the influx.”

Ser Patrek gave a short nod.

“Your Grace, I shall ride with your party as well.” Ser Jason offered. “It will take but a moment to summon the archers and guardsmen and see them settled in their new watches.”

“I shall see to that for you, ser,” Pate said. “Go with the prince. I’ll gather the men and see them settled at their posts.”

Lorcan snapped his ledger shut. “With your leave, Your Grace. I must find men enough to break the earth for the pits and see what timber can be found for the fences.”

“Go, then,” Maekar said, with a curt nod of dismissal.

The last to leave the Small Hall was Ser Patrek.

Ser Patrek offered what Blackhaven had taught him: “D-Don’t let the first c-corpse lie alone, even for a moment, Your G-Grace. T-The turn was fast f-from what I heard.”

“I am aware, ser.”

The night was thinning at its edges. Not yet dawn, but Maekar could see the darkness beginning to pale. Somewhere north of the road, the heralds would be riding toward Summertown with the decree. By the time the bells rang, the town would be waking to orders. Whether the smallfolk obeyed them remained to be seen. 

Ahead, the mouth of the Boneway had become a ragged trail of human misery. 

Small camps were scattered along the roadside and across the wet ground beside it—a small mercy the rain had finally stopped—but what laid before them was a desperate arrangement of people too tired to go farther and too cold to sleep well where they had fallen.
Cookfires smoked low in the damp. Wagons stood with their wheels half sunk in the mud. Here and there cloaks had been stretched over poles in a sad and pathetic attempt of making shelter. Most still slept. A few shapes moved in the half-light, hunched and slow with stiffness of a bitter night spent in damp clothes. 

At the far edges huddled around a smaller fire sat a young family close together. Even at a distance, Maekar could see the unmistakable shape of grief in them. The mother bent over herself, the father knelt beside her, one hand at her back. Between them, something smaller was wrapped in blankets. They were weeping.

Keep a close eye over that. Maekar took note and rode on. 

One of his riders, a thick-necked man with a voice built for tourney yards, spurred ahead. At Ser Jason’s nod he lifted a war horn and blew. 

The sound crashed over the road, long and merciless. 

Heads jerked up all along the trail. Men cursed from beneath cloaks. A couple of horses shied and stamped, waking their riders. Children began to cry. Figures emerged slowly from bedrolls, wagons, and miserable little lean-tos, blinking and shivering in the raw grey before dawn. 

They were a pitiful lot. 

Wet, cold, and hollow-eyed. Half of them looked as though they had not eaten a proper meal in days. Merchants in fine wool turned to rags by mud. Hedge knights with rust blooming at the edges of their mail. Laborers with hands split raw from travel and weather. All of them blinking up at the mounted men as though the cavalry might prove a more pleasant sight if they stared long enough. 

They were about to be sorely disappointed. 

Maekar drew up before them and looked over the lot. 

They were more than he had expected. Far more. 

The road had not merely backed up. It had swollen. What he saw before him was not a scattering of delayed travelers but the beginnings of a settlement, and a bad one at that. 

He would need more men. Twice as many. Perhaps thrice. 

Maekar tightened his jaw to stop himself from tallying what he lacked. 

The rider with the war horn rode a little ahead and barked for silence. Though there was not much noise to silence. “By command of Prince Maekar Targaryen, no man leaves this road camp until he is sorted and given his place. All newly come from the pass will be set apart from Summertown. The sick will be divided from the hale. Wagons will be placed by order. Fires will be marked. Water will be fetched under watch. Any man who breaks the prince’s peace will be beaten for it, and any man who draws steel against his officers will be met with steel as well.” 

That got their attention better than the horn had. 

A mutter spread through the gathered crowd, tired and ugly.

One of the first to step forward was a hedge knight, broad and raw-boned, his surcoat so faded its colors had become a matter of faith. He had a decent face under the beard, weathered but not mean.

“My prince,” he called, bowing shallowly. “If it pleases you, I’ll lend a hand. Me and any man here still fit to stand. Better we work than sit in mud waiting for the Stranger.”

Ser Jason glanced back at Maekar.

Others began stepping forward as well. A carter with arms like tree roots. Two younger men who had the look of dismissed household guards. A sellsword with a broken nose and a plain kettle helm. More followed once the first shame was broken. Strong backs. Steady hands. Men who had been bound for work in Dorne, or sellsword contracts, or harvest escort, or any other common trade that the closed passes had stripped from them.

Useful men. Healthy-looking men.

Maekar gave a single nod.

Relief passed through them so quickly it was almost embarrassing to witness.

He turned to Ser Jason. “Take the strong ones. Keep them apart from the fevered and apart from the dying. And every man you use is to be watched.”

Ser Jason understood at once. “For signs.”

“For any sign.”

The captain hesitated only a moment. “Do they hear the truth of it?”

“Not yet.”

Ser Jason’s mouth flattened, but he did not argue. “As you command, Your Grace.”

Then the merchants found their tongues. They always did.

A round-bellied man in a sodden fur-lined cloak pushed to the front, his cheeks purple with cold and outrage. “We are stuck?” he said. “Stuck where, exactly? I’ve no wish for Summertown. I’ve done with Dorne. I mean to turn my wagons and go home.”

“So do I,” snapped another behind him, a lean man with rings on three fingers. “Why should we be penned like cattle? We’ve committed no crime, m’lord.”

A third voice rose from somewhere deeper in the crowd. “Punished for traveling? Is that justice now?”

The muttering thickened.

Maekar looked over them without heat. He does not have the fucking time. 

“This is not punishment,” he said with a hiss. “It is a necessity.”

The crowd quieted just enough to hear him.

“The sickness is spreading through the realm. South, north, east, west, it matters little. You’re not getting a pass just because you’re weary of the inconvenience.” His gaze passed over the merchants and the wagons behind them. “Those who recover and show no further sign may take leave when the prince’s officers allow it. Until then, you do not settle in Summertown, and you do not depart this road as it pleases you.”

That did not soothe them. It was never going to.

The murmuring began again, sharper this time, edged with fear. Men looked at their own wagons, their families, their bundled goods. Women drew children nearer. Someone started praying under his breath. Somewhere a horse screamed and kicked at its tether.

Then came a different sound.

A scream.

High. Raw. Close.

Every head turned.

It came from the family by the fire, the one Maekar had marked before.

The mother was on the ground. For one stupid, impossible instant Maekar thought the child wrapped in blankets had fallen atop her in fright.

Then he saw the movement.

The child was not clinging.

It was feeding.

Her mouth clamped on the mother’s forearm. Tearing. Her small jaw worked a grinding persistence, her eyes open and white as curdled milk. The blood was running down the mother’s arm in ropes. The father gave a broken shout and tried to wrench the creature away.
When it lifted its head, it revealed a mouth bright red.

It turned on him with a speed that was all wrong.

The father reeled back, screaming.

Another scream answered from the far side of the camp.

Maekar wheeled his horse.

A slender man came running through the wagons, too fast, too loose in the limbs, his mouth painted black-red in the twilight. Blood slicked his chin and throat. He did not run like a man fleeing danger. He ran like a hound that had scented more of it.

“Jason!” Maekar snapped.

Ser Jason had already drawn the crossbow from his saddle.

The captain rose slightly in the stirrup, aimed once, and loosed.

The bolt struck the man between the eyes with a crack that Maekar felt in his own teeth.

The runner dropped at once, legs folding under him, body striking the mud hard enough to splash the boots of those nearest. Yet even on the ground the corpse kept jerking, heels digging, shoulders hitching, as though some blind part of it still believed itself in motion.

That was enough.

Panic broke like a dam.

