ACT III: The Reign of Jaehaerys I — Part 2: The Severance and Exile (87 AC – 101 AC)
Just a heads-up for anyone reading: the events in this chapter happen for one specific reason—the plot.
I’m not going to write a story set during the Dance of the Dragons without actually having the Dance of the Dragons.
As for “them”—you’ll find out who I mean in the chapter—they will be the protagonist’s adversaries; mind you, face-to-face, they can’t do a thing.
And before anyone mentions it: yes, they can see the future too, so just keep that in mind.
Can you guess which nobles are involved?
Enjoy the chapter, everyone.
Chapter 17: Poison, Massacre, and the Shadows of Destiny (92 AC)
A frightened female scream echoed through the clear skies of the South, followed immediately by a deep, mocking laugh.
Tearing through the clouds at high speed, a pale-grey speck cut through the air desperately: it was Princess Viserra, mounted on the back of her skittish Grey Ghost, trying at all costs to escape the relentless pursuit of The Cannibal.
Behind her, the gigantic black dragon with wings spread wide closed the gap effortlessly, emitting low growls that made the smaller one tremble with dread in the heights.
Obviously, all of it was nothing more than brutal aerial combat training.
However, the terrifying aura of the black dragon turned the simulation into an incredibly amusing nightmare—amusing, of course, strictly for me.
After satisfying myself with the maneuvers and seeing that Grey Ghost was at the limit of his physical stamina, I guided The Cannibal downward, descending toward a small deserted island in the middle of the ocean.
A few minutes later, Viserra landed her reptile beside mine, unbuckling herself from the saddle with her legs slightly trembling and her face flushed with adrenaline.
“Do you really need to do this in such an insane way?” Viserra protested, adjusting her silver hair and glaring at me with her dark violet eyes flashing.
“I am absolutely certain that on at least three occasions I only escaped death by pure and simple luck!”
I made myself comfortable on the warm sand of the beach, offering a sly smile.
“Perhaps I am just trying to find a plausible excuse to get rid of you and seek a more beautiful wife in the realm, my dear.”
Viserra let out a scoffing laugh, crossing her arms with the faultless elegance that had become her trademark as the Lady of the Blessings.
“That excuse of yours doesn’t even make sense, Arthos.
Where in the hell would you find a wife more beautiful than me in this world?
You would have to peacefully wait for me to die and reincarnate in another life to have any chance!
And do you want to know something?
On account of this bad joke of yours in the air, no sex for you today.
And since Daenerys is busy in the North taking care of the order, you’ll have to sleep alone on the tower couch tonight.”
I raised an eyebrow, looking at her with irony.
“Now then…
And for what exact reason would I not have sex today, when the Red Keep is overflowing with young, attractive handmaidens eager to please the Crown’s Sorcerer?”
Viserra took a step forward, wearing a venomous smile.
“If you are counting on those handmaidens, know that every single one of them is infinitely more afraid of me and my punishments than horny for your body, my husband.”
I looked around the deserted beach, contemplating the vastness of the sea surrounding us, and turned my eyes back to my wife.
“Look around, dear…
We are on a completely deserted island.
And a rather small island, to be exact.”
“Yes…
And so what?” she questioned, suspicious.
“Do you really think you can run from me here?”
Viserra looked at the edges of the sandy island, realized my intention, and took off running across the beach.
I smiled at the graceful childishness of the scene and decided to give her about thirty seconds of a head start, just to demonstrate that I could still be a gentleman when I saw fit.
When time ran out, I surged forward with supernatural speed enhanced by my body sorcery.
In mere seconds, I caught Viserra by the waist, tackling her gently onto the soft sand and pulling her body beneath mine.
I wasted no time on futile chatter.
Pulling up her riding garments and parting her soft thighs, I began fucking her right there, under the sea breeze and the sound of waves crashing on the shore.
“Running slow like that, you can’t hide from anyone the desperate desire to be caught on the beach, my wife…” I whispered in her ear as I dictated a heavy, deep rhythm that drew loud, breathless groans from the princess’s lips.
