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The looking glass was fair quality and Daeron’s hand looked promisingly steady in its smooth reflection, poised as it was with straight blade aloft, dripping with water from the nearby basin, inches from Egg’s scalp.
“Do it before you lose your nerve!” Egg encouraged, trying to balance his desire to inspire his brother’s confidence with the mandatory stillness of his head.
Daeron’s eyes were pinched, hovering right above Egg’s silver little head in the mirror, that harsh set to his concentrated features put in glaring relief by the candles as he studied the younger’s locks. “I’m only getting the lay of it…your skull.” He clarified. “Wouldn’t want me to flay you open, would you?”
“No,” Egg agreed, “but this was your idea, so see it through.”
“Stop moving.”
“Daeron, do it!”
“Should I trim you first, I wonder.” Daeron was not asking him, not really, he was still contemplating the method of ridding Aegon from his house’s signature glory and his own bane of existence.
“How should I know? It was your idea.”
Egg knew that if Daeron kept contemplating his skull, he would in time contemplate their plan, and in short time after that become overwhelmed by it, then proceed to fail further and further in his capacity to carry it through. It wasn’t the failure of a shearing that Egg feared, it was failure of their entire ambition to make it to Oldtown in time, and there catch ship to Lys before their father found them late for the tourney. Or likelier yet, before Daeron’s hands and head became unsteady once more.
“Oh fuck it.” his brother groused and Egg both heard and felt a fortifying breath be taken behind him, and then there was the scrape of steel against skin.
Wet. Tug. Sluice. Snip. Shear.
These were sensations and dreads that Egg had braced for many times before, with Aerion hovering above him in the empty darkness, fear paralyzing him and his heartbeat resounding in his toes, throat crushed in terror, cold steel and the readiness of a scrape, a snip, tug, wet, always awaiting agony.
Egg didn’t realize he had his eyes tightly screwed shut until he felt the tickle of falling hair against his eyelids. No pain came.
This was Daeron. He wouldn’t hurt him.
He would take Egg to Essos, they would have many great adventures there, they would be free and happy. In Essos Egg could learn the use of arms and perhaps someone in one of the many great temples there would be able to cure Daeron of his dreams and the fevers that followed them.
“Stop shaking your head, I’ll slice you.”
“It tickles.”
“You’ll make a shit squire if you haven’t any more fortitude than that.” Daeron warned.
“Is it working?”
“In a way.” His brother muttered lowly, not sounding pleased with his craft.
“What’s wrong with it?” Egg inquired, the fallen hair sat heavy on his lashes and he dare not open them and risk an eyeful.
“Well, it’s-“ the scraping sensation had made progress, its journey from left ear to center scalp punctuated by the jarring clack and clang of the blade against the porcelain basin, fresh drips and a smoother shave following each time. “-it does you no favors. And you don’t look much less remarkable than with that silver mange. People are going to think you’re a little warlock. We should get you berries to stain your lips and complete the look.”
Far from putting him off, this notion pleased Egg immensely. The idea of being mistaken for a dreaded sorcerer was exactly the sort of notoriety and respect he longed for, if not out of admiration for feats in arms, he could be revered for arts and spells. “Yes, shade of the evening!!” he cried out, “They will think I see visions and can curse their bloodlines.”
“Mmm, yes.” Daeron humored him, “I’ll introduce you as my little pet necromancer. I’ll tell them you’re over a thousand years old, but the spells shortened your height and the babies you have consumed gave your flesh its supple childishness.”
Egg wrinkled his nose in distaste, feeling the prickle of coarse cut hair move up his nostrils as a result, but he kept still, not wanting to incur another jab at his fortitude or to break the happy harmony that came down so very rarely, and gave him his eldest brother in the form of a benign and humoring man. “And you can tell them that your insights are from me,” Egg went on unabated in his zeal for their new lives, “and i will make a production of it, looking into braziers and mirrors to tell them dreams you had last night, and they will think us the most remarkable of men.”