Men lunged for horses while women snatched up children, tucking them like bundles under their arms. Wagons lurched, wheels grinding and splintering as carters fought the mud and each other. A brazier went over, spilling hot coals into the muck. A horse screamed—a sound thinner and sharper than any human cry. Two boys tumbled into a ditch and clawed their way out, shrieking. One man, driven mad by the press, began hacking at his own wagon’s traces; the mule wouldn't budge, so he turned his knife to the leather in a frenzy.

“Hold the fucking line!” Ser Jason roared.

Maekar yanked his horse around and bellowed to his men, “Circle them! No one leaves!”

His riders spurred outward at once, driving their mounts into a widening ring around the camp. Hooves tore the wet ground. Steel flashed in the grey light. One of the household men brought his spear crosswise to turn back a fleeing traveler on horse and nearly got trampled for the courtesy.

More screams were rising now.

Not one place. Several.

Not panic alone.

Corruption.

Maekar’s hand closed around the haft of his mace.

He looked once toward Ser Patrek, once toward Ser Jason.

“Find the newly turned and kill them,” he barked. “Keep your distance. No mouth near, no spit, no blood—You fucking already know! Do not let them get their hands on you.”

Both men had already heard as much from Melaquin. Neither wasted breath in answering.

Maekar drove in.

His charger plunged through the smoke, the shouting, and the first wild crush of bodies. A woman seized his stirrups and he tore free before she could drag him half from the saddle. A child ran shrieking between two wagons. A mule kicked loose from its traces and vanished into the wet dimness of the woods. The smell was mud, wet wool, horse shit, fear, and beneath it all that fresh copper stink that always seemed hotter than the air around it. 

He caught sight of her. The mother. 

She had already risen. Her eyes remained half-closed, showing only thin, ghostly slits of white below the lashes. 

Blood sheeted one sleeve. Her head hung at an angle that no living neck would bear. She moved fast in the upper body and wrong in the legs, shambling and lunging in the same breath, as if each half of her had died on a different road and been forced to share the same flesh. Her mouth worked open and shut. Blood and spit hung in red strings from her teeth.

The child was nowhere in sight.

That chilled him more than the mother did.

He rode alongside her, matched her for a heartbeat, then swung.

The spiked mace struck the side of her skull with a hard, rotten sound.

The bone gave. The head snapped sideways. She went down under the horse’s shoulder and disappeared into the mud.

He needed to find the child.

Maekar rose in the stirrups and searched the chaos ahead for a small shape, fast and blood-mouthed, before it found someone else to bite.

Every instinct in the camp had turned toward flight.

That was the true danger now. Not the corrupted, but the living stampeding blind through mud and wagon-ruts, crashing against one another in terror, breaking the thin ring his riders strained to hold.

Twenty men were not enough for this many bodies. Not enough to stop fear once it had found its legs.

“Hold them the fuck in!” Maekar roared, wheeling his horse across the churned ground. “Back to the bloody fires! Back!”

Ser Jason was worth six men by himself. 

The captain stayed mounted, riding the line with his crossbow drawn and recocked with the speed that bordered on the unnatural.

A man with blood all over his beard lunged from between two wagons, jaws snapping feverishly. Jason put a bolt through cheek and into the back of his skull.

Another came half-running, half-falling through the smoke—a maiden of no more than five-and-ten. Her face had been clawed so deep that the pale yellowed fat of her cheeks pulsed out from the gashes, wet and raw. Her mouth worked the air in a mindless, rhythmic search for purchase, as if trying to scream a name she had already forgotten.

Jason pivoted in the saddle and shot her clean through the open mouth.

She spun and dropped.

A body rose at the edge of a cookfire, too stiff in the limbs, too eager in the teeth. Jason barely seems to aim. The bolt took it in the eye and punched it flat into the mud.

Ser Jason was not wasting shots. He was selecting them.

Anyone with a bloody mouth. Anyone running wrong. Anyone too dead in the eyes and too hungry in the jaw.

Maekar marked it and approved.

Then he saw Ser Patrek, and approved less.

The knight from Blackhaven was no longer mounted.

He had lost his horse or dismounted in haste; Maekar could not tell which. Ser Patrek stood knee-deep in muck beside a collapsed tent, hacking at a hedge knight in piecemeal fury. The creature had once been a big man. It still wore a rust-streaked breastplate over a torn gambeson, and one sleeve hung empty where the arm beneath had been chewed near through. Its eyes were milk-white. Its mouth worked with a wet, snapping sound as it drove at Patrek again and again.

Patrek slashed across its shoulder.

Then across the neck.

Then into the ribs.

Useless.

Maekar's jaw tightened.

The head. Strike for the head, you fucking idiot. Melaquin said as much. You should know this better than any of us.

Perhaps Blackhaven had taught the knight many lessons, but not quickly enough. Perhaps there was no room left in him for lessons just now.

Patrek stumbled back as the hedge knight came on with the dull, tireless insistence of a thing no longer troubled by pain. It caught his cloak, dragged it from one shoulder, and nearly had him by the throat before Patrek kicked free with a curse that broke apart on his stammer.

Maekar hauled his horse around to go to him—

Then another scream cut through the camp.

High. Shrill. Young.

Not a child’s voice.

A maiden’s.

His head snapped toward the sound.

There.

Between a wagon with a broken trace and a low cookfire stamped half-dead into the mud, a small shape darted as quickly as a rodent. Bare feet. The blanket was gone. One side of the little face was slicked dark. The child moved with horrible, jerking purpose, not wandering, not frightened, but hunting through the panic for the nearest living thing slow enough to catch.

The horrid creature flung itself at a girl desperately dragging an old man upright.

Maekar dug his heels in and charged toward it. 

In a few moments the dawn would break clean across the camp, and the morning bells would begin to toll, revealing all the carnage laid out before them, and for them.

Chapter Text

The morning bells shattered the evening’s stillness like a warhammer to the skull… 

Daeron was considering what his existence had been until that point, it was impressive to state— with some exaggeration —that what followed was easily the worst period of his life. By his reckoning, the morning bells had tolled well before their time. The sun had not yet fully peeked over, leaving the world in a damp, grey half-light. Yet he knew very well his senses played him as a fool, for a cold steel band seemed to constrict his very skull. 

They did not return to Summerhall… 

He groaned, peeling his face off the cold stone floor of the rookery’s solar. The unkindness of ravens above was squawking with indignation, as though they too had been woken by the bells and wished to have their complaints heard by the three men beneath them. Daeron tried to sit up, but his head objected with such force that he briefly considered lying back down and praying for the Stranger, which would at least be an easier task. 

The taste of ash and cheap wine was an ache he swallowed gladly. A bitter tithe, and a small price to pay — it proved he had, for one night, escaped his wretched dreams for the sweeter darkness of true rest. Daeron lay on his back and lifted a hand, blinking slowly, sharpening the vision of his own fingers flexing against the rookery’s loft above— and with them, the pieces of the night before. 

Vague flashes drifted through the fog in his mind: the three of them meandering through the misty market square long after fleeing a red-silk tent and the words spoken inside it, finding a merchant who swore he had genuine Dothraki horse-grass and three bottles of what he claimed was fine Dornish Red. Daeron had known better even then, but the price had been right for three desperate idiots chasing oblivion.