After finishing our small, wild session of lovemaking by the seashore, we dressed and returned atop our dragons to the capital.
In the Small Council meeting held that same afternoon, the main topic debated among the councilors was the wave of violence and the bloodbath promoted by pirates and corsairs from the Free City of Myr.
I immediately suggested to King Jaehaerys I that we urgently reinforce the maritime and land defenses across the entire eastern coast of Westeros, preventing those wretches from setting foot on our soil.
However, the Old King, confident in traditional diplomacy and geographic distance, simply did not believe the corsairs had the audacity to invade the territory of the Seven Kingdoms.
Barely a week later, another emergency meeting was called in haste.
The news confirmed the worst: the Myrish corsairs had landed and seized control of the entire eastern part of the island of Tarth.
At the council table, I looked at Jaehaerys and raised a single eyebrow in a mocking gesture.
The monarch merely let out a heavy sigh and stared at me with tired eyes, saying before I could even open my mouth:
“Don’t even start, Arthos.
Just don’t start.”
The meeting concluded with Prince Aemon Targaryen rising promptly and offering to lead the Crown’s military response, flying to the island on the back of Caraxes.
I walked to the Dragonpit shortly after.
I found the heir to the throne adjusting the straps of his red dragon’s saddle, preparing for the impending journey.
Upon noticing my approach through the stone galleries, Aemon offered a friendly smile.
“Lord Vaelarys…
Did you come here to say goodbye to me?”
“Never speak that kind of word when departing for a war, Aemon,” I replied in a serious tone, adjusting my leather gloves.
“You might end up attracting bad luck to your own fate.”
The crown prince smiled with pride, patting Caraxes’s scaly neck.
“Do not worry, my friend.
I am a dragon.
And dragons are not brought down so easily.”
“Dragons can be killed too, my prince,” I complemented firmly.
“But you do not need to worry today.”
At that exact moment, the deafening roar of The Cannibal echoed above the pit’s upper opening, indicating the black beast had arrived.
“I am coming with you,” I declared.
Aemon looked at me with a mix of surprise and genuine admiration.
“To fight alongside the great Sorcerer of House Vaelarys and his fearsome Cannibal…
It is a true honor, my lord.
I am certain the bards will sing of this battle for many years!”
I looked at the prince in silence, thinking to myself that if I were not present on that trip, the bards truly would sing for years…
but it would be a funeral song about his tragic death in combat.
The journey to the island of Tarth went quickly and smoothly atop two winged beasts.
Upon landing in the courtyard of the local castle, I saw Aemon dismount, remove his steel helm, and converse cheerfully and warmly with Lord Tarth, who was relieved by the arrival of dragon reinforcements.
Using my skinchanging sorcery, I projected my consciousness across the island’s surroundings, taking control of the eyes and ears of small birds and gulls soaring over the eastern coast.
In a few minutes of scanning, I located the camp of Myrish crossbowmen hidden among the rocks.
However, among the dozens of mercenaries, the posture of one specific crossbowman caught my arcane attention: the man moved with a professional rigor entirely different from the rest, demonstrating he was a highly trained, seasoned assassin.
Later, during the strategy meeting inside the castle’s war room, we gathered around the tactical map with the Lord of Tarth.
Aemon, noticing my prolonged silence, approached.
“You are incredibly quiet today, Lord Vaelarys…
Did something happen?”
“Nothing that cannot be resolved in a matter of seconds,” I replied calmly.
In the very next millisecond, the sharp, distinct thwack of a heavy crossbow firing cut through the air from the room’s upper window.
That same experienced crossbowman I had previously identified executed the perfect shot from an absurd distance, aiming straight at Prince Aemon’s defenseless throat.
Before the iron bolt could pierce the heir’s flesh, I shifted my personal temporal flow.
My left hand darted through the air like a grey lightning bolt and caught the wood-and-iron bolt millimeters from hitting Aemon’s neck.