The blade stopped, not sudden but a nerveless sort of slacking off, and even with his eyes closed, Egg knew that somehow in his desire to continue the delicate moment, he had snapped its fragile thread. He shook the hair from his face and wiped his eyes before turning to look behind him and finding Daeron as he expected, near yet afar off, fear and exhaustion washing out the pale lavender eyes until they were only hollow, unfocused orbs, his gaze somewhere to the side of the mirror but only he knew where in spirit.
Egg had to summon up great courage to call to him, his heart heavy with sorrow and the burden of keeping his brother in the realm of ships and travel plans until they were safe away from their family. “Daeron.” He said to him, and his brother came back to him slowly, the same way he went, with focus and color returning to his reviving gaze, and with that fragile grimace of a smile he saved for Egg alone.
“I do not think this will work.” he said hoarsely.
“Why ever not?” Egg countered and spun back round in his chair to inspect Daeron’s work. It was hideous, clumpy, and half undone, but it was refreshingly bizarre, almost unrecognizable, totally thrilling. He did indeed look like an unbaked warlock. And that thrilled him. “Finish it and it will be well!”
“It will grow back in days.” Daeron seemed to realize only now; they had schemed this daring plan quite late in the night, fueled by Egg’s rabid appeals for Daeron to stay away from the bottle and Daeron’s intense objections about his prospects at the tourney. When the elder said he had no choice but the bottle or else go to hell, then Egg suggested Essos instead. They had then made plans, as only two privileged, morbidly unhappy, and very tired sons of a king’s fourth son ever could.
Poorly. Rashly. Unthought out. “I’ve got money.” Daeron had said by the time of the moon’s waning, “But your fucking hair will give us away.”
Now, Egg was half bald and Daeron was beginning to shake. “Have a sip to fortify yourself, only a sip fmind, and finish up.” he strategized, and Daeron let the blade clatter into the basin in search of the flagon of undrunk wine beside the bed.
“You’ve become damned imperious, you know that?” Daeron grumbled without heat between swallows. He drank more than a sip, but Egg had a brittle confidence that he would not abandon him with a half shorn head.
“Someone has to keep things on track.” Egg pointed out. “And we must leave before dawn, else our retinue will be alert. So come!”
“It’s not going to work.” Daeron reiterated but he returned to the mirror nonetheless, and picked up the blade with hands slightly steadied.
“Stop being so pessimistic, brother.” Aegon commanded.
“Ah you sound so like our mother.” Daeron sighed out, false reminiscence tinging his tone, “She always said that, said it especially when I told her I had seen how she was to die…before she went and died.”
They finished the shearing in silence.
“It is unconvincing.” Even Egg’s ebullience at the prospect of their adventure failed him at the sight of the finished project. He was not bald, merely tufted and strange and patchy. And Daeron was right, it would grow back.
“I told you.”
“Have you dreamed of this, has ought warned you of an ill omen?” Egg snapped back, patience worn thin under burden of being the sole motivating influence for a brotherly jaunt to Essos.
Daeron gave him a very pointed, strongly familiar look. Egg was never to ask after his dreams. Egg asked anyway, and often.
“You will never tell me their meanings, I know, but you needn’t be specific.” Egg appealed, “Only tell me if you dreamed, say- a lamb cart rolling over you, nay worse me, a mile down yonder road we mean to take?”
“I am steady enough to shave your head because I have not had a dream since dawn before last.” he pointed out, “No sheep carts, nothing. Only, only what it always is. And I know not when it will come.”
“Then we must go on to Essos, and find those who can decipher it,” Egg said, “and mayhaps it will be that Aemond has made some discovery in his studies, they have tomes of dragon histories in the citadel! And mayhap he has found that there are Dragons trapped in the Hightower’s black stone, and needs but our blood added to his to awaken them—“
“Aegon.” Daeron stilled him, not unkindly, an apologetic hand to his shoulder and a heartbreakingly uninspired expression on his face, “Enough, dawn comes, and we are not fit players for the scope of your dreams. Perhaps there will be a day when you will find someone to see it through, but not me. It was a nice fiction. I am going down, now, to ask our landlady for her best port to take on the road, and then our escort will doubtless be hassling us onward. If you want sleep, get to it. I won’t abide your whining later.”
