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Dinner is over, and the younger of the siblings have been sent off to bed, their father retired to his solar to work.
Aerion leans over Daeron, hot breath flowing along the curve of his brother’s ear.
“If you were a girl,” he says, “I could marry you.”
He follows the words with his tongue, tracing the lobe and tickling Daeron’s cheek. Daeron pulls away, wipes at the wetness with his hand.
His fingers have a greasy shine when he looks at them in the candle-light. It has been some time since he last washed his hair, or even brushed it. He lets it become greasy, so that it will look even darker, so that it will taste rancid, so that Aerion will leave him alone.
“We have sisters,” he says glumly. “Ask father if he’ll give you Daella.”
The younger brother simply scoffs.
“You know mother wouldn’t allow it. She said it often enough.”
“I’m sure if I was a girl, she’d have kept you away from me too.”
“Oh, no,” Aerion says. “You’d still be the heir in her eyes. Mother was Dornish, and father always listened to her, you know that. Summerhall is practically in Dorne anyway. But on this side of the border, only a son can be the heir. So they’d marry us together, and we would inherit together, just like the dragonlords of old Valyria.”
He leans back in his chair, self-satisfied. The tip of his red tongue darts out of his mouth, wets his smiling lips, pointy and scaly. Daeron remembers for a painful moment how they were children, competing who could fold his tongue into more complicated shapes. Aerion never stopped doing that. Aerion thinks it makes him look like a dragon.
Neither of them have seen a dragon in the flesh.
—
Years earlier, they are two children, splashing their feet in the rushing water of the Cockleswent. Father scolds them now and then, saying they'll drive the fish away. Daeron doesn't care. He doesn't much like fishing, and he doesn't like the gleam in Aerion's eye when he takes his little cleaver to chop off the fish’s head.
Right now, Aerion’s face is turned towards the sun, his eyes closed, his skin tanned to a golden glow. He has not yet decided that guarding his pallor makes him look more Valyrian. For now, it is summer, and mother is behind them in the meadow, telling stories to Aemon and Daella, two babes who just grew old enough to listen. A dragonfly dances above the river, its carapace gleaming blue and green.
“If I had a dragon,” Aerion pipes up, “it would be that same color.”
Daeron shakes his head. “It wouldn't. Dragons don't shimmer like that.”
“How would you know?”
“I just know.” Daeron hates talking about dragons, hates the hot breath and leathery wings that haunt his dreams. “I've seen — pictures.”
Aerion sulks, pulls his knees up to his chest. “What color can they be, then?”
“Black. Red, yellow. Like flames.”
“Flames can be green,” whispers Aerion, his gaze suddenly far away. “I’ve seen it.”
“Where?”
The boy shrugs. “When I close my eyes, I see them. You know they bred people with dragons in old Valyria?”
Daeron isn’t even completely sure what that means, but he doesn’t like the sound of it. “That’s disgusting.”
Aerion glowers at him. “It’s our heritage. I’m sure I could breathe fire, if I could only figure out how.”
Daeron would rather watch his brother gut fish again than listen to this. He jabs the fishing rod with a finger. “I think it moved.”
—
“I still have all my teeth,” Aerion says, and draws back his lips to show them. “He hit me right in the face, the lowborn bastard, and with his shield too. And yet not one of them broke. Dragon bone is resilient.”
Daeron shrugs. He prods his tongue into the gap between the teeth in his own cheek, then turns to his brother again.
“You know, I lost half my ear.”
“It’s a wonder you still had it. You'd think it might rot off, with how often you choose to go to sleep in your own vomit.”
Daeron takes a sip from the wineskin he carries. He swills the liquid around his mouth, to clean the broken teeth. The maesters recommended it, so father can't object. He'll make good use of that.
“Three men are dead because of you,” he says, trying Duncan’s words for taste.
Aerion laughs.
“Traitors. They knew the risk they took. I did my best to prevent that farce of a trial, didn't I? I paid off the apple knight. I couldn’t have known our uncle would —”
He winces, and for a moment Daeron hopes that he feels pain, or shame, or anything. But it’s only Aerion’s jaw that pains him and not his conscience. He spits a glob of blood and rubs his cheek.
And just like that, Daeron sees his little brother again. Clear like a dream, blood on his knee from tripping in the yard.
He holds the wineskin out to him. “Take a swig. It cleans the wound, it soothes the pain.”
Aerion looks up, straight into Daeron’s eyes. His are a deep purple, like the eyes of a dragon prince should be. He’s always been so proud of that.
“Daeron,” he says. “No.”
I don't want to look like you, brother.
—
It’s a clear warm day; Aerion is eight years old, and has just started his weapons training. Father sends Daeron to the yard with him, in the hope that having competition from a younger boy will motivate him.
Daeron is ten, and an old hand at weapons training. Or rather, an old hand at escaping his lessons and claiming to be injured. That part is fun for Aerion, at least. He knocks his brother to the ground and laughs merrily when Daeron pretends he can’t get up again.
Father is exasperated. He leads Aerion away from his ailing brother, takes up his own wooden sword and spars with the boy himself.
“See,” he calls over to Daeron, “your brother has the right idea.” Strike. “That’s how you become a man.” Parry. “That’s how you let people know you’re blood of the dragon.”
Riposte.
Aerion is beaming with pride, his grin stretching across his whole face. His cheeks are blotchy pink from the exercise, dark against his silver-gold hair. He looks like father, Daeron thinks, and he looks even more like him when he raises his wooden weapon and takes a studied combat stance.
Not long ago, father returned from battle with a stiffness to his limbs, a new coldness in his eyes. Daeron saw dragons in his dreams every night, black and red dragons fighting each other. A white worm wound itself around both of them, sucking out their lifeblood.
The maester granted Daeron a few drops of dreamwine, when he hadn’t slept right in weeks.
It helped.
“Come on,” says father. “Don’t you want to be stronger than your brother?”
Daeron can’t say he wants that.
In his dreams that night, he sees a young man lying in the mud, his sandy hair wet with blood.
Dead, he thinks.
—
They ride all the way to Wyl to send Aerion into exile. It is the closest port from Summerhall, and it is in Dorne. Daeron perches on the pier with his brother, who is no longer a sweet child, who is no longer injured, who sits in the shade because he does not want to tan.
The sea is dark in front of them, the mountains rise red and tall behind them, riddled with caves and tunnels that the Wyls fled into when the conquerors came. The stone of the castle is black, glossy in places. Aerion has a dagger in his hand, scratching at the wall.
“I knew it,” he says, triumphant. He shows Daeron the slash of red he has carved out through the layer of soot on the sandstone. “We did this. Back when people didn’t dare to mock us.”
Daeron lays a finger into the gash, feels it out like he sometimes does the deep scar on his cheek. We did this. The Wyls are distant cousins, through mother’s line, or grandmother’s, Daeron is not quite sure. He looks up at the cloudless sky and imagines the great black shadow of Balerion’s wings.
His dreams are full of flames.
The next day, they bring Aerion down to the harbor, where a sailboat awaits, loaded with servants and provisions and all sorts of luxuries.
When they part, Daeron almost wants to pull Aerion into an embrace, wants to allow himself to believe that one day he will have his little brother back, not the man, nor the dragon. But then he remembers the trial, the mud in his mouth. The feel of that scaly red tongue on his skin. Little Aegon’s words.
He takes a step back, and stands there until the sails disappear over the horizon.