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“Get up.”
Sprawled on the floor, insensate, Daeron tries to get his bearings. The earth outside the inn is cool, cool against his burning face; red from smacking, from alcohol flush, from the fire within. Slowly, he turns his face so that he can see the feet in front of him. His father’s black boots stare back at him, unimpressed. His father is here.
“What have you done with Egg?” Maekar asks, bending down so that his knee hovers just before Daeron’s eye. With one firm hand, he yanks Daeron up slightly off the floor by the collar, as if he were only eight and not eighteen, and his body weighs nothing.
“Nothing,” he struggles out, confused. Is he really so angry about Egg’s hair? In the fall, his teeth raked the inside of his mouth and now he runs his tongue along it, tasting blood. Metallic and fresh, it is more sobering than anything else has been.
“Where is he? I’ll have it out of you or I swear.” Maekar shakes the neck of his tunic and with it, his head lolls forward. “I trusted you with him, Daeron.”
No, it seems he was wrong. This is more sobering than the blood. His father’s voice, no matter how hard he tries to hold it back, trembles a little on the last word. Egg is gone? He thinks. Dread sinks down inside him, settling in him like food gone down poorly. But he had been there. Daeron had shaved his head, ate with him, seen him skipping down the stairs of the inn with a grin on his face. Now that he remembers it, drags the memory back up, he remembers more. That was a day past at least.
“He could be dead!” his father shouts. “When did you last see him? Or were you too busy drinking this inn out of house and home to even take note of that.”
A drunk he may be, but be a drunk long enough and you become accustomed to thinking through a deadened mind. You start to get good at it. Have a father like his, and you learn that excuses go miles further than you can walk. All he wants are the words. So, picking up his feet, like a horse for the ploughing, he pulls through his mind for something to answer. The last night he had seen Egg, that giant from his dreams had appeared in front of him, almost like he’d been summoned. So he lies.
“There was a robber knight. Like a giant from beyond the wall, I swear to you Father, he was at least twice my height.” he says, swallowing hard to keep the bile down. “He took Egg with him. I couldn’t-” he stops, head still hanging from his father’s grip. “I couldn’t stop him.”
“Why did you not immediately come to Ashford?”
But for all his thinking, there is no answer to that. No answer he can give, anyway. He can only stare forward, blankly, at the crook of where his fathers knee bends. Maekar drops him, and he collapses back into the dirt, blood in his mouth again, bone tired.
“Don’t think I am done with you.”
Daeron has never seen his father so concerned at the loss of him.
All the while to Ashford, he thinks of what will greet him there. To have run from the tourney, like he’d done twice before, was one thing. To have lost his littlest brother was another. His father was not so soft as his grandfather, as his uncle. Maekar dealt out his anger with a hard hand and none knew that so well as Daeron. No other child vexed him so openly. Aerion, for all the rottenness in him now, knew to hide it with smiles around Father. Daeron did not, could not. Whatever was left in him after dreams had had their way, it went to finding drink, to soft beds in pleasure houses. What did reputation mean in the face of the future, folding into itself before his eyes.
So he twists his foot down in the stirrup and imagines the lash upon it. He thinks of thirty, forty, fifty more lashes for his lost brother. No alcohol to soften it, either. That last swallow of wine before he got dragged outside by Ser Roland would likely be his last until he could sneak away. How can he care about pain, when Egg is missing? And yet the fear follows him as sure as his father’s gaze. Always the coward as usual.
Was Egg so very angry with him for sneaking them away that he had run off? He had seemed cheery enough. Maybe someone really had taken off with him. His dream, the one with the giant man, he had stood above a dead dragon. If that dragon were Egg… Drink would not be enough, nor lashings. Nothing would be enough if that were true.
Daeron leans over the side of his horse and brings up the last of the wine. Egg had named this horse, but he cannot remember what. He cannot remember.
At Ashford, his father gestures him down to the wooden floor. It is a routine they are both attuned to now. There is the lash, and there is his fathers hand, white knuckled around it.