It was shattering, to say the least, to have come so far in ambition and plan, to have tasted some unity of purpose and felt the tantalizing breath of freedom, in thought if not fully in action— only for Daeron to do what Daeron always did: fall flat on his pretty face in abject uselessness to see it through. It was too predictable and still, Egg had hoped, he dared to hope and this time his desire had been doubled by how great his terror was of returning to the society of his family, to that of Aerion.
It had been his appeals regarding the latter that had moved Daeron to attempt this little rebellion in the first place. Egg did not suppose it would carry its power again, having once been used to sway him, it would now have worn out its weight in compassion.
So, Egg chose instead a tactic most familial, natural even, more so than begging. “And how will you explain my head to father?” he asked Daeron’s departing form with guiltless curiosity.
His brother’s shoulder predictably thudded into the doorframe. Daeron’s face was stormy when he turned back, eyes growing wild and his finger pointed viciously, “We will think of something, but what we won’t do is tell him what foolery we thought of here. You will not. You will not dare. Aegon!”
“He will suspect it anyway! I am bald!”
“You are not bald you’re— ugly.”
“Uglifiied. By you!”
“Not a word, is that a word? It’s not a word.”
“I will tell him the worst of it, brother. And he will think even less of us for being cravens as well as fools.”
“This isn’t fucking happening.” Daeron whimpered in abject misery, hands pressed to red rimmed eyes.
“You’ve heard what he said last banquet,” Egg reminded, “he said if you did not make a change he would—“
“—see me dead. Yes. Fuck.”
Egg viewed his bother’s mounting distress with heartfelt sympathy, but he was too shrewd not to press the point while it was sore, “And I, perhaps alone among your kin, do not wish you dead-“
“-the fuck?”
“-and so we must see this through.”
“Seven take me, there is only ever new forms of torture sent to me.”
“Aerion wants me gelded, Aemond is useless, and father wants you dead rather than see you compared to Valarr one more time. Do you think the tourney will mend this perspective?”
“We have already discussed this.” His brother begged, exhausted.
“We have.” Egg agreed with exasperated candor, “Yet here we waste the last hour of darkness discussing it again.”
“Fuck, right- alright.” he conceded. “We will go. Your hair—“
“It will hide under a cloak until you can find a better method.”
“What better method?”
“I don’t know, that’s for you to know.” Egg sighed, “I cannot possibly do everything myself.”
“Yes, but how am I to know that?” Daeron urged, but Egg was pleased to see him gathering up his cloak and making those various preparation that befit a man intending to travel.
“Have you not learned how your prostitutes keep themselves so hairless?” Egg suggested pleasantly as he rolled what he considered necessities into a small bedroll made of a second cloak, finer than the one he planned to don for their escape.
“Firstly, they are not mine, they’re not my prostitutes.” Daeron scoffed.
“You monopolize their time to a degree it could be suggested they ar—“
“—Secondly,” Daeron overrode him, looking promisingly ready for their flight with a closed satchel brimming with bottles and a second pair of boots, “only a eunuch would ask such questions, a man appreciates the results instead, and thinks little of how it occurred.”
“Pity.” Egg shrugged, “If you had inquired we might resolve the issue of my hair.”
“That’s actually— you’ve got a point.” Daeron muttered, and then his spirits seemed to lift, as if joining Egg’s in some happy anticipation for their escapade, “Excellent idea, Egg! We shall stop, next pleasure house we come to, and there we will have the ladies attendant see to your tufts! They’ll fix you up until you’re as bald as Braavosi courtesan’s cun—“ he broke off abruptly, some residual modesty and decorum returning to him when sober, some of the old, endearing discipline regarding displays of lechery before children once instilled in him by their dead mother long ago. “…As bald as a Meerenese cat.” Daeron amended after some wordless tongue searching, specifically for Egg’s feline gratification, and with that, the brothers agreed to begin their journey.
First stop of which, was the next pleasure house they came to.