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My sweet… my sweet boy…
Patter patter patter. Rain spills through a disheveled room swollen with rotted timbers and mould. A boy sits with his back against the wall watching the whirl of dark clouds in the sky through a jagged and broken ceiling. The soft breaths of a girl drown beneath that noise. Patter patter patter. The wind is their unwelcome companion, cold and harsh as it bashes their thin woollen blankets. Hunger was the enemy of sleep tonight. There are so few hours in the day and for each one he hungers. Warm meals come as often as miracles, and tonight there was only memory to feast upon.
Come… closer, Viserys…
One memory is persistent. Like the wind that gnaws at his goosebumped skin. Pressing his eyes into his arms never alleviates the pain but he does it anyway. A storm rages on not unlike that night. Churning at the waters and churning at the sky with its threat to beat the black walls of Dragonstone into rubble. The courtyard puddles had reached his ankles with some rooms up to his knees. The ships in the distance had looked like far away lanterns. Some would sink into the sea or crash into the cliffs as easily as his toys. But the largest and fiercest had broken through, and for the nights that followed, the boy had wondered why the storm lord had gone so far to summon the storm gods.
Morning breaks the weather as sunlight finds his shivering sleepless self.
“Viserys?”
The girl watches him gather his few belongings. Half her hair is clumped into a single strand by her lips as she holds tight to a ball of red yarn.
“Get up. Up. You’ve slept enough.” He drags her before she can respond into the other room. Smaller and shadowed. A closet, maybe. A hole is slashed into the back end like a wound in the wall, dry with space enough to hide. “You know what to do. I will be back by nightfall. Don’t leave.”
“I won’t,” she mumbles.
He squeezes her wrist until she yelps. The redness on her skin bruises to purple to help her remember and the burlap sack in her hands is tied at the tips. He traces its outline through the fabric but does not dare gaze at it. There is memory hiding somewhere inside the metal.
Listen to me, my sweet… listen…
Today hunger was the enemy to be slain. The rundown set of old homes sits in the slums of the city where sewage seeps into cobblestone streets before cobblestone gives way to dirt and mud. His journey begins here in the alleys where lichyards stack upon one another until they form mountains to be traversed. A sun-kissed city sits in the distance gleaming. Through and under every street, he holds tight into the pouch filled with far too few bronze coins until the market districts reveal themselves in splendour. Barrels of ripe figs and peaches and sellers wearing wine shelves and the smell of spice so pungent it colours the air red and gold and bronze.
He breathes it in and sighs. The taste of a blood orange is sweet, but a belly filled with stew not nearly half as delicious is sweeter. He needs food that will last. The last true meal had been a bush chicken his sister caught and thought to raise for a week in secret. It had been an eggless gangly creature and fed them for a handful suppers. The only cost was a river of her tears.
A hand grips his shoulder. “What a skinny thing you are. Hungry?”
The boy slips away quickly. Offers and knives go well together and the usurpers’ especially would come when he least expected. Right here amongst the tide of people was as good as place any back alley. He slips away as if his nature was of a thief and not a king into a mess of stalls where no one looks too closely at the runt of a boy with a thief’s hands and a king’s eyes. Hard breads two eggs and a fistful berries find their way into his pouch while half a dozen fish roasted black and as thick as his finger swim into his belly. He pockets the bones as the seaside salt fills his nostrils and his eyes search the harbour. Across a causeway sits a tower of red with a brazier burning. Somewhere past a fleet of ships and slurry of temples each stranger than the next was the Archon and his hoard of wealth. One day, he thinks. One day.
Something inside the boy burns waiting to wake. The thought of gold. Or maybe the ships out there sailing for one purpose. The last dragon.
The fire makes him courageous. Brazen enough to snag a blood orange underneath the nose of the huckster only a few feet away and scramble past his guards with the flutter of a smile at his lips. As he runs and runs through a city with dusk on his heels the thought of storms from yesterday and years past becomes less than memory. The pain falls away as the wind at his face has him dream of soaring above. Even as he returns to that knot of mudchoked sagging houses where the smell is worse than sight, the feeling burns still.
The timbers groan like an old man as he climbs into the half-eaten hovel. “Sister,” he calls out, preparing a clean space to eat. She does not come and his heart falls. For all her faults, she is never tardy. Step by step he approaches the wound in the closet wall with a breathless trepidation. Blackness stares out. His hand reaches in and finds… no one.
Your sister… protect her, my sweet…
Nothing and no one. Only an empty space save a single red thread lying there like a worm. When he tugs on it, he hears her.
Her voice is muffled and somehow far away. “Viserys? Is that you?”
“Dany!”
The girl inside the walls scuttles like a creature giggling despite the grime on her face and beneath her fingernails. When she rolls out the hole smiling wide, a tangle of red thread is woven through her matted hair all the way down to her ankles. Upon her head sits a crown with rubies shining like a ring of red stars. “It’s like a maze in there,” she says. “All the houses are connected and when you left I fell and got lost. But I made sure I had this.” The ends of the thread sit in her palm like a puddle of blood. “So I could find my way, and so you could find me.“
Across her face is memory. Frail fingers soft brush his jaw and pinch the pink of his cheek. Frail fingers weak fall for the last time as blood soaks a bed and then the storm-flooded floors.
We must go, my prince… She is gone…
The boy snatches the crown from her head. It catches strands of her silvery blonde hair and leaves her teary eyed. The pain of even holding it is excruciating but he is ever gentle as he hides it away. No words of chastisement come and as memory persists he peers back at the ghost of a woman written into that frail girlish face. A part of him reaches out to touch her as another part looks away, burned.
“Viserys? Is something wrong?”
He tosses her the blood orange and walks away.