Aemon and Lord Tarth widened their eyes in absolute shock, paralyzed by the unbelievable sight.
The Lord of Tarth took a few seconds to process what had happened before shouting desperately for the guards to bar the castle, warning that we were under attack by enemy snipers.
Through my psychic link with the birds in the area, I saw the conspiring crossbowman glare at me from afar with horror upon realizing the shot had been thwarted.
Without hesitating for a single second and demonstrating the fanaticism of his order, the man pulled a curved dagger and drove it hard into his own neck, committing instant suicide to avoid any interrogation.
Instants later, a gigantic black shape plummeted from the heavens like a meteor onto the mercenaries’ hideout.
The Cannibal opened his jaws and incinerated the entire camp of crossbowmen in a single blast of black-and-green flame.
The few who did not die from the beast’s crushing impact were reduced to ashes in seconds.
I turned to the heir to the throne and handed the poisoned bolt directly into his hands.
“Well…
It seems today was not your day to die after all, my prince.”
With the assassin’s threat neutralized and the overwhelming presence of two dragons in the sky, the cleanup of the remaining Myrish mercenaries on the island of Tarth proceeded quickly and methodically.
Local forces and the dragons swept through the corsairs with ease.
The next morning, as we prepared to mount our steeds and return to the capital, Aemon remained visibly thoughtful.
He stared at the poisoned bolt in his hands before looking at me.
“You…
“The future is not something carved in unchangeable stone, my prince,” I replied coldly, adjusting The Cannibal’s reins.
“Tomorrow is uncertain and volatile.
That is precisely why I made a point of accompanying you on this journey…
To see what would happen and ensure the correct outcome.”
Aemon let out a deep sigh, gazing at the marine horizon.
“Thank you, my great friend…
Leaving so much behind had never truly worried me in the past.
But today…
Today I clearly realize all that I would have lost.”
The news of Prince Aemon’s heroic rescue and the crushing victory at Tarth was received with great fanfare and celebration in King’s Landing, especially by King Jaehaerys and the royal family.
However, my mind remained focused exclusively on the figure of that suicided crossbowman.
That man was definitely no ordinary mercenary.
His training, precision, and determination to kill himself instantly revealed a clear goal of political assassination.
Neither the Faith of the Seven nor the Citadel possessed the technical capacity to train an assassin of that caliber.
There was a dangerous mystery operating in the shadows of the continent.
The next day, court routine seemed to have returned to normal during the Small Council meeting.
However, the session was abruptly interrupted by the arrival of an urgent raven from Dragonstone: the messages reported that the ancestral island’s volcano was displaying anomalous behavior and worrying tremors.
Being the court’s sole specialist in earth and dragon sorcery, I was forced to fly immediately to Dragonstone to inspect the Mount’s structures.
However, as soon as The Cannibal gained altitude and cut through the clouds toward the island, a cold, bitter sensation rose up my spine.
The entire situation reeked of an orchestrated trap.
My suspicion was confirmed in the worst possible way.
In mid-flight over the sea, I felt through my arcane sensitivity that the blood protection glyphs and runes I had carved into the walls of the Red Keep were activated with extreme violence.
Someone had broken the royal family’s private barriers.
“Turn back, Cannibal!
Now!” I commanded mentally.
The gigantic black dragon made a tight turn in midair and shot back toward King’s Landing at maximum speed.
I landed The Cannibal directly in the castle’s inner courtyard, vaulting from the saddle and sprinting through the stone corridors to the heir’s quarters.
Upon crossing the door to the royal chambers, I was met with a devastating scene.
Prince Aemon’s body lay lifeless on the large oak bed.
Beside the bed, King Jaehaerys I was holding his wife, Queen Alysanne, while Jocelyn, Aemon’s widow, wept copiously in despair in the corner of the room.
Approaching the corpse in silence, I examined my friend’s eyes and veins: he had fallen victim to a devastating, ultra-fast-acting alchemical poison administered in his drink.
Jaehaerys raised his grief-reddened eyes to me, his voice trembling with shock.