“I expect little else from you, but to drag Aegon along and now to lose him? I thank the gods that your mother is not here to see what you have become.”
Maekar’s hands are almost tender as they ease his shoes off, tug at his stockings. In contrast, the first strike lands ever harder. As always, his father starts with a rhythm and then slowly tires of it. Daeron misses the rhythm when it goes. There is something in the certainty of when the next blow will land. But his father never tires of the hitting. Maekar is the anvil to his brothers hammer and his hands are not unblooded. It often feels like he is back on the Redgrass field rather than in the room with him each time he punishes his son.
The air around the whip sounds a little like the knife had sounded when he’d shorn off Egg’s hair. His brother had asked him to sing to drown it out. Sing for your supper, sing for your father, sing for your brother.
Grass is green in summer.
Thwack!
Green grass I adore.
Thwack!
But grass is red all over when you kill a rebel
Thwack!
Horses die in battle, this battle was the front.
Thwack!
Blackfyre’s not a
Thwack!
trueborn, he came from the wrong
Thwack! Thwack!
Country was in peril, the Hammer smashed the bastard
Just like the Anvil smashed his son…
There is no time in beatings, but when the pain starts to get to the knife point, to where he wants to curl up and die in his own vomit, that’s when he notices the feet peaking under the door. Little feet in maidens shoes, looking across at him. Perhaps someone else might feel shame, but not him. Thwack, the birch rod goes again, and thwack and thwack.
Foot whippings make no lasting injuries, not in the way that other whippings do, but Maester Yromwell blusters through his chamber door all the same, tincture in hand. The cold of it soothes at the very least, kissing his feet burnt red as if from pilgrimage across the sandy desserts of his mother’s homeland. Uncle Baelor will have sent him. Uncle Baelor would not have hit him. Neither Valarr nor Matarys had ever needed a maester, for their feet or otherwise.
“Maester?” A novice appears at the door, peeking his head around. “Prince Aerion needs your attendance.”
“Prince Aerion? What ails him?”
“The young prince was…” the youth hesitates then, glancing fretfully at Daeron, but Yromwell nods him on. “…attacked, maester. By a hedge knight taller than the castle gates, the maids are saying. I think his tooth may be chipped.”
Yromwell begins tidying away his things, though not with the urgency he likely should.
“Wait,” Daeron says, “my brother.”
“The prince shall be well, I assure you,” the novice rushes to say,“I only need the maester to soothe his tooth.”
“No, not Aerion. My younger brother.”
“Oh,” the novice smiles. “Prince Aegon has been found. He was with the hedge knight. Spoke for him himself, so they say.”
Alive. Egg was alive, and well, and actually with that giant knight. Who had punched Aerion. Was he perhaps the dragon? Oh, but in that moment none of it mattered, because Egg was alive.
“Where is he?”
“I believe he is back in his bedroom now, my prince.”
At that, Daeron forces himself up, biting back at his already wounded lip as his feet feel the floor. The tincture Maester Yromwell has just spent minutes carefully spreading is lost to the floor.
“Egg!”
“Daeron!” Egg shouts, jumping off the bed. “I’m sorry father hit you, I didn’t mean to, only I really wanted to go to the joust and I-”
Daeron instead bundles him into a hug, Egg’s bald head pressed against his ribs. For a brief moment, his hands holding Egg’s tiny frame small as bird bones, he wonders if he can tell him of the dream. But he is not a child anymore, not as Egg still is. What had telling ever done for him? To drag his little brother, still green as grass, down with the rest of them. It would be no kindness. So the words I dreamt you died, die on his own tongue.
After a moment, he makes himself tear away, and holds Egg back.
“Tell me about this hedge knight.”
“He will not have me as his squire...” Egg says plaintively, stabbing at his fish.
At the end of his tale now, they sit in front of a meal neither had asked for. Though Egg has likely eaten nothing but… well, Daeron cannot think, really, what false squires of hedge knights might eat. The nights when he cast aside his father’s fetters and found himself in the seedier parts of Kings Landing, he had never eaten. A good sot knows that to eat is to soften, and nothing could ever match the feeling of liquor slipping into an empty stomach like a mouse down a snake’s throat.