What followed was a sloppy rotation of drinking and smoking by the crackling hearth of Maester Berbert's solar, as the three of them traded increasingly ridiculous tales of misadventure, personal triumph, and the claiming of wenches. The maester could contribute nothing to the last, his maidenhead still regrettably intact, yet he reminded the prince and his groom that he was honor-bound to remain celibate, and to serve the realm as a neutral scholar, healer, and counselor. Gunter wadded up a scrap of parchment and threw it at him, insisting that when Berbert finally decided to wet his cock, no one in Summertown would truly report him to Summerhall, let alone the Citadel— and if proof were needed, one had only to look at the prince beside him, deep in his cups. Daeron answered by balling up a scrap of his own, much to Berbert's chagrin, and pitching it at Gunter’s forehead to shut him up.

Somewhere beyond the rookery tower, a faint heavy cough drifted past. 

The silence sat between them. 

Then the words came slithering back through his addled thoughts: “Violet eyes through grassy flames. Snow covering the smoky summer ground… The first one to go is a green dragon. It finds peace and finally closes its eyes.” 

Like seven hells I’d find peace. Daeron's own mind argued against the memory with the petulance of a man who had seen his own end in dreams, and knew better than to believe it came with peace. Prior to rats and their milky-white eyes, he had dreamt of dragons hatching, dragons dying, and mostly dragons attacking. He had dreamt, too, of the dark and gloomy place where the last of his breath would leave him—and he did not care to guess how old he would be when it happened, only that he would sooner die staring at a fine sunset than in some dank fucking crypt. 

The night continued with another round of the pipe and the bottle, and after that, everything went black.

Daeron blinked and rolled onto his side. The maester was slumped across his desk, face planted squarely on a pile of parchments and scrolls, one cheek smudged with ink. Gunter was still sprawled in the better chair, mouth open, and drooling freely.

The morning bells rang again — louder this time, as though to make certain every ear in Summertown had gone deaf by the final toll.

All three of them jolted upright at once. The ravens were equally unsettled — black feathers drifted down through the gap between the loft and the stairs.

Berbert sneezed, violently— sending parchments scattering across the floor —and stared around the room with the wild, ink-smeared confusion of a man who had forgotten where he was and who he was. Gunter gasped an announcement that he needed to tend to the horses, pushed himself to his feet, swayed like a ship in rough waters, and made for the door. He had taken perhaps two steps before it dawned on him that he was in the company of the prince. He spun around to face Daeron, who was now sitting upright against the wall.

"Fucking hells, m'lord! The sun's nearly up and we need to get your royal arse back before your father notices."

Daeron closed his eyes. Then opened them again.

"I am aware, Gunter."

"Aye! To be aware is one matter— to get off your actual arse and do something about it is quite another." Gunter crossed toward him in deliberate steps, as though to keep himself from listing sideways. "And I thought you—we were tryin' to avoid a foot-whippin', m'lord?"

"The Others take both of you! Must you be so loud at this hour?" Berbert croaked, shuffling through the chaos of his desk with a growing alarm. Sealed messages had arrived during the night— the ravens he had expected once the storms let up.

He yanked the cowl of his robe up to his nose and rushed for the stairs. Daeron and Gunter stood and watched as the maester sneezed, and sneezed again, freeing the ravens of the messages tied to their legs. After some time, Berbert made his way back down to the solar, eyes red and watering, and pulled the cowl away from his face— the familiar sheen of fresh snot had returned to his upper lip.

Cradled in his arm were several wax-sealed messages from neighboring castles; a few, heavier than the rest, bore the sigil of the Citadel.

"I must bring these to Summerhall," Berbert said, frantically gathering them into a leather satchel. “Maester Melaquin will want them at once. I should have delivered them hours ago. Oh, seven hells!” 

"Then we all go." Gunter swayed over Berbert as though trying to calm an unruly filly.

"Gunter, we have two horses, now three men," Daeron reminded his groom, emptying the rest of the bottles into his wineskin and taking a long pull of the dregs to settle his thoughts. 

"No matter, m'lord. We'll sort it out."

They sorted it out in the narrow yard beside the rookery. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, but the air remained cool and damp, clinging to their cloaks like a second skin. 

The argument over who would ride double lasted longer than it should have, primarily because all three of them were addled minded so reasoning was significantly diminished, and none of them truly wished to be the man pressed against another man’s back for the league ride to Summerhall. 

In the end, Daeron's destrier drew the short straw, and the matter was settled.

The three of them led the two horses down the muddy lane, the path thickening with bodies the nearer they drew to the market square. Everyone, it seemed, was heading the same way.

They had not gotten far when they spotted the Summerhall herald in his father's livery— the three-headed dragon of his house, quartered on a field of black —standing atop a makeshift dais, surrounded by at least thirty of his father's men-at-arms, a score of the town's own watch, a trumpeter — and a clerk. No— it was his father's steward, Lorcan.

“Gunter. Turn,” Daeron rasped.

"Turning," Gunter confirmed. He had seen Lorcan too.

The maester did not question them and also turned his head away.

Lorcan's eyes narrowed as though sensing them, and swept the square, but they had already pivoted the horses with the urgent, unhurried casualness of three men who were absolutely not avoiding anyone and were simply choosing, of their own volition, to take the long way around the square for reasons that were entirely their own.

Behind them, the townsfolk and stranded travelers had gathered in a restless, churning mass around the dais. The square had two main ways in and out. A pair of the town's watch were posted at the mouth of the lane toward Summerhall; another pair stood at the lane toward the row of inns and alehouses, though their attention was fixed on something further down the road rather than the square behind them. 

They slowed their steps. They could pivot toward the alley and cut through to the lichyard, though it was narrow— perhaps single file, if they led the horses by the bridle—

The trumpet sounded, and an immediate hush fell over the square. Daeron, Gunter, Berbert, and the two patient horses halted mid-trek through the crowd. Gunter tilted his head toward the market stalls, and they led the horses— and Berbert —to the side of a wooden vegetable stall, out of Lorcan's line of sight.

Behind them, the herald began to read. All five of them— horses included —turned to see what Daeron's father had decreed.

Gunter leaned close to Daeron’s ear. "M’lord, do you reckon your royal father's found out you stole away, and now there’s a decree that you’re banned from ever comin’ back to town?"

Daeron rolled his eyes in feigned outrage. "Gods, I'd not put it past him— seeing as I'm already barred from most of the inns, alehouses, even the winesinks." He pulled the stopper from his skin, leaned back against his horse, and watched on.

"By the command of His Grace, Prince Maekar of House Targaryen, Prince of Summerhall, this proclamation is made known to all who dwell within Summertown and to all travelers who have taken shelter within its bounds."

A pause. The trumpeter sounded two unnecessary slow notes. The herald continued.

"His Grace calls upon the able-bodied men of Summertown and its stranded travelers to take up work in the service of the realm. Hands are needed—"

"Hands for what?!" a voice boomed from the back.

Lorcan and the herald exchanged a glance. The herald pressed on.

"—for the breaking of earth, the raising of fences, the hauling of timber, and the tending of—"

"Aye, aye, we take your meaning!" Another voice cut through, pitched higher. "'Tis the why of it that eludes us."

The crowd began to grumble, low and restless.

Lorcan stepped forward. "Peace, good people, peace! Had you let our words finish… We are in need strong men for the watch, and stout backs to raise the fences—"

"Fences?!" An ancient but sturdy woman by the well bellowed. “Pray tell, is this why the bells rang before dawn — to beguile us into this gathering? To wattle up fences?!”

Lorcan silently mouthed wattle up, as though considering the question. The herald's eyes raced down the parchment, searching for a line that would answer it.

"Aye—do you mean to herd us like stock before midday?" a plump woman holding an empty bucket japed.

Gunter clapped a hand over Daeron's shoulder and buried his face in his own arm to keep from laughing. Daeron just stared on, wineskin pressed against his smirking mouth. Berbert, about to earn a specific link for animal husbandry, tried to calm the horses as the crowd laughed, murmured, and churned around them.