“It happened as soon as you took off for the North, Arthos…
It seems those wretches were just waiting for you to leave the city to act!”
“I don’t think they were just waiting, my friend…” I replied, my voice dangerously calm.
“They orchestrated the false alarm at the volcano specifically to draw me away.”
I immediately activated my Greensight, causing my grey eyes to turn milky as I navigated the recent memories of that room’s temporal space.
I saw the scene clear in my mind: a young and seemingly harmless maid had taken advantage of my lack of vigilance to drop a colorless substance into Aemon’s wine goblet.
Navigating the city’s arcane connections, I located that maid’s aura.
The woman was trying to flee desperately through the alleys of Flea Bottom.
I sent a direct mental order to the men of my secret order of arcane assassins operating in the capital.
In under three minutes, my spies intercepted the fugitive and dragged her unconscious directly into the private quarters.
When my men threw the maid onto the floor of the room, the woman woke in panic, screaming that she would tell everything she knew if we spared her life.
“Yes…
You will tell me everything,” I declared without a shred of emotion.
I approached the woman, cupped her forehead with the palm of my left hand, and channeled my blood sorcery directly into her brain.
I forced access to her deep memories, extracting the image of the intermediaries who had paid her with gold coins.
The intensity of my invasive arcane examination destroyed the woman’s neural connections, causing her instant brain death.
In a surge of blind fury over having been fooled, I grabbed the dead maid’s head and snapped her neck with brutality, smashing the corpse’s skull against the stone floor.
I took a deep breath, wiping the blood off my hands with a cloth, and looked at the king.
“The damned Citadel…”
Jaehaerys stepped forward, in disbelief.
“The Citadel?…
The Citadel of Oldtown killed my son?!”
“Yes,” I replied.
“But what I truly cannot understand is what the hell Vaegon was doing while all of this was happening!”
I channeled my blood magic to trace the vital signature of Prince Vaegon—the youth I had positioned inside the Citadel to control and purge the antimagic factions of the order of maesters.
However, the mental search returned nothingness.
Vaegon had completely vanished from my monitoring networks.
I stood in the middle of the room, staring at the stone ceiling as the realization of my own hubris crashed down on my shoulders.
How long had I operated as an unbeatable predator on this continent?
Years of easy victories had caused me to forget the most basic and essential rule of survival: the most dangerous moment when hunting a beast is precisely when it finds itself cornered with no way out.
I turned to the monarch and bowed my head.
“I ask for your genuine forgiveness, Jaehaerys…
It was through my fault, my extreme arrogance, and my negligence that your son was taken today.”
Jaehaerys frowned, not understanding my declaration.
“I do not understand you, Arthos!
Explain yourself!”
“Unlike the Faith of the Seven, which I destroyed gradually through the shadows, I left the Citadel under Vaegon’s supervision,” I explained with bitterness.
“We tightened the noose around the traditional archmaesters’ faction, but I made the blunder of forgetting a fundamental lesson: you must never completely corner an enemy without leaving them an escape route, or they will respond with a desperate, suicidal attack.”
The Old King stared at Aemon’s lifeless body on the bed.
The grief on his face gradually transformed into a cold, absolute hatred—something I had rarely seen in a man who had always preached peace and conciliation.
“I will avenge my friend and your son, Jaehaerys,” I declared, turning toward the door.
Before I could take the first step, King Jaehaerys I’s heavy hand gripped my shoulder with unyielding firmness.
The monarch stared into my grey eyes with a look of pure slaughter.
“Can you prove those wretches’ guilt to all the Seven Kingdoms, my friend?”
“I can,” I replied without hesitation.
“Then go…” the king ordered, his voice breaking with suppressed rage.
“And do not give a single one of those vermin a painless death.”
I left the royal quarters with long strides.
On the way to the outer courtyard, Daenerys joined me in silence.
The princess wore her combat garments and displayed a cold, sharp gaze; she had felt her brother’s death through the arcane web and knew exactly where we were headed.