Egg’s dark purple eyes look larger than ever with his hair gone, and he thinks for a moment they might even be tearing up. His tiny palm clutches the knife, as he wanted to hold a lance. It strikes him then that this hedge knight did some great good by his brother, if it hurts him so dearly to think of the consequences. Egg is a good boy, a kind boy, who has no love for Aerion but still followed this great beast of a man. He had eaten at his table and slept beneath the stars for the chance at being his squire. All the anger Daeron had had, all that great sulking grief, in thinking the dead dragon could be his little brother, evaporates like smoke. Perhaps it is Aerion, or perhaps it is someone else, something else. Perhaps it is years in the future or perhaps never at all. All he knows is that this man carries death with him, a poison to dragons, to Targaryens. To his own, and those he loves. Daeron fears, but it is as second nature as breathing. What would he be without his fear?
“Maybe we can change your hedge knight’s mind.”
“But if we’re caught, father will only hit you again.”
His little brother, as ever, caring for him when he did not need to. But even that said, his eyes have lit up, little flames in the darkness.
“Then we best not get caught.”
Night has firmly drawn in by the time they sneak away and he is starting to feel it now; the need for drink crawling out of his skin. He should be finding some drink with this stolen time, not sneaking out with his brother to find a man he condemned. Damn him for a fool. Perhaps this hedge knight could smuggle him some ale.
“Hurry up,” Egg says and he has to bite back something about his aching feet. All he needs is a drink, and it is not Egg’s fault. He had even offered to detour.
In the tent, he only has time to remove his cloak before the hedge knight has a knife to his throat, pins him back against a table, falls on top of him rather. The dead dragon, his mind thrills.
“Stop! Please!” Egg cries, but he’s held back by some other lad. He can see him squirming from here.
“I should drive this through your neck,” the giant boy spits, accent thick as any Flea Bottom brat. The fear is there, but along with it, a kind of relief. Finally the man, alive and the dragon falling.
“I’d sooner you poured me a cup of wine.” True as it is, it is as much for Egg’s benefit as this giant’s.
The man’s thick arm presses against his sternum, strong and warm blooded. Daeron holds it with his own hand, wanting to press it closer, like a shrike's prey sinking back into the thorn.
“Fuck your wine. You lied about me.”
“Well, I had to say something when my father demanded to know where Egg had gotten to,” he says, to this man who scoffs, who does not know his father. He’s wheezing slightly, whether he likes it or not, the arm is pressing further. In all honesty, it can hardly be called a lie. So Daeron had not known whether this hedge knight stole his brother, but he had not known otherwise either. As it turned out, they had been with each other in the end anyway.
“Please, don’t hurt him!” Egg shouts again and the tall boy throws himself away from Daeron. Coughing, he pulls himself up against the trestle bench, and Egg scurries over to his side.
There is talk, and there is no wine, and still Daeron offers to take a blow and leave the fighting to the rest of them. It might be gallant if he did not imagine he would be knocked down on the first tilt anyway. Still, it is a kindness, one his brother’s Ser Duncan does not acknowledge. This knight of the hedges, whether he liked it or not, had stolen away with one brother and assaulted another. For one cruel moment, he thinks bitterly that Egg would not go so far to defend Daeron, to be Daeron's squire. But it is a fleeting thought as much as it is wrong one. Egg would distract their father when his gaze fell upon him and he had mixed him sweetsleep in the inn. Egg had slept beside him with one arm slung over. It is you that does not defend him, he thinks, when Egg lists the ways Aerion has tormented him. When the Fossoway cousin chuckles at his story, Daeron levels a look at him and makes a snide reply. He has no fists to punch with and it is not enough, but it is better than nothing. What a bad brother he is, in the face of it. He hopes Ser Duncan kills him.
Before his guilt can settle into silt, he stands, knowing he must sneak back.
