Chapter Text
You urged your mare higher along the narrow path.
Below, the Vale laid green and distant. Fields and forests melted into one another beneath the pale light.
You rode alone.
No escort, no banners, no sworn shield at your side. You had ordered Ser Gawen to remain behind at Runestone, despite his protests.
You wore bronze and leather armour beneath your riding cloak and found comfort in the familiar weight of your sword beside you. You were atop your mare riding across the lands of your ancestors and you preferred it that way.
At five-and-twenty, you were already too accustomed to eyes upon you. The heir to Runestone. A widow. A woman with a rightful claim to rule. Yet the lords of the Vale wished you had been a son instead.
So they watched you and they waited. Every glance weighed your strength. Every whisper sought weakness. Somewhere among them, surely, there must be a flaw they could exploit. Something they could present to your father as proof that a daughter could not inherit such an ancient seat.
Let them watch, you thought bitterly. They will find nothing but grit and defiance.
You were descended from the Bronze Kings who once ruled Runestone long before the Andals crossed the Narrow Sea. Long before falcons nested in the Eyrie and the Arryns claimed dominion over the Vale.
And woven faintly through that First Men blood ran something stranger—the legacy of Princess Alyssa Royce, who had once flown the skies above these very peaks on dragonback and later ruled Runestone in her own right.
You tightened your grip on the reins as your mare picked carefully over loose shale.
You should not be thinking of dragons. Instead, you forced your mind toward quieter thoughts.
It had been five years since Adrian’s body was brought back through Runestone’s gates. Broken by a clansman’s axe during a raid along these same mountain passes. Five years since you had buried his body in the crypts. Five years since his ring had been pressed into your palm. Five years since you had sworn never again to bind yourself to another man simply because the realm found widows inconvenient.
Quiet did not truly exist in your life. Back at Runestone there were always duties waiting. Letters from neighbouring lords, tithes to oversee, petitions from smallfolk, endless disputes over grazing rights and fishing waters.
But out here, surrounded by hills and sky, you could breathe. Out here, the weight of expectation lifted, if only for a little while.
Or so you believed.
Your mare’s ears flicked back as the wind shifted.
“What is it, Pear?” you murmured, reaching forward to stroke her neck. “What troubles you, girl?”
The land had fallen too silent.
That should have been your first warning.
An arrow struck the path before your mare’s hooves. The second arrow tore through Pear’s neck.
Your mare screamed—high and terrible—her cry echoing off the cliffs. She reared violently, blood spraying across stone and grass. You threw yourself sideways just as she collapsed, the ground slamming into you, knocking the breath from your lungs.
From behind the surrounding boulders, figures rose. Three of them at first. Then more shapes shifting among the rocks.
They wore furs and leather stiff with grease. Their hair hung in tangled braids threaded with bone charms. War paint streaked their faces in crude spirals of red and ash.
Mountain clansmen.
You rolled aside as another arrow struck where you had fallen. Your sword was already in your hand as you pushed yourself upright.
The first clansman rushed at you with a howl. Instinct overcame you. Stepping aside, you opened his throat in one smooth stroke.
The second swung a jagged axe but your blade caught it with a ringing crack, the impact jolting up your arm. You drove your knee into his groin. When he doubled over, you split his jaw. He dropped without a sound.
Then more emerged.
Too many.
Too many to count.
You backed toward the cliffside, your blade slick with blood, your breathing sharp. Your mind raced, measuring the terrain. If you could reach the narrow cut above the ridge—
A net dropped from above.
Weighted stones tangled around your shoulders and sword arm, yanking you backward. You tried to slash through one cord before two bodies slammed into you at once.
A fist struck your temple. Another seized your wrist and twisted until bone ground painfully against bone.
Your sword fell and clattered to the ground.
But you were a Royce, descended from Alyssa Royce herself.
You bit the nearest hand hard enough to taste blood.
But it was a brutal blow to the back of your head that ended the struggle.
The mountain clans kept you bound for three days.
Three long days of cold wind, choking smoke and the constant ache in your wrists where the ropes bit deep into the skin.
They had taken everything from you.
Your sword first, of course. Then the dagger at your hip. Even the thin blade hidden inside your riding boot—the one Adrian had once teased you for carrying. They had stripped you of every weapon with crude thoroughness, laughing among themselves in their guttural mountain tongue as if they had already decided what your fate would be.
You endured it in silence but hatred burned in your chest like a coal.
The mountain clans had always been a curse upon the Vale. They descended from the high passes like a storm. Stealing livestock, burning villages, slaughtering smallfolk who had nothing to defend themselves with. They left ruin wherever they passed.
They had taken more from you than most.
At six-and-ten, you had been wed to Lord Adrian of House Redfort. A second son, but a good man who was chosen carefully to stand beside the future Lady of Runestone. Your marriage had begun as a duty and a shared obligation between two ancient Vale houses.
But love, you had learned, did not always come like lightning. Sometimes it began as an ember.
Adrian had been patient where you were proud. Steady where you were restless. You grew into one another slowly. Through shared laughter in the training yard, long rides along the cliffs, quiet evenings spent over wine and books.
