Chapter Text
They moved north along a low river feeding into the Greenblood. She knew such waters in Dorne ran close to places where a god’s breath was said to pass between territories the living world forgot.
White cloaks rode with them and their steel rang in warning against unseen dangers that extended too near. The boy had watched them with dim interest from the carriage.
The sky had been a black basin strewn with brilliant stars. Even the river darkened, drawing that unseen breath into itself. Wheels murmured over the much travelled path.
There was no herald when the world broke.
Only a suddenness that tore the night open to pour violence through it.
The horses made high, rending sounds that did not belong to beasts made for reins and bit. The carriage lurched, wheels lifting, then pitched over with a crack that ran up through wood and bone. Steel answered flesh. And the calm voices of men and women had turned into ragged, bellowing fragments.
She moved before thought could catch her. One moment, she was beside him, hand resting upon the blanket that covered him, and in the next instant her body became a shield. He saw only a piece of her face before a flash of silver consumed his sight.
The strike did not sound as he expected. It was the wet, inward noise of a fleshy fruit split by teeth.
The blow passed through her and into him, yet the force that parted him offered no pain. He could not even cry out as a rushing absence coursed through his body; everything within him startled into flight.
One side of the carriage had fallen away, spilling their bodies into the open dark now made savage by fire. Flames licked the lacquered wood, silks, and scattered forms of men who no longer moved. Broken shapes bent in postures that could no longer change.
He felt her weight before he understood it lacked the careful way she held him and her body was no longer whole in the way his mind expected. Warmth spread across and from him, seeping into what remained of cloth, skin, and opened sinew.
Her scent was gone. An itch burrowed to the back of his throat and would not be swallowed. It filled his mouth when he tried to breathe. He tasted it as the blaze drew nearer.
The river, beyond sight, caught and broke the firelight. No insects sang along its banks.
He tried to move but his body did not obey as it once had. He could not even blink where he lay pinned beneath her.
The carriage sank into itself, beams collapsing with a sound like distant thunder.
Only the boy remained, cleft yet unended, held between blood, the inferno, and a deeper cold.
Gathered smoke rose and above them the sky was gone.
—
It had not been his intent to hasten, yet the horse was spent all the same.
The road twisted upward toward the black mass of Dragonstone and the air sharpened as the sea drew nearer. Enough salt rode the wind that it could gather in one’s tongue and lungs.
Then, against the sky, color moved where no color should have been.
Valarr slowed.
At first, he saw only the wind taking hold of cloth, snapping it outward before letting it fall. Red worked upon darker red and black. It seemed an illusion as it took form, until it could no longer be mistaken.
Oh, gods.
His father.
Valarr’s grip tightened on the reins.
Another banner stirred beyond it.
This one fuller, richer in its dye: the three-headed dragon that spoke not of office but of rule. It did not snap so much as hold the wind, as though the air itself bent to it.
His grandfather.
Valarr’s breath seized.
The king and his Hand did not travel together. Not unless the matter before them outweighed the danger of leaving the realm exposed.
He had been careful, and no witnesses should have seen him--
Then he saw the third banner.
The wan as bone device stark upon black. It did not move as the others did. Even at that distance, it seemed to watch.
His composure faltered, and did not right itself at once.
The horse’s ears flicked back and its breath came quicker.
“Fuck,” the word was scarcely more than air.
He would not have gone to the gate, even without their presence.
The sea-path was rough and slick beneath his hands, worn smooth by his own passing more than the waves. He climbed without pause, wind rising off the water in cold breaths that tugged at his clothes and hair alike.
The window gave, as it always did, though not to any hand that tried it.
Inside, the air was no kinder.
Cold held in the stone. The scent of salt had seeped even into this hidden place, the sea refused to be shut out.
It was not a chamber meant for living.
Cloaks and mantles hung in no order, some cut shorter, some weighted at the hem. Boots sat beneath them in pairs, worn to different shapes. A narrow table held what was needed: knives without ornament, a coil of rope, flint and tinder laid ready. Packs half-filled. Dried food wrapped and stacked.
Nothing there belonged to a prince.