Lorcan lifted a gloved hand.  

The trumpet sounded again, sharper this time, that made the boys all wince and curse under their breaths, their heads still sloshing from the night before. 

The smallfolk’s murmuring fell back, though it did not fully die, but pressed down into something restless and almost ignoble. Heads turned towards the dais. Shoulders more squared. 

A dozen of the town’s watch shifted where they stood along the edges of the square, hands now settled on their hilts.

Oh, easy there. Daeron grip his wineskin tighter as if it was his own longsword’s hilt. 

“Good people of Summertown,” Lorcan called, raising his voice to carry as far as the herald's. 

“His Grace is in need of good men. Any able-bodied man who offers his back, his hands, or his arms—guards and laborers both—present yourselves. Prince Maekar offers better camp than the mud and good coin besides! But you must be hale and hearty, for the tasks ahead.” 

Lorcan pointed to the two Summerhall guards standing rigid behind the dais. “Hold your stations by them and bide your time for orders.”

A few motions rippled through the crowd. A young man near the front, lean and lithe, shouldered his way forward. A pair of travelers with the look of hedge knights glanced at each other, exchanging a look that said coin is coin. A small group of laborers in mud-caked boots followed. 

The trickle became something like a thin stream through the crowd. 

The herald cleared his throat and continued, louder now. “A grave malady has come upon the realm. It passes swiftly from man to man through shared breath, shared cups, and shared bedding. It spares neither young nor old, neither the highborn nor the low.”  

The herald paused, drew breath, and delivered, “The sickness is upon us now.” 

The words laid heavy across the square, prompting a collective, uneasy glance from the crowd. Then came a sudden shuffle as folks recoiled from their neighbors. Just two paces from where Maester Berbert stood, a maiden stepped back from her lover, the latter oblivious to the motion. At the front of the vegetable stall, a pair of children traded shoves until they collided with a startled bystander.

The herald continued. Separate the sick from the hale. No shared cups. No shared boards. No shared beds save between kin. And no crowded gatherings. 

“Furthermore, all alehouses and taverns within Summertown are hereby shuttered until His Grace lifts this decree—” 

For an oddly brief moment Summertown fell silent and then the masses responded. 

“What in the Seven Hells?” 

"What else is there for us, but to bide our time until the pass is unbarred?"

“—Oh, fuck off! If I were to fall ill, let me fall deep in my cups!” 

The jeers swelled into an ugly, crashing wave. Daeron caught the movement of his father’s men—their hands were ready, waiting only for the word. The trumpet sounded again, louder this time. 

The noise thinned but did not fall. 

"—and the dead," the herald pressed on, louder now, "shall not be washed. Shall not be mourned in the manner of custom. The dead shall be burned without delay. Pits are being dug south of the town walls for the purpose. The corruption of the lungs lingers in the flesh, and the flesh must be given to the fire—"

That was when the voice came from the east. 

“The Father above looks upon us!” 

A thin man, his dark robes frayed at the hem, a wooden seven-pointed star hanging at his throat. He was clean shaven. His hands were pale and clasped together. A holy brother, maybe begging brother, or a hedge septon, Daeron could not tell nor did he care. 

“The Father above looks upon us,” he said again louder. “And the Father is just. The Father does not strike the realm for no cause.” 

The herald glanced toward Lorcan. Lorcan did not glance back. His eyes were on the speaker.

“We have forgotten ourselves,” the holy begging septon cried, his voice cracked. “Our princes take and take, and what do they give us? Sickness. Closed passed. Pits outside these walls to burn our kin like scraps of kindling. Fire over blood. The Seven watches on! The Seven remember. The Summerhall Prince who slays his own brother—his eldest brother, the heir to the kingdom anointed by the Father—do you think such a sin passes unmarked!?” 

The square stilled.

Daeron felt the cold reach his back before it reached his mind.

“Prince Baelor! His namesake was the Blessed. The Seven Above has sent us a righteous liege. Only to be struck down before his time at Ashford Meadow by the hand of his own blood. A mace to the head! A mace to the head. By the very hand of a twice kinslayer prince who sent us his herald and arms this morning to close our doors and burn our dead without their holy rites. Tell me— do tell me —whose house do the gods punish now?”

Daeron chewed on that, then his mouth clenched. The hand holding the wineskin had gone still at his side. He could not feel his fingers. 

Father never meant to kill— The gods know this is a lie! 

The townsfolk’s dark sentiment ran counter to Daeron’s own. Nearby, a woman was nodding in rhythm with the septon’s lies. A man was muttering aye, aye under his breath. The crowd had been looking for a shape for its fear, and the treasonous septon had handed them one. 

They stupidly lapped it up with the hungry, greedy relief of swine waiting to be fed. 

Gunter had gone still beside him.

"M'lord —"

"I heard him." 

"M'lord, we should —"

"I heard him, Gunter."

His own voice came out flat. Not his voice. Something lower, closer to his father's.

If anyone’s to blame it should be— Daeron could not find in himself to finish it. 

A heavy man in traveling wool shouldered forward through the press — a merchant by his cloak, his face red with cold and grievance. 

"And the king!" he bellowed up at the dais. "King Daeron the Good, aye? Him and his open hand for every Dornishman and Free City peddler who comes sniffing the coast! We bend the knee to Dorne now, do we? Is that why our passes are shut— to please the Martells? Why we starve here and Targaryens treat with foreigners? The sickness comes off their ships! Off their ports! Everyone knows it—" 

A chorus of voices poured through. 

"...from the east, from Essos…"

"…I saw a Lyseni galley at Oldtown, men dying on the deck…"

"…it's in the spice trade, it came in the spice…"

A full third of the square was shouting now. Lorcan had both hands raised. The herald had stopped reading. The trumpet sounded and sounded and was not being heard.

Behind Daeron, two women walked by, and their words drifted up to the three of them. 

"…the red one, the one in the tent down by…"

"…aye, I saw her, all in her silks…"

"…a red witch. A witch of their fire-god. Come over the Narrow Sea to curse…"

Daeron turned.

Gunter had already turned. So had Berbert. The three of them looked at one another and did not speak for a full breath.

 "Oh, fuck," Gunter said, very quietly.

The color had drained entirely from Berbert's northern face, leaving it stark and frozen. "She does not— she does not understand what— she will sit there smiling at whoever—"

"She will be utterly helpless," Daeron said.

Gunter was already moving. "I'll go."

"No. I'll go. You take Berbert—"

“M’lord, use your wits, I beg you.” Gunter’s hand gripped the reins of his own mount. “Your lord father expects you to be in the keep, and the ol’ maester’s waiting on those parchments. Your destrier can charge faster than mine. I’m the one no soul will miss, your Grace. Let me ride on. I’ll have her out of that tent before this rabble decides to give her to the flames— second thought, she may like that…” 

Daeron opened his mouth.

Berbert spoke first.

"He is right, my prince." The maester's voice shook, but the words did not. "The messages. If Maester Melaquin does not have them within the hour, we— there is no —please."

Daeron looked from one to the other.

"Fine," he said.

Berbert was already fumbling at his belt. He pressed a heavy iron key into Gunter's palm.

"The rookery. Use the side door— the small one, facing the alley. It has its own lock. She'll be safe there until—"

"Until what?" Gunter said.

None of them had an answer.

Gunter closed his fingers around the key. He looked at Daeron, and for one absurd beat Daeron thought he was going to say something that would need to be remembered later.

"Ride with care, m'lord."

"You first."