He never mocked your education. Never sneered when you spoke of history, philosophy, or sums. He did not mind that you wielded a sword.
The ember had grown. By the time you realised you loved him, it had become a forest fire.
And then, when you were twenty, they brought him back through Runestone’s gates.
Broken. Bloodied. Dead.
His men had wrapped him in his cloak, but no cloak could hide the blood that soaked through the wool.
Something inside you died that day.
For five years you had remained a widow. Not because no one asked for your hand—they had, many times—but because you would not chain yourself to another love, only to met with grief and death.
Adrian had been your love. There would not be another.
So you sat now among the filth and smoke of the clan camp, wrists bound, hatred blazing openly in your eyes.
They noticed. One man noticed more than the rest. A broad-shouldered clansman with filed teeth watched you too closely. His gaze crawled over you like something foul.
Once, when he thought the others were distracted, he crouched before you.
You did not shrink away, meeting his eyes with open contempt that he spat and struck you across the cheek instead.
The taste of blood filled your mouth, but still you smiled.
He left you after that, though his eyes lingered whenever he passed.
And you knew exactly what fate awaited you if you did not escape.
Or die first.
It was on the fifth night that you saw the eggs.
The clansmen hauled them into camp from somewhere higher in the mountains, grunting beneath their weight.
You leaned forward despite the ropes, eyes wide with barely concealed wonder. They were enormous. Larger than any bird’s egg, their shells dark and mottled with age.
Your breath caught.
Dragon eggs.
The mountain clans gathered around them eagerly, passing axes and stone hammers between them. You watched as the first blow struck, but the shell did not crack. Another blow followed and another.
Still nothing.
You almost laughed. The eggs were ancient and centuries had surely turned them to stone. Fossilised dragon eggs were rarer than rubies. Lords across the Narrow Sea would pay fortunes for such relics. A single egg could purchase fleets of ships.
The Vale had held riches beneath its mountains all this time and these fools meant to smash them open like walnuts.
Something stirred inside you.
Strangely, you could feel them.
The heat they emitted was faint, but unmistakable.
Your brow furrowed, tilting your head as you continued to stare at the eggs.
Stone did not hold warmth, you thought to yourself. Unless they were not stone at all.
Your gaze drifted toward the shadowed peaks beyond the camp.
There was only one dragon these eggs could belong to.
Gaelithox.
Once known across Westeros as the infamous Cannibal, the savage dragon who devoured the eggs and his own kind. A creature feared even by other dragonriders. Until Princess Alyssa Royce had claimed him.
Through your father’s blood you were descended from Alyssa—her great-great-granddaughter, though the years between you stretched nearly a century.
Alyssa had been the only child of Lady Rhea Royce and Prince Daemon Targaryen. During the terrible days of the Dance of the Dragons, she had ridden Gaelithox through flame and war to help seat her stepmother, then her younger brother, Aegon, upon the Iron Throne.
When the war ended, Alyssa returned to the Vale and she ruled Runestone for decades afterwards. She was fierce, unyielding and loyal to her people until the day she died. The history books say Gaelithox had vanished into the Mountains of the Moon soon after. Some said he had died from grief.
You had grown up on stories of that dragon and his rider. As a girl you had imagined them soaring above the Vale’s peaks. Black wings cutting through storm clouds while Alyssa laughed in the wind.
You had adored your ancestor. Idolised her courage, her loyalty, her defiance.
Perhaps it was her blood that stirred something reckless in you now. As you looked again at the eggs the clansmen were trying so clumsily to destroy, as blazing heat brushed your skin from across the firelight, you could not stop the words.
“It has turned to stone,” you called hoarsely. Your voice sounded strange to your own ears after so many hours of silence. “Even the sharpest of blades will not do.”
Several heads snapped toward you.
One of the clansmen snarled in their tongue, whilst another spat in the dirt. But they ignored you, continuing to hack at the eggs with growing frustration, steel striking the hard shells again and again.
The sound grated against your nerves.
“Do you even know what they are?” you tried again.
The answer came swift and brutal, in the form of a heavy hand struck across your face.
Pain exploded along your cheek as the world lurched sideways. You tasted blood instantly, warm and metallic on your tongue.
But the blow had done something else.
As the clansman’s arm passed your bound wrists, your fingers moved—quick and precise. Years of training in secret blades and hidden weapons had taught you to seize opportunities measured in heartbeats.
By the time the man stepped away, cursing your insolence no doubt, the dagger that had hung at his belt was no longer there. Instead it was hidden in the folds of your sleeve.
You kept her head bowed, hiding the small flicker of triumph in your eyes.
Night eventually came.
The clansmen drank themselves into sleep around a dying fire. One or two remained on watch, but even they seemed dulled by exhaustion.
When the camp had finally gone quiet enough, you shifted carefully, bringing your bound wrists beneath the folds of your cloak. The stolen dagger slid easily into your palm.
The rope was rough and thick, but rope was still rope. The blade sawed through it slowly and at last the final strand snapped.
You flexed your wrists, biting back a hiss of pain as blood rushed back into numbed fingers.
You should run. That was the sensible choice. Escape the camp and flee down the mountain, find the road back to Runestone.