“Ser Duncan, private word?”
Despite the fire, despite the season, outside the tent Daeron shivers. Whether from the absence of alcohol or the night or his dreams he does not know.
“I dreamed of you,” he says.
What difference does it make? The great beast of a man can do nothing with it. Daeron cannot tell him that he had feared the dead dragon was Egg. He cannot tell him he knows now it is himself. His brother will be listening, his ear to the flap of the tent.
He doesn’t wait for a response in the end, only hobbles away on his pained soles, leaving Egg behind. Tears slip heedlessly down his face but what does he care?
Back at Ashford Castle, Daeron does not seek out liquor or a warm body, but wanders the long halls until he finds his own empty bed. There will be no sleep, not this long without, but if he is to die tomorrow, what does it matter? He will spend his last hours depriving himself in a way he never has before.
Not that I ever asked to have my honour redeemed. Whoever has it can keep it, so far as I’m concerned, he had assured the great lunk. And perhaps that was true, his dishonourableness plodding on like a mule year after year, but in the bone chill room, at the face of his death, he wants to walk toward it on steady feet.
None will know, or better yet, none will know quite the white knuckling pain it is taking, but when they present his body to the silent sisters, he hopes when they stopper his mouth that it won’t smell of arbor gold.
On the floor again, always on the floor.
It had not been hard to stay down after Robyn Rhysling knocks him off with his lance. His armour takes most of the blow but it jars him still, so much so that he cannot even try protecting himself when his horse, his Symeon, as Egg had reminded him, rears up and snags his cheek as it flees. The pain greets him with welcome arms; it is better than waiting blind, but there is more coming and that is what he really fears.
Facedown in the mud is where he waits, still as a corpse, wondering how it will happen. There’s no knowing if his brother’s Ser Dunkan will be the one to deliver it, so he can only watch with his one good eye and hope he sees death approaching, as he always has done. Near the front pavilion, he can see his brother, with his ridiculous armour, fighting Dunkan. Aerion is putting into practice all the training he’s ever had but eventually the great beast of a boy gets his sword at the line where his armour meets and cuts deep. For a moment, Daeron hears his brother’s cries, pitiful, and feels a tug, despite everything. But then he hears his father too, howling his brother’s name across the trial field, sounding wretched and concerned, and all his feelings sap out of him, leaving him with only the pain of his cheek.
Maekar brings down the laughing storm, but he’s held back by his uncle and the Baratheon before he can get to Aerion.
“My boy! My boy!”
There have been no calls of his own name, not once, though he’s been lying insensate in the mud for most of the battle. Even now, with his hands soaked in days of blood, Aerion is always favoured. Maybe father’s relieved, he wonders. He, least loved son, watches as Aerion loses.
When he wakes, it takes him a moment to remember that he is alive. But the tight pain on his face, his foot, the desperate aching of his body for booze tell him he is more than alive. Shifting, he goes to sit up when he spots his father, asleep in a chair beside his bed. The bounding of his heart from the jump reminds him, ‘you are alive, you are alive’.
His father has his own jolt when he opens his eyes to find Daeron staring back at him. A shame. For a brief candle flicker, it had been peaceful between them.
“You’re awake.”
“Evidently,” Daeron replies, because he cannot forget the rumbling of his father shouting for his brother.
“Your uncle is dead.”
Daeron can only let out a weak, wheezing chuckle. Of course. His dreams will always be real, and they will always come true. Of course he wasn’t the dragon. Of course his Uncle was dead, the best of them all.
“Have some respect,” his father spits out, rising from his chair. “Now you are awake, I’ll be returning to Aerion’s room.”
“Your boy?” Daeron must ask, because he has all the time in the world now.
Maekar pauses sharply, his back to the bed. Unexpectedly, he doesn’t turn back and spill vitriol back at him, about how his uncle is dead and his brother greatly wounded. No, he only lingers, like a spirit not yet wanting to leave out the window.
“I thought you were dead,” he says quietly. It is not an answer really, not to the question Daeron is asking. But it is an answer all the same.
