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“How was I to know she was your wife?”
A blow to the face that knocked loose the feeble sense he had scraped together for the evening. It was not the first time Daeron had been punched, and likely would not be the last.
The foul man was so close to his face, Daeron could feel the flecks of spit hit him when he shouted. “Tellin' tall tales of some Targaryen prince come to sweep her off her feet. Spinnin’ talk of mighty castles and fresh-hatched dragons.”
“I spoke true! Well… perhaps not about the dragons.”
He was pushed up against the outside of a rotten tavern wall by calloused hands that had known hard labor, his collar bunched up by gnarled knuckles.
Daeron had a ring in his boot for moments such as these, had advised his youngest brother to do as such when he’d run off for the hedges, the little scoundrel. But his boot was very far away from where he was being throttled.
The girl had been young and comely enough, certainly worth a few cups as she’d sat on his lap and he’d wooed her with mulled wine, pretty words, and courteous compliments. She was not worth her husband’s fury however.
“My good fellow, nothing a few coins cannot clear up-”
“So now you take me wife for a whore?”
Daeron’s excuses were worth less than clipped coppers and eventually he was sent to sprawl amongst mud with some rooting pigs, breaking their wattled pen in his fall. His hair was matted thick with blood and muck and he stared up at the night sky while the hogs snorted around him and laughed for the indignity of it all.
The Seven stared down at him from a legion of twinkling eyes, winking in their complicity of his insensibility. If the gods did not want him to drink himself unconscious and chat up other men’s wives, they should not have made him tortured by dreams and good with his tongue.
No dreams found him that night, a mercy he scarcely deserved, but his troubles found him doubly.
As Daeron fumbled for his wine skin and sought to make the ground a soft feather bed and the oinking the snoring of a satisfied lover, he was accosted by yet more greedy hands, pulling him from his pursuits. Perhaps the hogs were married as well.
A set of burly fists dragged him limp from where he lay. Two men that looked to be four in his wine-false vision had hauled his body upright and were poking him in the chest and batting his cheek to get him to answer.
“Say, are you speaking the common tongue?” he asked them. “I only speak Dothraki, I’m afraid.”
Slapped for his insolence. He deserved that.
Finally some words registered in his drink-addled brain. “You’ve gone and caused quite the scene, you hear? You’re to accompany us to the bailiff.”
They carried no swords but crude sticks, their sparse armor was rusted and they stank as bad as he did. Village guards, and uneducated, perhaps he could barter his innocence.
“See here, my friends...” It did not help that his tone was a bog of sludge and he hiccuped out each word. “As it happens, I am a prince. Pleased to make your acqu- acquaintance. Daeron of hick House Targaryen. If you’d be so kind as to remove my boot-” but the wind was knocked from his chest by a well-placed blow.
“Best not add ‘impersonatin’ a noble’ to your charges,” the man reminded him. Daeron was simply another belligerent drunk to those unfortunate guards.
He had always coveted his brothers and their beautiful white heads. His hair was the colour of wet straw, and made him look more a common man than a descendant of old Valyria.
But it had its uses. For one, he did not draw eyes to him when he stumbled to some remote town or village and asked for the nearest alehouse. A nobleman’s sword meant little to him, and he carried only an unassuming dagger.
He’d dress in muted tones and rough fabrics and find himself drinking to his troubles and dicing away his coin. Songs were sung until dawn and he’d trip to some bed with a wench if he was lucky, or lay alone in a dew dampened ditch if he was not.
For Daeron’s life was one roll down a meadow hill, all grass-stains and dizzy head. It was only when he stopped tumbling did darkness truly find him. Dreams that made him retch for their vulgarity and sob for their intensity.
Nothing he’d ever found seemed to quiet them like drinking. Whoring was a close second, gambling a close third. But even after a tumble down a knoll that was his overindulgence, the dreams found him with renewed vengeance.
And yes, he’d laugh about it in some moments and weep about it in others, the fact that he was a complete failure of a human being and shame was near enough a friend. But at least he’d been born with enough coin to drown his unpleasantness properly.
When Daeron awoke as he often did, unsure of where he’d ended up, he was greeted by a sour smell and a throbbing pain. The smell was himself and the throbbing emanated from his own head. He gazed up with a stiff neck at the bars that enclosed him.
A few bleary memories wiped themselves with a soiled cloth over his recollection. A bit of a brawl, some pigs as drinking partners, a stiff punch to the face and the gut. So no more memorable a night than most.
He’d tried to use his signet ring but the jailer had pocketed it, naming him a thief.
Perhaps he’d stew there for an age until his father was forced to find him. Daeron’s body whined in protest to his waking, but the source of his rousing pounded like his head against the oak door of the jailhouse.
He watched through clumped strands of blond as several pairs of feet were marched inside, sabatons and leather soles trampling the entry and clattering in Daeron’s empty head.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?” A stranger's voice spoke— no, that was the bailiff’s voice, the one that had called Daeron a liar and a lecher.
