Chapter Text
Vāedar
Vāedar spent more than three moons with Brandon and the Singers, and during that time, Oak taught him the two Songs in a long-forgotten tongue of the ancient Empire. The Song of Healing and the Song of Growth. Quenelīrë and Tuialīrë, in Dawn Tongue
The lessons happened in a side chamber off the third branching, well away from the main cave where Brandon was.
Learning the words and their meanings was not difficult. With his memory and much better working mind, during the day he knew them by heart, knowing how to emphasize words or how to pronounce them.
But it was the singing itself that was the challenge.
Oak would sing a line, sitting cross-legged on the packed earth with his hands in his lap. It came out of that small brown throat like water going over stone.
Then Vāedar would sing it next.
It came out flat and dead and wrong in a way he could hear perfectly well, and he couldn't fix it, no matter how many times he tried. Oak never corrected him but simply waited and sang it again and again, and this went on for two moons.
He became convinced, in the end, that the vocal cords of men were not made to produce such sounds, and that only thanks to his transformation in Other was he capable of it at all.
He couldn't put it into words, but Songs of Earth sounded more like the sounds of nature itself, of the world itself, blended together, than simply singing.
They sounded not like words and a melody plucked from a human throat, but like the sound of flowing water, birdsong, the whistle of the wind, and the crackle of a fire, and many more, all blended into a harmonious symphony of sounds.
The night he finally got those notes right, he felt a peace so otherworldly and blissful it was difficult to fathom. He felt as if he were resonating with nature itself, as if the surrounding cave walls were responding to his song in their own way, joining in.
Oak smiled broadly, his amber-like eyes sparkling with unmistakable joy and pride.
"Yes. That's exactly it. You understand. The melody comes not from your throat, but from within, from your very essence, connected to the world by unbreakable threads."
At these words, Vaedar looked at the old Singer with a slight irritation. "Master Oak. Couldn't you have told me that from the very beginning?"
The little creature only laughed, shaking his head. "It's not something you can understand from words, child… You must discover and understand it for yourself. That's why, among the more than a hundred of my kin living here, only four besides me have been able to learn these Songs."
Vaedar simply nodded with a sigh and returned to trying to repeat the feat.
Compared to learning the songs, warging came to him easy. Remarkably easy.
Not only with Geri and Freki, but with other animals as well.
Hares, deer, and various types of birds. Even some insects, though that was much more complicated. Brandon had him train with every possible creature within reach.
And since Vaedar, as it turned out, didn't need sleep, Brandon would force him to take control of the bats in the caves, one by one, all night long, until his mind was completely sluggish and exhausted.
Then he would have to rest, though it still wasn't sleep, more like sitting or lying down for one to three hours in relaxation and silence.
Brandon passed him considerable knowledge on the subject and a great many tricks that made holding an animal easier, especially where it came to more than one at a time.
But as the old greenseer said more than one time, Vāedar needed practice. Everything demanded training and experience, and warging was no different.
Brandon tried to teach him greensight as well, maintaining that he ought to have the ability, but it went badly. He had to learn all of it himself.
Brandon could not get into his mind to guide him properly.
They tried it a few times. Each attempt went the same way, with the old man going quiet and his one clear eye losing its focus and then coming back into himself far too quickly.
He said that an impenetrable darkness shielded him, and behind that was a cold capable of freezing the mind itself. He had put all his will against it once and drawn back, and after the fourth failure he stopped trying altogether.
So Vāedar put it aside for later and concentrated on perfecting his warging and on learning Earthsinging.
Geri and Freki accompanied him as often as they left the caves and went off hunting.
Both had grown considerably, far faster than Ghost, and they already came up to his waist, where he himself was a good deal taller now, standing six feet and seven inches.
Ghost, fully grown, reached his chest, but that had taken him three years. He had a feeling that Geri and Freki could have grown even larger. Brandon claimed they fed off his magic, which was now incredibly powerful and unpredictable.