Then he turns back and grabs a goblet off the table, the one that must have been his, and extends it to his son.
Daeron takes it, fingertips brushing his fathers hand, and holds it between them like it is something warming. And then his father is gone.
For all his father’s hatred of his drinking, it had been through him that Daeron had learned the power of drink. When their mother had died, he had watched his father become a drunkard, pouring wine down his throat until he seemed to become hazy, half a ghost himself. So that he can find some rest, Valarr had whispered to him as they watched Maekar stumble his way to his bed. She’s probably haunting their bedchamber.
She’d been haunting Daeron even before she died. Dreams had not waited for him to understand them, or even finish learning his sums, no, they had come to him almost from the cradle. Though he cannot quite remember, he thinks that was the first time he realised that his dreams were dragon dreams. Before they had been nightmares, as ordinary as any other. What child didn’t wake up, sweaty and dazed, from time to time? But this time he had dreamed of a dark star bleeding into the dawn sky as it fell. Months later, his mother had accidentally stumbled against a wall, laughed it off, and been dead as the sun rose. Her blood did not clot, a Maester who had been with her since girlhood explained. His siblings had haunted their father’s footsteps for a little while after that, but Daeron had kept away. I knew and did nothing, he had realised.
From a distance, he had watched his father soften around the edges with each goblet more, and every night at an earlier hour, stagger off to bed and not reappear. So when he next dreamt, Daeron had taken to drink as a babe to the breast. It did not always work, no amount of wine or sweetsleep could keep the dreams at bay forever, but it lessens them. It is not every night, at the very least. But soon it served him in a thousand ways. An impressive gift for an unimpressive man, Daeron had told the hedge knight, and it was true, yet wine had a way of unmaking it. Drink made him feel like a hero from the bards, that his dreams were one small part of a greater song. It made him into a prince born in grief, melancholic and doomed and beautiful. Sober, he knew they were falsehoods.
Looking down into his father’s half drunk cup, he sees his own reflection, the sutures sewn like a falling star across his face. He closes his eyes and drains the cup.
As soon as he is well enough, Daeron drags himself down to the tents, drinks his weight in wine, and pays some whores to make him forget for a little while. Uncle Baelor’s death has cast rather a pall, so some have made an early escape, puppeteers included, but the smallfolk pick themselves up spectacularly. After all, who was he to them? Who was he to you? a voice asks. Only an uncle, who put words in with your father when he could, who smiled at you kindly and ruffled your hair and sent his sons to cheer you.
Daeron does not go to the burning. And though Egg, discovering him in a heap in Ashford’s walled gardens, wets his eyes at him to no avail, their father does not even send anyone to look for him. Perhaps to him, I did die, after all, Daeron thinks unfairly.
All of Lord Ashford’s guards eye him but none step in. So he spends hours in the garden, drinking and drinking and letting his eyes lose focus. When Egg finally reappears, sky darkening now, he kicks at his foot as if to check he’s still alive.
“Daeron,” Egg says, voice breaking, and this time he cannot refuse him; he jerks his head up quick as anything.
“What’s wrong?”
“He won’t take me to squire.”
He sits up as fast as his body will let him, tries to focus on the words. “What do you mean? Who won’t?”
“Father asked Ser Duncan to come back with us to Summerhall,” Egg whispers, sniffing. “So I could squire for him. But he won’t have me.”
“Why?” Daeron asks simply, because he cannot imagine why anyone wouldn’t want his brother as squire. He had risked punishment just to see the man. He was kind and good and sweet.
“He says he’s done with princes.”
So maybe this isn’t Daeron’s fault on its own; it was Aerion who had challenged the boy, Aerion who had terrorised the puppeteers, Aerion who was cruel. But he was not blameless. He had lied to save his own skin, and he had pointed a knife at him, and he was no good brother. And now it was costing Egg, who did not deserve it.
“Let me speak to him.”
“Is that wise?” Egg asks, eyeing the state he’s in.
“Tomorrow, I promise.”