Everything there belonged to him.
Gwayne stood near the table.
“We’ve company,” Valarr told him.
“You’re the last to know.” Gwayne’s gaze moved over him then, one eye dulled where the other remained keen; it lingered nowhere, yet missed nothing.
Valarr unfastened his cloak and threw it onto a nearby hook.
Gwayne crossed to the door in two strides, angling his head a fraction ahead of his step, as though to fix the world in place before he moved through it. “Hurry. Be worth the trouble.”
His chamber lay as he had left it.
He dropped to one knee beside the bed and patted for clothes left too long in neglect. One shirt, then another - both sour but unfit. The third gave what he needed: stained through at the collar, stiff where wine had dried and been left.
Valarr stripped where he stood and dragged the linen over his head while kicking what he didn’t need back under the bed frame. A creased, ill-kept doublet followed, cut to sit wrong across his shoulders. He exchanged his belt for another, its leather scarcely worn, the buckle still bright where it should have dulled.
By the time Gwayne returned, the guise was nearly set.
“The castellan already has them in hand,” he said, shutting the door behind him.
Valarr turned to the metal plate hung crooked on the wall.
He dipped his hand into the basin beside it and dragged wet fingers through his hair, then again, rougher, breaking what order remained. The white along the right side cut through the darker brown like a scar laid into it.
He slackened his shoulders and shifted his balance.
Gwayne watched. “Do not overplay it.”
“It would disappoint expectations.”
“They expect disappointment,” he returned, moving for the door. “Not idiocy.”
Valarr tilted his head, considering the distinction.
He met his own gaze in the dim metal, let it go, then followed.
—
The wind turned colder as they rode the last miles.
Dunk had known wind all his life - across fields, along roads, through broken villages - but this came off the water with a bite carrying salt and something older besides. Not rot or ash, but a scent that settled into a person and did not leave them.
It brought to mind other fields, long after the fighting and men had died, when he had walked them with Rafe, turning over the fallen for what little might be taken. Leather or scraps of metal. The air had carried blood and churned earth, not death itself, but what was left behind when men were done with conquest.
Ahead, the castle rose from the rock as if it had been forced up from the earth rather than built upon it. The towers did not climb so much as coil. Even at a distance, the place gave the sense of an encased creature, and he did not know where to look that would make him understand what he approached.
Dunk had thought himself past wonder after the Red Keep. Dragonstone told him he was not.
He rode just off Prince Baelor’s left.
Despite his age, the king sat upright in his seat, no favoring of one side or the other. Beside him, his son rode with his attention fixed ahead, the same man Dunk had followed from Ashford, though the ease that had shown there was gone. Behind them came the king’s sorcerer, an eerie presence Dunk found himself aware of without wishing to be.
The gates opened before them without delay.
Men stood ready in the yard beyond, drawn up in order, though Dunk marked the small betrayals of haste: one man setting his cloak straight a moment too late, another stepping out of line before catching himself. A castellan came forward to speak the formal words of welcome, bowing low before the king. Sweat ran along his temples despite the cold.
No prince stood with him.
They were led within. The halls turned more than ran, black stone curving in ways that made one uncertain of distance. A man could get lost here and not be found again, and Dunk would not know if that was the fault of the castle or the man.
Heat gathered from braziers set along the walls, though the stone beneath Dunk remained cold when he neared one in passing. His boots sounded wrong on the stone. Too loud, though no one else seemed to hear it.
Compared to the Red Keep, the wealth here was set at a cost he could not reckon, yet shown for no one’s comfort.
By the time they were brought into the hall, the meal had been laid.
Dunk took the place given him off the prince’s shoulder, standing a step behind the chair as the white cloaks took their places.
Before the king, his son, and Lord Rivers, trenchers had been set. Meat lay carved from the spit, steam still rising where the knife had parted it. A bird, cut and dressed in some dark glaze, bled into its own crisped skin. Loaves had been broken open and spread with butter that softened too quickly in the heat. There were figs stewed down to sweetness, onions drowned in fat, and a flagon of wine so deep in color it might have been mistaken for blood in poor light. Salt sat near the king’s hand in a small, worked dish.