But that other voice. He knew that one quite well.
Aerion did not need to raise his tone past a casual drawl, it sounded more dangerous when it was calm, the point of a needle. “You unfortunate stain of soot, do you know who I am?”
“I… indeed, your grace. You look to be the Brightflame, Prince Maekar's second son.” The man stammered but he spoke it true, Aerion had a passion for colourful silks, so saith his moniker.
“So you do not lack sight as you do wit.”
“I beg thee pardon?”
He heard his brother’s silence, it rang in his ears worse than his headache. “That man you have imprisoned like a peasant is a prince of the realm.”
Daeron clutched at the metal bars, observing them through tangled hair. Aerion looked as sharp as ever, two plated guards flanking him. “Aerion,” he choked. “So good it is to see you, brother. I am sorry I cannot offer you a drink.” His savior, dressed in red velvet and not even sparing him a second glance.
The jailor bowed his head. “My sincere apologies, m’Lord–”
“I am not a Lord, I am a Prince.”
“Of course, my Prince. I meant no offense. It’s only— Well, this man, prince or no, has racked up a lengthy list of charges this night of last. If I may…” He brandished a scroll presumptuously.
Aerion regarded him with spear points for pupils, jaw set firmly.
The man cleared his throat and read from parchment. “Public drunkenness-”
“It was a tavern,” Daeron tried to interject, his voice hoarse.
“Disturbing the peace-”
“It was my peace that was disturbed." Daeron insisted more loudly.
“Solicitation of prostitution-”
“She was not even a whore,” he implored.
“Incitement of adultery-”
“Aha! So there you have it, was she a whore or a wife?”
“Destruction of property-”
“I was thrown into the pigpen.”
“Larceny-”
“Of my own possessions!”
“And general misconduct,” the man concluded, the scroll curling back up with snap.
Daeron raised his palms in conceit. “I admit he has me on that last count.”
“What of it?” Was all Aerion said, examining his nails with little interest.
The man hammered on. Daeron would have admired such conviction if not behind the other’s iron. “With all respect, m’prince. For charges such as these, it is customary for the accused to spend a day’s turn in the pillory, as well as certain financial reparations.”
Aerion viewed him coldly, lips puckered, tilting his head slightly to the side as though inspecting some flaw in stonework. Then, he gathered a nasty pull of saliva and spit it to the floor. “I have just blessed the ground you walk upon, man. You are not worth the spit of the dragon. You will thank your prince.”
The man looked befuddled, but Aerion held his gaze, fixed expression. It took only the smallest of glances towards his guards for them to flex their presence and the man to respond. “I.. er, I thank ye, m’prince.”
“Now,” Aerion tongued his cheek appraisingly. “I won’t hear any of this nonsense about a pillory. I will be generous and pretend those false words did not leave your lips. However, let it not be said the Dragon House is without our courtesies.” He untied a purse from his belt and tossed it to the man’s feet.
It landed with a heavy clink of weighted coin.
“Yorkle, Gant, see my brother from that mildewed cell.”
The jailer retrieved the hefty purse and judged the weight, bouncing it in his hand before he took the ring of keys from his belt and unlocked Daeron’s rat cage, squalid vermin that he was.
Aerion tapped his toe insistently on the floor while the two knights hauled Daeron up to unruly legs. He balanced himself against their steel plate, familiar with embarrassment.
Daeron stretched his back. “A poor night’s rest. I don’t wager I’ll return for a second, innkeeper.” Daeron winked at the jailer, trying to clear his filthy hair from his face. He held out his hand and his ring was returned to him, fitting snugly on his finger.
The pale light of day made him flinch like the bite of a birch switch. The overcast sky burned a brutal white that dissipated through a healthy fog.
His brother led them to four horses, leaving a spare for the cleared convict. Daeron was not an accomplished rider, but could have sworn he’d ridden some palfrey to that quiet village before being so rudely accosted.
Their guards rode someways ahead of them, leaving his brother space to speak freely, likely by his own unspoken command.
“You reek like a pig and look as such,” Aerion commented.
“Well surely the gods need something to laugh at.”
“You mark us all with your weakness, Daeron. Every dragon that shares our blood is shamed by your foolery.” Aerion hissed his words but he tossed Daeron his wine skin without being asked.
Daeron gulped it down like the milk from a stingy teat. It ran dry punishingly fast, barely quenching his thirst. He wiped his mouth upon a soiled sleeve. “I promise that is not my intent. Although I don’t see why we should command such reverence. Our dragons are but stitching on banners, they fly only on flags.”
Aerion inclined his head with a roll of his neck. “You have your visions, Daeron. And I have mine. Flames made flesh. I will not be bound by skin forever. We are dragons.”
“That’s awfully cryptic.” Daeron laughed at Aerion’s overly serious tone. “We are dragons the way a puddle was once a pond.”