These two put on reach and weight every time Vāedar looked away from them. They brought back an elk between them in the tenth week. They had dragged the whole carcass a mile and a half through snow, and they were plainly waiting to be told how impressive that was.
In their behavior, however, they were still overgrown pups with fiery tempers, unlike the always calm Ghost.
Freki went at anything that was living and had lost a strip of his ear to a badger he should honestly have left alone. Geri was steadier, but only by comparison. He had lately learned to steal meat from the children by sitting in front of them and looking mournful until they gave in.
He honestly loved that about them. They brought a smile to his face every time, reminding him that he was still part human, that he had feelings.
He also tried to understand his own body better, how it reacted to cold, how quickly it got tired, and what it could endure or how it behaved towards fire.
He expected that fire might injure him, even though he saw with his own eyes how the Others could simply ignore it.
So, kneeling beside Leaf’s cooking fire one evening, he put his hand into the flames and held it there while he counted to fifty.
Leaf watched him do it with obvious anxiety and then as interested as he was.
Just as with the Others, ordinary fire did not work on him. The flame moved around his fingers and would not take them. And when he drew the hand back, it was not even warm.
‘Or perhaps it is connected to my blood. To my father's family.’
He could not answer that for now.
He spent a great deal of time talking with the Children as well, trying to learn something more about their people.
They were patient about it, and the fact that he talked to them in Old Tongue, or as they called it, True Tongue, made him more likable among them. They often came, sat on the ground, and observed whatever he was doing.
What were they seeing when they looked at him? He didn't know, but he thought he was simply a curiosity to them, something different from the constant monotony that filled these caves.
He tried to ask them as many questions as possible, but just like the Songs they had once known, time had blurred their memories about their past.
He had not expected that. A beings who lives for a hundred years ought to carry an unbroken memory, ought it not? Instead, many thousand years fit inside a handful of stories, basic information about their enemy, and two Songs.
His conversations with Brandon brought him far more.
The old man had watched the world for a few decades, and the spirit of Tree-Eyed Crow had inhabited his body for millennia and had vast knowledge.
*******
Vāedar sat on the cold stone in front of the weirwood throne most evenings and asked, and Brandon answered.
Which is how he learned that Brandon turned out to be none other than Brandon Snow, brother of Torrhen Stark, the Last of the Kings of Winter, the King Who Knelt to Aegon the Conqueror. It was something Brandon could not come to terms with, and so he left the North to end up at last as a vessel for the power of the Three-Eyed Crow.
Every Stark knew this story, highborn and bastard alike. Brandon had offered to his brother to put all three dragons down in their sleep with arrows from the branches of the weirwood tree.
Torrhen would not have it. He didn't dare risk his whole kingdom on this gamble, so he knelt and swore an oath to Aegon. His bastard brother then went north and never came back.
The roots holding old man shoulder creaked as he shifted.
“I was a proud fool then and did not see what I see now. My brother was wise, and that moment brought us to this place, where I have before me the shatterpoint of both our lines.” Brandon admitted it with a sigh, and the weariness in his voice could be felt.
“So you know?” Vāedar asked, having expected it.
“About your origins? Aye.” The man nodded. “That it has not happened yet does not mean I cannot see it. Of course it is one of the versions of the future, one that now will most likely never take place… Your presence in these times will change the world so drastically that the future is impossible to predict. At the moment of your arrival, every branch in time that existed became another thousand, and these became another thousand and another."
“Do you think it was someone’s deliberate action? Did someone send me here?”
Brandon furrowed his brows and frowned in thought, then at once shook his head awkwardly, as far as a body half grown into a tree allowed him to.
“I do not think so. I expect it was a chance. The breaking of the ritual before its completion, by your brave direwolf, is possible; this affected time and space themselves, creating a rift or door through which you fell here.” He paused. “It is truly hard for me to answer that question. The only other option I take into account, considering who was trying to gain control over you, is...”