The king spoke in a tone that never rose, yet carried. Baelor answered him calmly, a smile set in place for the room rather than for himself.
Brynden said nothing, but Dunk felt his part in the conversation all the same.
The doors opened again.
He glanced up. Dunk had heard enough from Raymun to know who this must be. Yet nothing in the young prince before him matched that telling at first glance. A white cloak was a step behind him.
The young prince’s clothes were of good make, but ill-kept, sitting wrong across the shoulders as though they had been worn too long and with too little care. The smell of wine was on him, sharp in one breath and gone in the next.
His hair was brown where it should have been silver-gold, damp and uncombed, lying wrong about his head. Stark white strands cut along the right side of his head.
His eyes were not of one color, or it seemed so. Shadows altered the certainty of Dunk’s observation.
Valarr’s course strayed, and he set it right too late; Dunk felt embarrassed for him.
“Your Grace. My prince. Lord Rivers. I had no word of your coming.”
The king’s gaze rested on his grandson longer than was needed to mark his condition. “Word has trouble finding you of late,” Daeron said, and left it there. “Sit.”
He took his place but did not touch the food set before him.
“You have not been where you ought.”
Valarr set his hand against the table, fingers spread as though to find purchase. The wood did not move. “I have fallen short, Your Grace.”
Dunk found himself waiting for the turn, an excuse or deflection that would set things right or aside, but none came.
“Then you will have a man assigned to you.” When Baelor spoke, the air about the table altered for it.
Dunk felt it like a misstep in the dark.
“He is sworn to me,” Baelor went on, “and will now be sworn to you. Ser Duncan.”
Dunk looked to the prince, but the Hand never glanced his way; the matter settled by its naming.
So Dunk looked to the young prince.
Valarr had not moved, yet the dissolute sprawl did not reach his eyes. They had swiftly fixed on him, but left as soon as Dunk noticed, slipping back beneath the loosened posture and the uneven line of his shoulders.
Dunk turned his face to the ground.
He told himself the young prince could not have marked anything of him. There was nothing to give him away beneath the new dark cloak and unadorned steel armor Baelor had provided.
Even so, Dunk found himself standing straighter. He almost reached for his belt, half-expecting to find the rope still there, but cast the urge aside.
He did not know what the stripling had seen. Only that it was not the look of any drunken princeling.
“You have shown,” Baelor’s voice held no anger, only a steady firmness, “that I have given you too much leave.”
Valarr’s shoulders drew in, not enough to be remarked upon by most, but Dunk saw the way his arms came closer to his sides, and there was no defiance in the action - only the fleeting, unguarded discomfort of a son who heard what had been said, and felt it.
Dunk had not expected that.
Behind the prince’s chair, Gwayne did not move.
Valarr did not turn.
Nothing passed between them that any courtier would have named.
“As you will, my lord.” Valarr swallowed and thoughtlessly smoothed a hand against his tunic beneath the table.
The king said nothing to Brynden, nor Brynden to him, yet those red eyes did not move from the young prince.
Daeron broke the stillness. “And what have you been about, then?”
The question sat lighter than the conversation before it, and Valarr's mouth went near to a smile. “Little that would recommend me, I think.”
“So ready an admission,” Brynden remarked to the table.
Dunk started despite himself.
The man had spoken little since they embarked from King's Landing. He had begun to seem part of the room rather than within it and his voice came idly, not aligning with his presence.
“One might almost think it practiced.”
“I’ve made a poorer account of myself already,” Valarr’s fingers brushed once at the edge of his cup before he pulled back to rub at the back of his neck. “Pray do not mistake it for a virtue.”
Baelor’s smile came and held by will.
“Go on,” the king’s amusement had not yet gone. “Try me.”
The men returned to their meal as the king and young prince talked. Dunk found himself watching the young prince in glances, unsure if he would be met with that unnerving regard again.
Valarr ate little, though he handled knife and cup.
Like his father, he did not look like a prince - not as Dunk understood such things.
Yet he did not look like anything else, either.