We mounted The Cannibal and took off toward the South, flying at extreme altitude above the clouds to avoid detection from the ground.
I sent a mental command to the spies of my arcane order all along the route: whenever an emergency raven took flight from any southern castle toward Oldtown, my men shot the birds out of the sky with poisoned arrows, ensuring our approach remained a total element of surprise.
Hours later, the grand city of Oldtown and the imposing High Tower appeared beneath the horizon.
Using the consciousness of small creatures and rodents inhabiting the Citadel’s foundations, I located Prince Vaegon.
The boy was chained and imprisoned in the underground dungeons of the maesters’ order.
The archmaesters had executed a silent internal coup, isolating Vaegon after receiving secret aid from an external force—I perceived pockets of unknown black magic impregnated in the complex’s walls.
An ordinary dragon would already be a cause of uncontrollable dread for any city.
A powerful sorcerer would be a worse nightmare.
But a sorcerer of House Vaelarys mounted on the back of The Cannibal was the true apocalypse incarnate.
Taking advantage of The Cannibal’s own practically limitlessly vast vital and magical reserve, I channeled that brutal energy to reinforce the dragon’s physical structure and our own resistance in the air.
The gigantic black dragon began a vertical dive toward the Citadel’s central courtyard, plummeting from the sky without slowing down for a single second.
The Cannibal’s collision against the Citadel’s stone courtyard occurred with the kinetic force of a devastating meteor.
The colossal impact generated a shockwave that swept through and shook the entire city of Oldtown, knocking down roofs, cracking stone pavement, and destroying vulnerable structures across every neighborhood of the metropolis.
Curiously, the Citadel itself suffered not a single scratch or crack; the ancient construction from the Age of Heroes boasted wards and ancient enchantments so powerful that they absorbed the kinetic force of the impact without any structural damage, while the rest of the city trembled under The Cannibal’s overwhelming weight.
I dismounted from The Cannibal’s saddle accompanied by Daenerys.
The princess was visibly dizzy from the brutal deceleration of the impact, but she used the Valyrian steel rings on her hands to channel body magic and regain her balance in mere seconds.
I extended my consciousness across the entire Citadel complex, combining my blood sorcery with skinchanging to read the minds and memories of every maester, acolyte, and guard present.
In under a minute of mental scanning, I mapped out the exact list of every individual who had actively participated in or had knowledge of the conspiracy against Aemon and Vaegon.
I passed the mental list directly into Daenerys’s mind.
“And what about those who are not on that list of guilty ones, Arthos?” my apprentice asked, her voice icy.
“If any of them try to get in your way…
Kill them all,” I replied without hesitation.
Daenerys took the left galleries while I advanced down the right corridors.
A group of ten armed Citadel guards ran toward me with spears raised.
I merely raised my right hand and clenched my fist in the air.
The blood pressure in those men’s veins increased instantly until their bodies exploded in a grotesque rain of blood and viscera.
Before the red liquid could hit the ground, I manipulated the floating blood with my mind, transforming it into arcane blades and whips that shot up the stairs.
Directing the surging wave of blood against the crowd of acolytes and maesters filling the stairways, I made the magic react differently based on their guilt: for those identified on my list, the blood sorcery caused their own blood to boil violently inside their veins, roasting them from the inside out in agonizing screams.
For the innocent, the sheer impact of the blood whips merely knocked them unconscious, leaving them senseless on the stone steps.
I climbed to the top floor of the confinement section, reaching the iron cells designed to discipline the order’s rebellious members.
With a simple touch of my hand bathed in pyromancy, I melted the solid metal bars as if they were wax.
Inside the cell, I found Prince Vaegon sitting on the floor, bruised and bloody, accompanied by his few loyal allies within the order.
Seeing me emerge amidst the flames of the melted door, Vaegon let out a sigh of relief and pain.
“You took long enough to arrive, Lord Vaelarys…
I have been locked in this hole for days.”
“They were terribly complicated days in the capital, Vaegon,” I replied, helping the youth to his feet.