“Maiden-Made-From-Light,” Vāedar put in, nodding his head slightly. “I have thought about that too. She is the opposite of the Lion of Night according to the eastern myths, and besides, I feel a flame burning in me that seems to balance the cold and the darkness existing in me.”
“I am able to shed very little light on that subject for you,” Brandon admitted. “My powers do indeed allow me to reach across time and space, but they are limited to the lands where the underground network of weirwood tree roots extends. Even there where the trees were cut down long ago, the spilled blood still feeds the roots.”
Vāedar looked at him, surprised. This was completely new information to him.
“So then, considering I have never heard of weirwood trees growing outside Westeros, I take it you cannot reach beyond this continent?”
“Only one of those statements is true,” the greenseer replied mysteriously. "Indeed, I cannot reach the other continents, but weirwood trees do grow outside Westeros. Or at least something similar to them. They are called Singing Trees, which occur in the vast forests east of the city of Qohor.”
Saying this, Brandon looked at him meaningfully, as though what he had said ought to tell Vāedar something.
'Singing Trees? Singers? Song of the Earth? Were his thoughts going in the right direction? Is this what the old man wanted to lead him to?'
“Do you mean to tell me that they have something in common with the Children and with the Song of the Earth?” he asked, at which the old greenseer smiled meaningfully.
“Ifequevron. Meaning "wood walkers" in the Dothraki tongue. A small forest people, secretive and magical, who once inhabited those woods. Probably related to Leaf, Oak, and the rest of the Children in the same way that the First Men were related to the Andals or the Valyrians. Two branches of the same race. Perhaps they will have the answers we are looking for.”
For Vāedar, all of this was a complete novelty, and it made him realize how little he knew about the world he inhabits.
That in truth his knowledge was mainly limited to the northern part of Westeros. Qohor had heard the name perhaps few times, but always in the context of their famous blacksmiths and armorers. The world was really much, much larger than that and full of hidden secrets.
“If they may have some answers, then I will go beyond the Narrow Sea. But not yet,” he said after a moment. “There are a few places in Westeros that I want to visit first and look for answers there, and a person I want to speak with.”
“Aye.” Brandon nodded his head with understanding. “The places we spoke about, I also think it would be better to visit them first. Especially Oldtown and the Isle of Faces, though that second place is hidden even from my sight, and I do not know what may be waiting for you there.”
Yes. He'd heard it before. And he intended to heed the warning. Vāedar knew that within a few days it would be time for him to set out on the road.
He had learned what he could. The rest remained a matter of practice and of gaining greater knowledge about the Song of the Earth, and neither of those was waiting for him in this place.
********
He was spending the time training his warging, sitting in the minds of both his direwolves at once, when his sharpened instincts caught movement near his body.
His sapphire eyes, like two shards of ice, fixed on Oak. His teacher in Earthsinging, and the oldest living child of the forest.
As Leaf maintained, Oak had almost eight hundred human years behind him and was drawing near his end.
And it showed. Where the rest of the Singers were lithe and full of energy and quick, he was slow and calm, with skin resembling the bark of an old oak. It had gone grey at the knuckles and along the forearms, split into small hard plates.
Hence the name Vāedar had given him. Because translated out of the Old Tongue, his true name would run roughly like this: Singing the Song of the Streams and Rivers, Carving Corridors and Paths in the Flesh of the Earth. Decidedly too long to be saying constantly.
“Come, Singer of Ice and Fire. Brandon asks for your presence,” Oak said to him in that calm voice of his, which resembled the sound of a river running in its current.
Vāedar followed him to the main cavern, where Brandon remained always forever intertwined with the weirwood tree.
Several of the Singers were present there too, standing well back from the roots in the way they always did.
On Leaf’s hands rested two young ravens, a few months old perhaps, plainly not yet grown birds. Their feathers had not finished coming in along the shoulders.