Gunter was up on his horse and gone before the crowd learned of the red witch in the tent, or the alleged ruin she had wrought upon them. He cut hard toward the alley that ran behind the stalls, low in the saddle, his cloak whipping. Daeron watched him until the stalls swallowed him.

"Come on," he said to Berbert.

They led the remaining horse toward the main lane — toward the watchmen at the mouth of it, toward Summerhall. Daeron kept his hood up. Berbert kept his satchel pressed tight against his chest.

On the dais, Lorcan had his hands raised and was calling for peace in a voice the crowd was no longer receiving. The herald was no longer reading. The trumpeter sounded another note, and another, and the square took no notice of either. The watch and his father’s guards are closing in on the unruly mass. 

They passed the pair of watchmen at the lane's mouth without being challenged. Whatever those two men had been told to watch for, it was not a maester and a hooded rider slipping past on a single horse while the square behind them began to come apart at the edges.

They were perhaps twenty paces down the lane, Berbert mounted up behind him, when the scream reached them.

It came from the south end of the square— from the direction of the alley that led to the inns and alehouses. High, sustained, the scream of someone who had seen a thing the mind could not hold.

Daeron twisted in the saddle.

Behind them, the square was opening. Bodies moving away from something at the far end. The watchmen at the lanes were drawing their swords. His father's steward was no longer on the dais. And above the rising noise— above the shouting, the weeping, the animal-sound of a crowd becoming a mob —a voice was screaming the same words over and over, louder each time.

"HE MEANS TO KILL US! HE MEANS TO KILL US!"

Daeron felt Berbert's grip on his belt tightened. He was startled. 

Daeron turned to face the road. The horse caught his urgency and lengthened its stride, hooves striking hard against the wet stone of the lane.

He did not look back again.

Chapter Text

He and what remained of his men were no closer than half a mile from Summerhall…

When the galloping reached them — hooves cutting hard through the underbrush, coming blind and fast from the north. 

Who's to say a shambler cannot mount a horse… Maekar's hand had already found his mace before his mind had finished the thought.

His captain of the guard had already raised the crossbow and loosed a bolt into the treeline ahead.

What followed was a high-pitched scream, it echoed harshly off the trees, sending a dark cloud of birds exploding into the sky. A frightened whinny and then a clamor of panicked voices, overlapping and incoherent.

A wench and two men. Maekar's jaw set. And one horse, by the sound of it.

"Who goes there?" Ser Jason bellowed into the shadow between the trees.

“Seven hells! W-we mean no harm!”

Maekar’s eyes narrowed. That voice. He knew that voice. Maekar had known that slurred, affected drawl for the latter part of nine-and-ten years.

“Hold,” he ordered, raising an open palm. Ser Jason lowered the crossbow without a word.

They emerged from the trees into a narrow stretch of road, and there was his son.

Daeron sat astride his destrier but he was not alone on it. There was a frightened hooded maiden, the would be source of the shriek. Her face was pressed against his son’s back, with both of her arms around his midsection, a leather satchel crushed between her and Daeron’s spine. She was visibly shaken. 

Yet, Maekar swore he heard another man’s voice, where was the second man? 

“Daeron.” 

“Father.” 

Daeron rode forward, blocking Maekar’s view of the hooded maiden. On closer inspection, it’s apparent his heir looked like he had been dragged through every tavern in Summertown.  

Maekar’s jaw tightened.

“Why the fuck are you out?” he demanded.

Daeron’s eyes darted away. “Oh, you know. Fetchin’ the maester for the maester.” His son shifted his weight on the saddle and the horse promptly steered left, then gestured behind him at, not a maiden, but a young Northerner. “Maester Bobbert. I mean Bertbert.”

“Berbert.” The man pulled back his hood and peeled himself from Daeron’s back, revealing his heavy chains.  

“Oh right. Maester Berbert mans the main rookery. He had Citadel seals for Maester Melaquin.”

The young maester nodded along.

Maekar could sense that this was a farce, but before he could question it, his idiot son narrowed his eyes and asked, “Why the fuck are you out, Father?”

Maekar looked down at his own chest. He and his men were splattered with bits of carnage and dark, drying stains of butchery.

He was too tired to argue with Daeron. 

"Ride," he said. "Both of you."

The sun was higher in the sky when they rode into the outer yard. The servants stood ready with buckets of steaming water, basins of vinegar, and piles of clean cloth. Squires, grooms, and guards stood at the ready.

Maester Melaquin had already prepared for their return, the old man clearly not spent the remaining night sleeping. 

Maekar, Ser Jason, and the seventeen men dismounted. They had ridden out with twenty. The horses were led away by the stable hands, he noticed they kept their distances and did not touch the riders. 

Daeron twisted on his seat and firmly pushed back the young maester with one arm, then swung his leg over and dropped to the cobbles, leaving the maester to fend for himself.  

“Your Grace, we have everything prepared in readiness for your return,” Melaquin said. 

“I can see that.” Maekar nodded.  

“Strip!” The old man straightened up and strode off. "Tunics and gambesons off. Everything that touched the outside goes into the pile." Melaquin was moving between the rows, pointing, his chain swinging.

The yard filled with the sounds of men undressing. Buckles. Laces. The wet, stiff resistance of linen that had been sweated and bled through. Around him, Maekar’s riders stripped wordlessly.

“Even your smallclothes.” Melaquin eyed Ser Jason.

“Alright, just try not to weep when you marvel at what the gods have gifted me.” Ser Jason winked at a servantmaid. “There is a reason why I walk heavy.” 

Melaquin rolled his eyes and moved on.

Maekar noted how gingerly the squires worked, dodging the gore that stained his gambeson as they unbuckled his mail hauberk. As they pulled the stiff, sweat-soak garment over his head, he caught a sideways glimpse of Daeron. His eldest had already shed his cloak and tunic, beside him, the Northerner was still fumbling blindly with his own laces.  

“Only those who rode with me,” Maekar growled.

Daeron shrugged at him. “I did, didn’t I?” 

"Only those who rode with His Grace before morning, my prince," Melaquin said patiently. 

Daeron looked up, relieved, and picked up his tunic from the ground.

"Wounds — any wound, any scratch, any bite — report to Eddan and Ser Will immediately. They will look at every one of you before you are permitted inside. Every one." The Maester shouted.

He reached Maekar and stopped.

"Your Grace." He looked Maekar over, assessingly. "Injuries?"

"None."

Melaquin looked at him.

"None that matter," Maekar said. 

"And what of Ser Patrek?" Melaquin asked.

Ser Jason poured a bucket of vinegar water over his head and shook it off like a dog. “Had to put a bolt through him,” he said flatly. “Pitty. He was strong. But not very fast.” 

A quick glance between Daeron and Berbert. The sudden stiffness in their shoulders. They had not known.

Melaquin closed his eyes for a moment. Then opened them. "I see," he said. He wrote something on the parchment in his hand. "Thank you, ser."

Ser Jason nodded and went back to his washing.

“There were three others.” Maekar added, rinsing his forearms in the vinegar basin. “You shall have their names when I’ve finished here.”

Melaquin pocketed his parchment and turned to the younger maester. “Come with me, Berbert.” Then he seized Daeron by the arm. “You as well.”

Maekar watched the three of them head toward the maester’s quarters — his son half-dressed and surly, stumbling along.

A pathetic sight. 

Maekar was in his solar with fresh clothes on, the sour scent of vinegar lingers around him. The gambeson he wore this morning was ash by now, or would be shortly. He rolled up his right sleeve and scratched out the names of the men that did not return. 

Seventeen men out of twenty. 

He was grateful every single one of them, along with Ser Jason, had come back whole. No bites, no open wounds, no hidden tears in the flesh, nothing that needed a maester’s healing. He would need strong bodies in the days ahead.