Vaegon stared into my grave eyes and asked, fearing the answer:
“What did those wretches do, Arthos?”
“They killed Aemon.”
The young prince closed his eyes, his face pale with shock and rage.
“Miserable…
Miserable idiots…”
As we exited the dungeon area and saw the bodies of the guards scattered on the floor, Vaegon looked around with dread.
“Did you kill all of them?”
“No…
Only most of the direct culprits who were here,” I replied in a calm tone.
Inside, I smiled with irony.
I thought to myself that in the following months, the “gods”—or rather, my arcane order’s assassins spread across the continent—would harshly punish the remainder of the conspiring maesters who were not in Oldtown at that moment.
After all, inexplicable accidents on the edges of staircases, high windows, and sudden attacks by venomous animals would become terribly common among the members of that order.
Reaching the central corridor, we met up with Daenerys again.
The princess was walking calmly toward us, her garments and skin completely bathed in the blood of the guilty she had executed along the left path.
A dark smoke of condensed magic floated behind her.
Dragged by the neck by Daenerys’s sorcery came one of the conspiring archmaesters, kept alive solely to be brought to the king’s judgment.
We advanced to the great Conclave Hall, where the remaining archmaesters were cornered.
Unlike what was speculated in the South, the true intellectual leader behind the entire conspiracy and Aemon’s assassination was the Archmaester of Higher Mysteries.
And the man’s motivation was surprisingly personal: years ago, that same archmaester had sent a group of mercenary thieves to attempt to break into and rob my family’s ancestral vault in the North, and one of the men killed during the break-in was his favorite bastard son.
Staring at the scene, I couldn’t help but let out a bitter laugh.
It was a classic, grotesque butterfly effect blowing up right in my face.
I approached the Archmaester of Higher Mysteries.
The man glared at me with eyes brimming with pure hatred, but his body was completely paralyzed by my body sorcery, allowing him only to move his eyes.
“Your fellow council members will be taken to King’s Landing so that King Jaehaerys may cut off their heads or feed them to Vermithor,” I declared in a calm tone.
“But you…
You are the main culprit behind this insanity.
And I know you are a coward hiding greater secrets.”
I touched the archmaester’s forehead to extract his final memories.
However, the instant my consciousness penetrated his mind, I felt an external arcane force pull my spiritual projection into an isolated psychic space.
In a second, I found myself standing in a realm of absolute darkness.
“Interesting…” I commented, looking around the black dimension.
“A real sorcerer…
And not one of those mediocre charlatans from the Houses of the Undying in Qarth.”
A deep, resonant voice—a voice composed of dozens of overlapping voices at once—echoed from the void of the darkness:
“The son of House Vaelarys tried to interfere with and alter the sacred destiny of this world…
Something that is absolutely inadmissible.
You shall be judged and corrected before our order.”
Feeling a psychic pressure attempt to crush my mind, I merely smiled with disdain and doubled my arcane willpower.
The pressure against me was shattered instantly, converting into a piercing scream of agony that echoed through the voices of the void until only a single conscious entity remained on the spot.
“Know your place, worm,” I commanded in an imperious tone.
From the shadows of the psychic realm, the figure of a man clad in dark robes and a bone mask projected himself before me.
I immediately recognized the nature of that magic: it was a Shadowbinder, an influential sorcerer hailing from the legendary and distant city of Asshai.
The Shadowbinder let out a low laugh, a laugh overflowing with a strange blend of fascination and fanatical adoration.
“Right…
Our order in Asshai was absolutely correct about you, Arthos Vaelarys.
Your late father was already too powerful a figure for the balance of the world, but you…
You have surpassed him in every conceivable aspect.
You are someone truly worthy of personifying a Song of Ice and Fire.”
To my surprise, the sorcerer from Asshai displayed no genuine hostility or fear toward me; he exhibited an almost religious adoration for my existence.
And as we were in a battle of spiritual projections, I knew he could not lie.