“A puddle is one strong rain away from a pond. For it reflects light just the same. You only dim your brightness, brother. And why fraternize with the commoners? There is wine enough at the castle. It cannot be their company you seek, when by their hand you end up in the dirt…Tell me true, was it a whore or a wife you tried to bed?” A slight hint of humour that he did not often submit to.
Daeron tried to drain any last fermented miracle from the wine skin. “She said she liked my scar,” he chuckled.
“You should see the girls in Lyse, they make the ones in Westeros look a bunch of untrained whores.”
“I’m alright with untrained whores, they try all the harder to please.” He tossed the empty wineskin back to his brother. “I suppose it was father who sent you to collect me,” Daeron said, dripping apprehension at the idea.
“Let the Father judge you, not our own. As it happens, I intercepted the steward with the news of your… predicament. Some drunken sot claiming to be a Prince of the Blood.”
Daeron broke a laugh through the dry tunnel of his throat. “Out of the kindness of your heart, I am sure. So what, do you wish to blackmail me?”
Aerion offered one of his old smirks, the kind he’d shed so freely as a boy. “My dear brother, do you take me for someone so base? I only wished to spare our house further slander. How would it look to have your dirty head locked in a pillory for the peasants to gawk at.”
“I always knew you had a heart of Valyrian steel,” Daeron jested.
“But now that you've mentioned it. There is something I could use your assistance with.”
Aerion had spent but a few years in the Free Cities. He had come home changed, but if for the better, Daeron could not say. He was more calculating, more concise, but the seed of madness he’d always fostered seemed to have snaked its way from a coiled gut to a rapid tongue.
“With all this time at Summerhall, you must know its contents rather intimately.”
Daeron curled with a shrug. “I try to spend as much time away from the castle as possible, as you might have noticed.”
“Indeed…”
“What is it you would know?” Daeron felt the saddle dig at him uncomfortably, there were much more pleasing things on which to sit.
“It comes to mind. Our youngest brother. He used to carry a dragon’s egg around with him. A shell the brackish colour of the depths.”
“I believe that’s why he took to the epithet,” Daeron mused fondly. Little Egg and his stone dragon.
“Have you any notion where father keeps that relic?”
Daeron knew exactly where he kept it. A locked chest in the storage room where mother’s portraits were stashed lest they provoke their father’s sorrow. “What care have you for an old egg the years have hardened?”
Aerion pursed his lips. His brother chose his words nowadays, considered their weight like a coin purse, choosing where to spend his coin. “I have seen many things across the Narrow Sea. Black magic and old sorcery. Prophets more reliable and less prone to madness,” his eyes slid sideways to gesture at Daeron. “Teas that offer visions, wines of evening that shade our current world with their foretellings.”
“So I suppose you had a productive exile, then?”
Aerion ignored him. “This continent has given up on us, brother. They are content to let legends remain on the pages of books and in the dried marrow of bones. Across the Sea they speak of rights and rituals. They do not worship seven silent spectators, but gods that make their miracles abundant."
“I’ve never heard you so devout–”
“And at the center of the whispers, at the backs of throats and on the tongue of all those enlightened, dragons.” Aerion spoke the last word with reverence. There was a terrible kindling sparking in his violet eyes and Daeron thought he sounded just as mad as he did with his dreams.
Aerion must have judged true the concerned look Daeron cast upon him, for he regained his posture even as Daeron named the request. “So you wish me to fetch you an old egg so that you might hatch it? I say, all that tea and wine you spoke of must have shriveled your brain like a raisin.”
His brother of the past would have clung at that jape with a sharp bite, but this new one picked it from his teeth. “You are always claiming your dreams come true, brother… Have you any dreams of dragons? Not dead ones, nay, but fire and blood.”
Daeron sighed, but his dreams took any invitation to be made verbal. “I know not if what I see has happened or has yet to. In one stretch of century past or hence, I see a dragon born of flesh with three heads. And upon each head, a crown of fire, and upon each tongue the breath of destruction.
“And it writhes from a barren womb and sprouts from the signing death of a wailing immolation. It drags its claws into the flesh of the earth and sows vile seeds of contamination. It rolls in waves of agony and-”
“Enough.”
Daeron blinked free the wretched image. “I know not what any of it means,” he admitted. “If it has been or has yet to. Still I see dreams of things that have come to pass. A dragon as large as a meadow, a field of sick-stricken dragons, the falling star of our mother…” He trailed away sadly.
“There is a saying spoken by the followers of the Red God.” Aerion sat sure in his saddle, swaying in time with the tepid trot. “That only death may pay for life.”
“Whose death, Aerion?”
This younger brother looked at him a long while, summing him up, evaluating him. It felt exposing, and embarrassing. Daeron realized how he must look next to his brother, one a vibrant prince with short silver hair, and the other, a mud covered mat of tangled curls and trembling fingers.
Daeron gripped the reins to steady his hands as his brother only flashed him a tainted smile.
“Come, brother.” Aerion quickened their pace. “You must invent some plausible story for that split lip and peasant’s garb.”