For the partitioned failed.

He had known it would end in catastrophe the moment he saw the size of the camp. The camp was a small town in the making and twenty armed men was not enough.
Maekar should have known better. If the Hammer was here, he would have simply reminded his youngest brother that he was a slow study when it comes to numbers.

Gods be damned.

Now corruption and panic will flood the fields, the neighboring holdfasts, the farms along the road, and then to Summertown. The service-town is already swollen with bodies and more bodies to come. Unless his steward had somehow worked a miracle with the recruitment of strong men and the smallfolk of Summertown had proven more receptive than Maekar expected. 

He grimaced. He saw little hope in that. 

The smallfolk had been wary of him since Ashford. Since the news of Baelor’s death had reached them. A prince slaying his own brother — the realm’s heir — left a stain that no amount of coin or careful words could wash away. If the gods were punishing anyone, they had chosen their target well.

He cut and squared a fresh parchment—an inquiry after his father, his daughters, and any word of the sickness in the Red Keep.

He tucked the papers in the tab of his doublet then made his way to the southern end of the castle.

Maekar heard voices— heated, overlapping —as he approached the door to the maester’s quarters. Daeron’s was first, but not in his usual lacquered drawl, then Melaquin’s voice, it was lower though.

"...holy man spoke nothing of treason, Melaquin, I'm telling you the fucker—"

"—the square, what of the square, did Lorcan—"

He paused right before the entry.

"...the steward and the herald lost the crowd, they became angry, there was…"

"—how many—"

"...all of them, all of them, there was a scream from the middle of it and the whole—"

Maekar moved closer to the door.

A pause. Then Daeron's voice, the tone was deep and unfamiliar to him.

"...I dreamt something queer. Before any of this. Weeks ago."

"Another nightmare, my prince?"

“...white-eyed rats, creatures, they were consuming each other—dreamt it more than once…”

Maekar felt the cold move through him. The milky eyes. The flat dead stare of each wretched thing he had to put down in the camp— the mother, the hedge knight Ser Patrek had lost to, the maiden, and then the child —every one of them looking back at him with the same clouded emptiness where a soul had been.

His son had dreamt of the white-eyes. He always dreamt of strange things.

“...a dead dragon…a great beast…it had fallen…the dragon was dead.”

Maekar had heard his son muttering such words. They were all covered in mud and blood; his son bled from his ear and limped towards him as he held Baelor’s cold body. The giant continued to cry out. Aegon rushed to retrieve a maester. Yet, Daeron stood there, broken, and muttered the same words over and over. After that Maekar could not recall. It was all darkness. 

He pushed the door open.

Three heads turned at once. Melaquin straightened behind his worktable, Maester Berbert knocked over an inkwell but caught it, and Daeron turned from where he had been standing by the window. His expressions shifted twice then settled on a stupid neutrality.

Maekar looked at his son. Then walked past him. 

He set the folded parchments down on Melaquin's worktable. "The names of the men who did not return. And a message to the Red Keep — fly it today." He looked at the young maester. “Any word of my father?"

Berbert's hands were still pressed over the inkwell. "We are still working through the messages, Your Grace. As soon as we have anything of King Daeron—"

His father’s namesake stepped forward, voice rising. “Father, there is talk of treason in the town. They take you for a—”

“Kinslayer?” Maekar turned to face him fully.

Daeron was almost taller than him now. When had that happened?

Maekar dropped his voice to a hard tone. “Is that not what I am, boy? Unlike you, I understand the weight of my actions. I wear the consequences. Or are you so fucking craven and so deep in your cups that you sooner hide behind the horrors of your damned mind than claim any responsibility on your part?” 

His words pierced the marrow. Daeron said nothing, but his jaw clenched and his violet eyes met his with a steadiness Maekar had rarely seen in him. Then he noticed something that had always been there: their eyes were the same shade. 

The door hit the wall. 

“Your Grace! Your Grace! We need healers. Now. It’s Lorcan.” Wylla stood by the frame, her hands nervously clasped together tightly. 

“He’s been stabbed. Multiple times. I am afraid it’s grave.” 

Melaquin was already moving, but Berbert caught his arm. “I can see to the wounded, Maester Melaquin. You must be very tired. I have silver links. So do not worry.”

“I trust you.” The old maester went back to his worktable and sat down. 

Maekar turned away from Daeron without another word and followed the young maester out of the room, his boots heavy on the stone.

They reached the outer yard as Lorcan was lowered from a horse. The steward lay on the cobbles in a spreading pool of his own blood, tunic soaked black, the color of his face faded. Two guards knelt beside him, pressing rags against his side. No one had carried him inside.

The rule held: no one entered the keep until they had been washed and inspected.

Berbert pushed through without hesitation, dropping to his knees in the blood. Maekar stood over them, arms folded, jaw set.

“Five wounds,” Berbert said, voice tight but steady. He tore the ruined tunic open with a small knife. “Three shallow. Two deep.”

Lorcan’s eyes fluttered. A wet groan escaped him.

“Boiling wine,” Berbert snapped at the nearest servant. “Now.”

Maekar noted the wounds: one high on the left side, below the armpit—that one was the worst of the visible bleeds, pulsing rather than seeping, the cloth pressed over it already soaked through. Two were in the abdomen, lower. One was along the ribs—shallow, by the look of it. The last was in the side, below the lowest rib, angled inward.

Lorcan was conscious. That was both a mercy and hell. His eyes were open, fixed on the sky above the yard. Maekar does not want to see another pair of milky-eyes.

"Lorcan." Berbert's voice was even. "Look at me."

The grey-blonde head turned.

"You are going to live," Berbert said slowly. “But I’m afraid this is going to hurt and I need you to bear with the pain.”

Lorcan’s mouth moved, blood spilling out of the corner of his lips; Maekar wondered if it was meant to be a smile.

Berbert reached into the satchel and produced a small glass bottle. The contents were pale, it was milk of the poppy.

"Drink this," he said, pressing it into Lorcan's mouth. "It will dull the pain, though you must grant it time to work its full mercy."

Lorcan swallowed, choking, then sagged to steady his ragged breathing. 

The servant arrived with the first pot of boiling wine, steam rising from it.
Berbert took it without looking up.

"Hold him," he said.

The guards took Lorcan by the shoulders and the legs and held.

Berbert poured slowly on the open wounds. 

Lorcan screamed. The sound tore out of him, raw and animal, as the wine hissed into the open gashes. His back arched off the stone. Blood and wine mixed, pink and steaming, running between the cobbles.

Berbert murmured his apologies.

“A hot iron,” Berbert ordered. “Burning coals. More clean cloth — now!”

A brazier was dragged over. The iron poker glowed cherry-red. Berbert packed the two deepest wounds with strips of boiled linen, jamming them in hard to staunch the flow. Then moved his attention to the three shallower cuts. He took needle and thread and began sewing with quick, practiced stitches, pulling the skin closed while Lorcan twitched and moaned under the poppy.

Maekar watched without blinking.

When Berbert finally lifted the glowing iron, he looked up at Maekar. “Once I seal the two largest wounds, he shall mend. They missed the heart. And the lungs too. He is lucky.”

Maekar said nothing. Lucky was not the word he would have chosen.

He turned to the nearest guard still standing in nothing but smallclothes, vinegar dripping from his bare chest. “What in the seven hells happened?”

The man looked half-sick. “They dragged the herald off the dais and killed him, m’lord. Then they came for the steward. We got to him’n time, but barely. Dragged him out between us while the rest of the watch tried to hold the square.”