“I apologize for the inconveniences, great Mage Vaelarys…” continued the Shadowbinder.
“But the Dance of the Dragons must happen.
The lineage of the princes must crumble and the dragons must die so that they may be brought back to life again in the future by the hands of the reborn Azor Ahai.”
I let out a loud, mocking laugh in the sorcerer’s face.
“What absurd foolishness…
You are destroying the dynasty itself over a misinterpreted prophecy?”
“It is not foolishness, great Mage,” the man answered firmly.
“Destiny cannot be avoided, no matter how much you try to alter it with your sorcery.”
“Nor does destiny need to be forced by worms like you,” I countered serenely.
“If destiny dictates that the Targaryens must lose their dragons and eventually their dynasty, so be it.
But no arcane law says the dragons must be exterminated from the world…
Only that the Targaryens can no longer have them.”
The Shadowbinder bowed his head in respect.
“You have your vision…
Our order has ours.
We shall see which of our wills prevails in the end.”
“And what guarantees that I will not go to the city of Asshai right now to eradicate your entire order from the face of the earth?” I threatened.
The sorcerer’s projection began to slowly dissipate into the darkness.
“I rely on the simple fact that you will be too lazy to fly on the back of your dragon to the other side of the world just to get rid of us…”
With that declaration, the psychic illusion dissolved completely.
I flexed my blood magic and broke the mental trap, returning to the reality of the Citadel hall.
I extracted the final memories from the dying archmaester’s brain before ending his life.
I discovered that the conspiracy against Aemon had been funded by the order of Asshai, by the maesters’ faction, and by great noble lords of Southern Westeros who stood to benefit politically from the heir’s death.
And those lords had been extremely intelligent, utilizing complex networks of intermediaries protected by shadow magic to completely cover their tracks, preventing even my blood divination from identifying all the names involved.
The events that followed in the days after in King’s Landing altered my direct plans very little.
King Jaehaerys I personally conducted the trial of the conspiring archmaesters brought from Oldtown, sentencing them all to death for high treason.
The Old King acted as his own executioner, severing the culprits’ heads with the Valyrian steel blade Blackfyre.
To the surprise of the entire court, even Queen Alysanne demanded to execute with her own hands one of the maesters involved in the murder of her beloved son.
The queen was not seeking a graceful or clean execution; shaken by blind fury and devastating grief, she wanted to vent all her anger and suffering directly on the culprit, delivering three consecutive and pitiless sword strikes.
Any ordinary man would have gone into fatal shock or bled out completely on the very first strike, ruining Alysanne’s moment of release.
Because of that, I intervened discreetly through my blood sorcery, sustaining the maester’s vital force and keeping his consciousness perfectly intact so that he would feel the agonizing pain of each blade slicing his flesh.
I only allowed the wretch’s life to actually expire on the third strike, when his head finally rolled across the courtyard stones, guaranteeing the queen’s relief and revenge before everyone.
As for the southern lords who secretly funded the attack, the absence of direct names did not bother me.
I already suspected the main families involved.
What had truly caught my attention and my arcane interest was the existence of that order of sorcerers and Shadowbinders from Asshai.
The masked wretch was right on one point: I really wouldn’t bother flying to the end of the world in Essos just to hunt them down.
However, knowing that there was a group of arcane adversaries actively working against me on the continent brought a glimmer of excitement I hadn’t felt in decades.
What truly displeased me was the Small Council meeting that would take place that very morning.
Jaehaerys had summoned the councilors to officially announce the redefinition of the Iron Throne’s succession.
The Old King had decided to pass over the legitimate rights of Princess Rhaenys—the daughter of the late Aemon—to name his second son, Prince Baelon Targaryen, as the new Proclaimed Heir to the Crown.
That act by Jaehaerys, motivated by the sexist fear of the Andal lords and by disdain for Valyrian primogeniture, would be the first definitive step toward the ruin and end of my long friendship with the monarch.
Already deeply irritated before the session even began, I adjusted my grey velvet cloak and walked toward the Council Chamber.