Vāedar looked at them, then at Leaf and Brandon. “What is this?”
“This is our gift for you,” Brandon said, indicating the birds with his right hand, the one that had not grown into the tree. “From the flock that I use. Young ones, which I have not yet warged into. They may prove to be an invaluable help to you. Believe me. I know something about that.”
Leaf held the birds out towards him, at which Vāedar put his own hands out towards her. After a moment’s hesitation, the ravens hopped across onto them, climbing higher, until they settled on his shoulders.
Their claws closed on him hard enough to hurt a normal man but not him.
At the same time he reached out to them with his mind, initiating the bond between them. Weak for now, set against his bond with Geri and Freki or in the past with Ghost, but this was only the beginning.
Looking at Brandon and the children, he smiled, and nodding his head in gratitude, he said, “Thank you. They may indeed prove to be an invaluable help.”
**********
King’s Landing, 87 AC
Rhaenys Targaryen
Rhaenys took a long flight on Meleys over Blackwater Bay, turning back only when she had come within a few miles of the Gullet.
The turn was the best part of it. She leaned right and forward, and the Red Queen went over onto one wing, and the water stood up on her right hand like a wall. Then they were pointed at the coast again and climbing, and her stomach caught up a heartbeat after the rest of her did.
Bonding with Meleys was the best thing that had happened to her in her life, and flying on her was the most wonderful experience. Only on the back of her dragon did she feel truly free and happy.
In the moment when she looked at the world from above and felt Meleys beneath her, hot as a heated furnace, she felt truly powerful. Able to decide her own fate.
She dreamed at nights of unknown lands in the east and of the boundless ocean in the west. Of the ruins of old Valyria. Of unexplored Sothoryos, covered over with impassable jungle. Of the endless ocean of grass that is the Dothraki Sea, and of Asshai, hidden among shadows.
With bated breath she always listened to the tales that Ser Corlys brought to court, who had seen those wonders with his own eyes. He came back every few years with a hold full of things nobody in Westeros even had a name for.
But he told all of it flatly, as though giving somebody the road to Duskendale. So she had to pull the tongues of the sailors accompanying him to find out more.
She felt envy that she could not see all of it, and yet she had a dragon, while Ser Corlys had only his ships. She would reach those places considerably faster.
But she was aware that the moment she so much as tried it, her father on Caraxes would be right behind her, and her mother would give her something to remember. So, all she had left were flights like this one. Within the Crownlands and the coast. Two hours, three at the most, and only in fair weather.
And even that had its end when she flew down to the ground and became once more the only daughter of the heir to the Iron Throne and potentially the second in line.
However, the certainty of her being second in line was questionable.
Few lords looked favorably upon a woman on the Iron Throne, frankly, upon any throne at all. Her grandfather, moreover, seemed to be of a similar opinion.
Additionally, at this moment, the situation did not concern her much.
Her grandfather likely had at least a decade of reign ahead of him, followed by another two decades for her father. What she desired was the chance to decide about herself. Because in the end, what was the sense of possessing a fire-breathing dragon when, within a few years, they would marry her off to whoever her grandfather judged suitable anyway? The bay stretched out beneath them, appearing grey, flat, and enormous.
Not wanting to think about it any longer, she gave herself over to the pure joy that flying brought her.
The bay ran under them, grey and flat and enormous. Dozens of ships sailed through the bay, and from so high, they were tiny as ants.
Then she flew much lower. A fishing boat turned its whole crew’s faces up as the shadow went over. Rhaenys leaned out to watch them and laughed into the wind, where nobody at all could hear her.
When she returned, however, and came out of the Dragon Pit, an unpleasant surprise was waiting for her in front of the entrance.
She had come up out of the dark of the pit with her hair full of ash and her hands still shaking. She walked past the dragonkeepers, who held whips and iron chains, out from under the arch and into the daylight. Four paces. That was as far as she got before she saw her.
Her mother was clearly not in a good mood.