Suddenly Egg grins, all sorrow lifted for a moment. “There is some good news at least. Father’s sending Aerion to the free cities.”
Daeron does not need to seek out the hedge knight in the end, he finds him at the wake for the two knights who died and waits to be approached. He reasons that letting the man edge closer himself like a timid animal is likely the wiser idea after their last meeting. In the end, though, he has to draw his attention by calling for the serving boy before the lunk hobbles over.
“Have you no shame coming here? Those men are dead because of you.”
A thousand things to say flitter around his mind but he realises he owes this man no explanation. Instead, he shrugs. Ser Dunkan turns to leave, and Daeron kicks himself; There he goes ruining it all again.
“Will you take Egg to squire?”
The boy turns back, looking almost cowed. “I told your father, he’s not my concern.”
“You know…” he breathes out an almost laugh, thinking of how to keep him here. “My brother wasn’t always such a little monster.”
“Egg is no monster, he’s just a boy.”
My boy! My boy! His father’s voice rings like a mace against helm through his head.
“I didn’t mean Egg.” He cannot decide if it is the boy’s stupidity, or his own treacherous nature that makes him think so. “But… no doubt we’ll make a man of him, too. Perhaps the seeds of madness are sewn in the womb, as the Maesters say. But Aerion was quite the glad child once. He liked fishing.”
It pains him to remember Aerion the way he had once been. Daeron, of course, had not noticed until it became too late. There had been Aerion before he knew the truth about his dreams, and there had been the Aerion after. By the time he had been able to lift his head from his own worries, whatever bristles of cruelty there had been before had worn down into him like grooves. He liked fishing, and yet Daeron can remember the joy on his face as he speared and gutted a fish. That had not seemed near as bad as drowning the cat, but maybe it was all the same. Maybe Aerion had always liked holding something fragile in his hands only to crack it.
There’s a look on the hedge knight’s face that seems almost startled at his last words. Maybe he was a fisherman. Maybe he was horrified at the idea that Aerion had not always been the way he was. Good. Let him feel a sliver of the horror they felt. Just in the way he had defended Egg unnecessarily, Daeron knows he will be good. He will miss his brother, desperately. But he thinks of what it would have been had someone stepped in, for him, for Aerion. Maybe nothing would be different. Maybe everything would have been. It was worth the attempt.
“I heard you told my father you were done with princes. You said it yourself, Egg’s just a boy. Take him away from princehood, and that is what he will be.”
Ser Duncan looks in thought, which on his face appears painful. After a moment, he turns around and hobbles back to his bench.
“Daeron!” Egg calls, shaking his shoulders. He’s ended up back in bed, exhausted by mead and old memories. “You spoke to Ser Duncan!”
“Why, did it work?” He lifts up the covers and Egg hops in.
“Well… almost. He went to father and asked to take me on the road, as a hedge knight squire. But father… he won’t let me go.”
“What were his exact words?” he asks, as Egg squirms and presses his cold feet against Daeron’s legs. His brother leans neatly against a pillow, hesitating, clearly hiding something.
“Father said that I cannot live as a peasant. Daeron, have you ever slept in a ditch?”
The question is so completely unexpected and his tone not nearly as sad.
“Probably. How angry did he sound?”
“Not angry at all in the end. More sad than anything else. Maybe I can say one last goodbye to Ser Duncan in the morrow before I go.”
Daeron looks in Egg’s pitiful eyes, feels soft feet pressing against his legs, and thinks of his father’s foot whipping. Better that his little brother’s feet grow calluses from hiking cliffsides than that. Better that Daeron be the one to face it. He weighs his options and one comes out light as a feather.
“In the morrow, go and see your Ser Dunkan, and join him. I’ll grab Father’s ring for you in case anything foul happens, but go and be his squire, Egg.”
“What about father?”
“I’ll handle father. I think you’ll find once he calms down, he’ll grow quite accustomed to the idea. Now get your cold feet off my legs.”
Egg presses them harder and the laughter rings around his drunken head like bells.