Another guard, still half-naked and shivering, spoke up. “The town’s watch took over the line. We rode back with him. Not sure they held.”

A third guard, younger, voice cracking, added, “It was chaos, Your Grace. They started turning on each other. Some of them… they were biting. I saw three different men sink their teeth into anyone close enough. Not fighting. Biting. Like dogs.”

Every guard around the brazier nodded.

Maekar felt the word settle in his gut like cold iron.

Biting. 

Chapter Text

The heavy weight of silence hung in the thin air…

As Daeron worked through the piles of messages the ravens had brought. He was instructed to sort the parchments by region, keeping a sharp eye out for the black wax of the royal seal or the stamped chain of the Citadel. 

The task was enough to dull the sharpest wits — or, perhaps, to sharpen the dullest.

Daeron knew not which.

Though he suspected the old maester lacked enough confidence in him to read through and make notes of each missive.

On any other day, Daeron would have found an excuse to slip away — the urgent need to use the privy, or the dire need to check on his horse — but he had had such a strange morning, and his father’s words continued to echo in his near-sober mind. So he found comfort in doing a mindless task inside the maester’s musty quarters.

It’s not that I don’t claim any fault. He admitted in his thoughts. Nor am I naked of the consequences. In fact… every waking day I am dressed in the damned thing.

I may not wear it well as he does. 

Though Maekar most likely did not consider a headache from multiple rounds of drink as a consequence. 

Daeron’s mouth felt as dry as the parchment in his hand. It was sealed with the three wheat stalks of House Selmy; he placed it along with the others from the Marcher houses.

But how is one supposed to take proper action against horrors yet to unravel? He looked up at Melaquin, who was frowning as he made notes in a ledger.

Especially when the horrors remain entirely beyond comprehension. Daeron had to admit that he lacked comprehension as well. How could he claim responsibility for something he did not fully understand?

The familiar thirst scraped at the back of his throat. If he slipped down to the cellar, he could be back before the old man ever realized he was gone—

“Care for a drink, Your Grace?” Melaquin set down his quill and rose to his feet. 

Daeron offered no reply, knowing the maester already knew his answer. His heavy links clinked and swayed as he walked to a curtained shelf, gently parting the fabric. 

“I always found it curious,” he mused, rummaging inside. “The thought of the very source of injury could serve as the cure.” 

He emerged with a heavy wooden tray containing a small flagon of wine, a cup, bread, and a wedge of hard cheese.

“‘Twas brought over some hours past, though I scarcely had the appetite for it then. Pale amber, and strong too,” the maester warned, pouring the wine. “But should ease the ache. Have some bread with it, my prince, lest you fully sour your stomach.”

Daeron nodded in appreciation and lifted his cup.

“Were you weighing your father’s words?” the old man asked.

A long sip was Daeron’s only answer. Over the rim of his cup, his gaze followed the maester back to his worktable and settled onto his seat. 

“Your Grace, if you would permit me to offer counsel,” Daeron knew far too well the maester would offer it regardless. “It is unwise to let your lord father’s words sink you deeper into the shadows of your mind. I know well your tendency to swirl thought upon thought, until you know not where you began. They are but the mere words of a frightened father; do not let them weigh you.” 

Frightened was not the word Daeron would describe Maekar. 

The maester met his gaze, his tone shifting. “I require your wits sharp and your health whole, there is a grave pestilence spreading throughout the realm. We need to be careful.” 

Grave, indeed. Fevers and coughs, sure. What was truly grave was the frightful mob swelling in Summertown, raw with frustration at Dorne and the Iron Throne alike. There was the business of the rats and the milky white-eyes, true, but those terrors did not frighten him half as much as the venom he had seen in the septon’s pale eyes at the square. He needed to return to Summertown, to fetch his groom and the priestess, but how?

He had believed that if he could tempt his father to charge into the town on account of treason and whispers of kinslaying, he might ride along, retrieve Gunter and Selyra, and escape his father's scrutiny entirely.

But the gambit had failed.

What Daeron had received instead were words that made his chest heavy with ache and his throat turn dry with a hollow sort of guilt—one he could not define, so he settled on the guilt of his own existence.

Now he was trapped in Summerhall. Maekar would ensure he did not leave. That, Daeron knew all too fucking well.

He kept these thoughts to himself, breaking off a piece of the bread instead. 

“You are more your father than you care to admit, and he more like you—though he will never allow himself to acknowledge it.” 

“I beg to differ, maester.” Daeron set his cup aside, then continued to sort the letters. “My father has never lost an opportunity to allow himself to acknowledge my failings—”

A loud, impatient mewing interrupted him as a fat grey tabby leapt onto the wooden tray with a heavy thud. It was the old Lord Chubs, intent on making off with the cheese. Daeron scrambled to intervene, but his clumsy swipe missed the cat entirely, sending a pile of letters tumbling to the floor instead. 

“Thank you, cat,” Daeron let out a feigned groan, sinking to his knees to gather the parchment strewn across the cold stone.

Lord Chubs, utterly unbothered by the ruin he had caused, clamped his jaws around the prize and trotted off in triumph, leaving another sorted pile of letters — the very one Daeron had just finished sorting — to scatter across the stone floor.

Having only just finished gathering the first stack, Daeron was forced to crawl toward the new ruin of scattered parchments. “We have far too many cats running this keep.”  

“Far fewer now than in days past. Oh how I scarcely see them,” Melaquin countered. 

Then Daeron spotted two missives bearing a black wax seal, the parchment still tightly curled from being bound to a raven’s leg. He quickly picked them up and handed them to the old maester.

“If my memory serves, ’twas your lady mother who held a great fondness for the creatures—Ah, thank you, Your Grace,” Melaquin murmured, breaking the wax. “At one point, we harbored so many that no rat nor mouse dared venture within a yard of the castle gate….” He suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” Daeron tried to peek over to read what the letter said. 

All color drained from the maester’s face.

“We must find your lord father,” he said, his voice stripped of its usual calm. The maester folded the parchment with trembling fingers, sweeping the rest of the letters and his ledger into his arms. 

“Wait! What does the letter say, Melaquin?”

The old man was almost out the door, having forgotten Daeron behind. He spun around.

“Come, Your Grace. It is right that you should hear it with him.”

They hurried from the maester’s quarters, passing the smaller rookery on their way to the southern entrance of the arched hall. Daeron was scarcely keeping pace with the old man, a realization that made him question his own virility at barely nine-and-ten.

They had not gone far crossing the grand garden when they nearly collided with Molly. 

“Oh, goodness,” Molly gasped, blinking rapidly. “I was just on my way to fetch you both. His Grace summons you to the Small Hall.” The steward’s daughter looked a wreck, her narrow shoulders slumped, her eyes red and swollen.

Melaquin gave a grave nod. “Lead the way, child.”

They followed her along the curving gravel path, cutting across the garden where the large dragon fountain sprayed and glimmered defiantly in the late afternoon sun. Despite the bright water, Molly’s downcast presence only deepened the pervasive gloom.

She shared the coloring of Lorcan of House Blackberry — possessing the same ashy-yellow hair, but her usual brisk countenance had vanished, replaced by something fragile and exhausted. She was a few years older than Daeron, and he had always found her steady competence vaguely intimidating.

Seeing her broken like this felt entirely wrong.

Melaquin cleared his throat then asked, “How fares your father, child?”

“Alive. Very much alive. I will…” She almost broke into a sob but held it. “I will f-forever thank the gods above for keeping the S-Stranger at bay,” Molly managed to answer, her voice wavered slightly. “He’s resting in our quarters now. The young maester—sorry, I couldn’t recall his name—says he will need nearly a moon or less before he’s fit again.”