But your gaze kept drifting toward the eggs. Something inside you—something old and instinctive—whispered that you could not leave them.
You rose silently and crept across the dark camp. The eggs were heavier than you expected. You found an abandoned sack near one of the bedrolls and placed them inside, gritting your teeth as you lifted the weight over your shoulder.
Then you ran.
The mountains were black and silent beneath the stars. You had barely made it past the outer edge of the camp when a voice barked behind you.
A patrolling clansman rushed towards you with a roar and collided hard. You both tumbled into the gravel, the sack slipping from your shoulder and falling to the ground with a dull thud.
The man’s knife flashed in the dark.
You twisted, but not fast enough.
Steel sliced across your face and pain ripped through your skull as the blade carved a brutal line from your chin upward across your cheek toward your brow. Blood spilled instantly, blinding one eye.
You bit back a scream and drove your dagger upward, the blade sliding beneath the clansman’s ribs. He gasped once, then collapsed.
You knelt, then fell, sprawled in the dirt. Blood pooled beneath your cheek. Your vision began to blacken at the edges. The cut burned like fire, warm blood running down your throat and collar.
Your body felt weak.
Very weak.
You could vaguely hear shouts from the camp behind. The other clansmen had likely heard the struggle.
You stared up at the dark sky.
So this is how it ends.
You thought of Adrian. You still remember the scream that tore from your throat when you last saw him.
You thought of your father. Cold and stern to the world. Yet no man in the Vale had ever defended your claim to Runestone more fiercely than he had. His only child and his pride of joy.
You thought of your mother. Sharp-eyed and clever. Loyal as steel to family and home. A woman who hid her cunning behind courtly smiles.
And you thought of the mountains themselves.
How poetic it would be, truly, to die in the same passes that had taken Adrian.
Footsteps drew near.
You closed your eyes and waited.
But something changed in the air. It grew warmer and the mountains feel silent once more. Even the approaching clansmen slowed, their shouting faltering.
A shadow moved across the stars.
You opened your eyes.
Out of the darkness came a shape so vast it seemed to swallow the mountain itself.
Black wings, ragged and enormous.
When it neared, it finally took shape.
A dragon.
It descended like a storm unleashed, fire erupting from his jaws.
The clansmen never had time to scream. Flame swept across the slope, engulfing them in a roaring inferno that lit the mountainside brighter than day.
Steel melted and men burned.
You lay frozen, too stunned to move.
I am dead, you thought blindly. I am dead and I entered the seven hells.
It barely crossed your mind that you followed the Old Gods and not the Seven and that your faith did not believe in hell.
You noticed that the sack had burst open during the fight and the three eggs rolled free across the ground. As the dragon’s fire washed over them, they cracked.
Once, twice, then the shells split. Three small shrieking forms emerged. One blue as a summer sky, one black as night and the other red as fresh blood.
Dragons. Three more fucking dragons.
This isn’t the seven hells. This was the Targaryen version of heaven.
Their wings unfurled as they clawed free from their shattered shells.
The larger dragon landed with a thunderous crash, the mountain trembling beneath its weight. Then its enormous head turned slowly toward you.
Fear rooted you to the earth.
For a long moment neither of you breathed.
Then it slowly lowered its head.
Something unexplainable drove you to sit up. Despite the tremble in your arm, you raised it up and placed your palm against the dragon. Its scales were warm and rough, ridged like bark. Its nostrils flared as it drew in your scent.
For a heartbeat, you thought you saw something in its green molten eyes. Recognition? Or something akin to it.
Black scales. Green eyes.
A dragon in the Vale.
You almost jerked back.
Gaelithox.
“Alyssa Royce’s dragon,” you whispered.
Gaelithox’s pupils narrowed, searching your face as if sifting through memories, as if the great beast was reminded of a woman long dead. Of a rider who had once worn bronze.
You did not dare lower your gaze, despite the blood leaking from your temple. Your legs ached, but still you stood.
“If you mean to burn me,” you said softly, “do it now.”
Gaelithox unfurled his wings fully as the remaining clansmen, those who had survived the first inferno, found their courage and launched themselves forward.
The dragon reared back and loosed fire past you. The air exploded in white heat and the screams ended in seconds.
You blinked ash from your lashes as smoke rolled in the air.
Gaelithox lowered his head once more.
An invitation.
Your heart slammed in your chest so hard you feared it might burst.
“No one has ridden you in near a century.”
His answer was a low rumble that vibrated straight through your bones.
With careful steps, you mounted the crook of his leg, gripping a jutting scale to haul yourself upward. He did not move to throw you.
When you reached the base of his neck, you eyed the saddle warily. But still, you swung your leg over the saddle, finding it similar to that of a horse’s. Thick leather straps, padding and a handle.
Shrieks filled the air. The hatchlings—you had almost forgotten them—scrambled awkwardly up after you, attaching themselves to the folds of your cloak.
Clingy little things, you thought humorlessly.
“Gaelithox,” you called out, testing the name, feeling the weight of it. The name felt enormous in your mouth.
The dragon rose to his full height and without warning, he leapt.
The sky swallowed you whole.