At that moment Rhaenys remembered that she might have promised her help in sewing a cloak for her father for his approaching name day.
She winced inwardly at the oversight. She had indeed prolonged the flight on Meleys more than necessary.
Hurriedly she went up to her mother, lowering her head apologetically.
“Mother, forgive me. I clean forgot,” she apologized.
Then she looked into her mother’s blue eyes, which looked as though they were filled with a storm.
Jocelyn Baratheon did not raise her voice. She had never needed to.
Though tall for her age, Rhaenys still had to tilt her head upwards, because her mother belonged among truly tall women, overtopping most of the men at court. That was the famous Baratheon blood, and it appeared that Rhaenys had inherited not only her mother’s raven black hair but also her height. Her father, besides, did not belong among the short either.
Considering that Jocelyn Baratheon could not be angry for long with her only daughter, she merely sighed lightly and said, “Never mind. But do not think that you are forgiven, young lady. You are forbidden to fly for the rest of the week... Now come. The carriage is waiting for us.”
‘But it was only the second day of the week. That meant five days without flying.
These thoughts must have shown on her face, because Ser Robin Shaw, the member of the Kingsguard attending her mother, threw a smirk in her direction. Her mother now had merry sparks in her eyes as well, which was worse than the storm in them earlier.
“Do not sulk, Rhaenys. You must learn responsibility. As a future queen...” her mother said, but Rhaenys, hearing the advice, only snorted lightly.
“As if that were possible. The lords will not accept me. Grandfather will not either,” she answered in a slightly wounded voice, at which she was angry with herself.
Her mother plainly pressed her lips together, as if she wanted to say something, but eventually she let it go and set off towards the carriage waiting some thirty paces further on.
She too knew that Rhaenys was right.
When they had settled inside, escorted by Ser Robyn and twelve members of the guard, her mother, sitting opposite, took her hand into her own, saying comfortingly, “Many years will pass before the matter of the succession returns. The king is healthy, and your father is in the strength of his years and has many years of ruling ahead of him. We both know that you are the apple of his eye, and I cannot imagine him not naming you the official heir to the throne when the time comes.”
Rhaenys smiled weakly, feeling somewhat better. Her mother was right.
However, even if it came to that, her position would not be as strong as she wanted. Yes, she had Meleys, but she-dragon was neither the largest of their dragons nor the most seasoned in battle. Vhaegar, Vermithor, or Caraxes were more dangerous.
For her rule to be stable and for her to control anything at all, she needed something more. A good match.
No, not a good one, but potentially the best, one that would give her additional assets.
The rest of the journey to the Red Keep passed with her listening to her mother, who spoke about how the king and the queen still had not reconciled, despite the fact that both her father and uncle had tried to reconcile them.
In Rhaenys’s view it did indeed look bad, and it affected the image of the Royal Family in the eyes of the lords, especially since her grandfather was to set out within a few days on a progress through the Westerlands to remind by his presence whom the lords serve and to whom they owe decades of peace.
Looking out through the window, she noticed new works being carried on by hundreds of laborers along the road.
Men stood in the trench to their shoulders. More stood on the spoil heaps. The line of them went back further than she could see from a moving carriage.
According to her father’s words, the plan was another idea of Septon Barth’s, so that the sewage and the filth from the main street would drain into his famous sewers. The purpose of this system was to further eliminate the unpleasant smell of the city.
Rhaenys wrinkled her nose at that smell and breathed through her mouth for the rest of the hill.
She could not imagine how the smallfolk were able to live like that from day to day, and supposedly, before the building of the sewers by Barth, it had been considerably worse here.
That she decidedly could not imagine.
In general, despite the uncertainty and the feeling of a lack of freedom, she could only be glad that she had not been born as a smallfolk. Even being an ordinary lady without her dragon would limit her freedom still further.
She knew that as a Dragonrider she would have more to say in her marriage. Unless her husband wanted to discuss it with Meleys.