“We thank the gods as well.” Daeron murmured the appropriate words. “And…if it helps, his name is Bardbert.” 

Melaquin glanced back at Daeron with a puzzled look, though Daeron couldn't imagine why. He had only meant to console the maiden.

“Oh, if that be his name, I shall give my proper thanks.” Molly gave him a small, tired smile. “He has done so much for my father.” 

When they reached the Small Hall, Melaquin entered first, his chain clinking as he walked through. Daeron moved to follow, but Molly’s hand suddenly caught his sleeve, stopping him just outside the doorway.

“Wait Daeron—er—Your Grace,” she said in a hushed but urgent tone. “Wylla’s nephew has been missing since last night. Do you know where Gunter is?” 

“Um. Probably in town to see the smith about new horseshoes.” Daeron didn’t miss a beat. It wasn’t a complete lie. Gunter was in town.

Molly’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed. “To town!? With all the chaos happening out there? My father was almost killed in town! Was it you who sent him there?”

“Of course not,” Daeron said, perhaps a touch too quickly. “I wouldn’t. He went on his own. You know how he is.”

She studied him for a long moment. “Very well. I shall bear those words to Wylla. Just know there are frightful things happening out there and she’s worried sick!” Molly winced at her own words, catching herself. “A turn of phrase, you know. I did not mean she has taken a fever. She is whole and well, truly.”

What an odd thing to say…

“I catch your meaning.” Daeron gave her what he hoped was a reassuring nod.

She released his sleeve, and they stepped into the Small Hall together.

Seriousness hung in the air, and Maekar sat at the very center of it. The prince remained at the head of the long table; to his right, Maester Melaquin was already murmuring into his ear, while Wylla gestured urgently for Molly to hurry and sit beside her. To his left were Ser Jason and Ser Pate, followed by a wide gap, and then Maester Barbert.

He took his place next to the young maester. 

Wylla met Daeron’s eyes. Her face was tight and composed, but her gaze betrayed her barely contained worry. He quickly looked down, guilt sank deep into his stomach. They will need to get back to Summertown soon…

“U-um, Maester Bardbert? I just want to say thank you for all that you did.”

Daeron looked up at Molly, then turned to the northerner beside him, who merely nodded in acceptance.

A choked laugh came from the end of the table by Maekar. 

“Oh, sweetling, I think you will find his name is Berbert. Ber-bert.” Ser Jason settled into his seat and flashed her an amused smirk.

Molly, her face turning a bright crimson, shot burning daggers at Daeron, who could only offer an apologetic shrug in return. It wasn’t his fault the northerner had such a difficult name to remember correctly.

Melaquin cleared his throat and began, “Word has come from House Caron at Nightsong. They too have seen an influx of travelers turned away from the Prince’s Pass…” 

Daeron sat in silence, half-listening as the council continued around him.

The old maester spoke of another round of stranded travelers gathering near Summertown, warning that they would soon spill into the neighboring holdfasts. He went on about the Marcher Lords and to the establishment of escorted trade routes through both the Stormlands and the Reach, for Oldtown and Lannisport had already been sorely stricken. Then his father spoke of the household, decreeing that Wylla would take over for Lorcan while Molly assisted with managing the servants, before he droned on about the securing of Summerhall and the deeds that must be accomplished.

Guards. Supplies. Arms. Words. Words. And more words. Daeron let it all wash over him the way he let a septon’s unwanted sermons wash over him. He was far too much of a lost cause, anyway, and would retain very little of it.

Daeron turned and caught the eye of a passing serving boy, giving a sharp tilt of his head. The lad knew exactly what was required.

A few moments later, the lad returned.

As he brushed past Daeron's seat, a quiet exchange was made under the shadow of the table — a cool filled wineskin for a silver stag.

He was contemplating how to bring the stopper to his lips without his father's eye catching him, when a sudden remark from Ser Jason drew his full attention.

"The scouts have been sent to Summertown," the captain said. "To verify the reports from the guards who brought back Lorcan, and to get a measure of whether the town is still in chaos. They should return before evenfall."

I wonder if Gunter would return with them. Daeron turned his head toward the window; it would not be long until evenfall.

“I do pray,” Ser Jason drawled, leaning an elbow on the table to rest his chin in his hand. “They returned unbitten.”

The word sent a low, frightened murmur to ripple through the hall.

Unbitten? Daeron glanced at Berbert. Did I miss something? 

Berbert looked as puzzled as he was. Then the maester raised his hand. 

Maekar exhaled once, and said, without humor, "And to what purpose is your hand up, Maester Berbert? Put it down and deliver your counsel.”

Daeron had to bite back a laugh.

Berbert lowered his hand quickly. “If we are to secure Summerhall… Perhaps we should make the castle’s rookery the primary one for the time being. That would mean retrieving the ravens from town.”

Melaquin nodded immediately. “I was about to suggest the same, lad. We may not be able to bring them all, but we must prioritize those needed for the Red Keep and the Citadel. Still… we should try to gather most of them.”

Maekar considered the suggestion for a moment, then gave a curt nod. “Once the scouts return with their report, Ser Jason will assign escorts for Maester Berbert to Summertown.”

“They will need a wagon and extra cages for the ravens.” Melaquin added. 

Daeron eyed Berbert with sudden, genuine admiration. 

No wonder he’s a maester. 

The man had just handed them the perfect excuse — an official, Maekar-approved reason to return to Summertown. They could retrieve Gunter and Selyra without Maekar suspecting a thing. 

Two birds, one stone.

Or was it two stones, one bird? 

Either way, he was impressed.

Maekar then dismissed everyone except for Daeron and Melaquin.

When the chamber had cleared and the door was barred, Maekar turned to face the maester. “What word do you have of my father?”

Melaquin stepped forward. “The Grand Maester reports that King Daeron’s condition is improving. His fever has broken, though the cough remains persistent.”

Both Maekar and Daeron exhaled in visible relief.

“But,” Melaquin continued, voice growing heavier, “the Hand has died. And…I’m dreadfully sorry to say…Prince Valarr as well.” He offered quiet condolences.

Daeron felt his blood turn cold. Maekar simply looked down at the table.

“And of Lady Jena and Matarys?” Maekar asked.

Melaquin’s hands trembled slightly as he steadied his breath. “They are… missing.”

Maekar’s voice dropped dangerously. “How the fuck do you lose the next in line for the Iron Throne?”

Melaquin handed him the letter. “It is from Lord Bloodraven.”

Maekar read it slowly. His expression grew increasingly disturbed.

“What does it say, Father?” Daeron asked.

Maekar studied the parchment in tense silence, his jaw working tightly. When he finally looked up, his voice was flat.

"Aerys has caught a fever. No cough as of yet." A pause. "Your sisters are in the Maidenvault with Lady Shiera. Hale and safe. Both of them."

He looked down at the parchment, as though he could not believe the words scratched across it.

“There were multiple accounts of Lady Jena spotted in Flea Bottom. Seeking a healer or some fucking woodwitch. This was days before Valarr died.” His voice had gone flat. “Brought in strange medicines, ointments, or potions… She was desperate.” 

He set the letter down.

"Then Lady Jena, Matarys and Valarr were heard arguing in his chambers. Loud enough that guards had to step in. His fever worsened and Valarr died hours later." A beat. "After the funeral pyre, Lady Jena and Matarys were not seen again. The Kingsguard are currently on the hunt."

He said nothing further.

Daeron didn’t know what to do with any of that information.

A sharp knock came, and Ser Jason stepped into the hall. “Your Grace, the scouts have returned.”

Without a word, his father stood up and stalked out of the hall.