94 AC, King’s Landing.
A damp sea wind carried the fading light of summer’s morning across the great city.
The towering Red Keep looked down upon its subjects, and from within the vast Dragonpit came the faint roar of dragons.
Morning light passed through the carved lattice of the tall glass windows, casting diamond-shaped shadows across the parchment before the boy, cutting through the finely rendered bones, vessels, and layered muscle drawn upon it.
The pen in the boy’s hand scratched softly as he traced the final lines, silver hair falling across eyes of purple, lending a certain fragile beauty to a face that was already fine-featured, nearly beautiful in its own right.
Quentyn Qoherys had lived through thirteen name days.
His fourteenth was still some time off, though not so very far.
As heir to Harrenhal, he carried a secret that only he knew.
He was a transmigrator.
When the college student who knew A Song of Ice and Fire by heart, but had only a loose and passing familiarity with Fire & Blood: The Targaryen Dynasty, found himself struck by fate into the body of a silver-haired, purple-eyed infant, and at last confirmed that he had crossed into Westeros, he had been startled to discover that this world was not quite the one he knew.
Who could it have been?
Quentyn set down his pen and leaned back, sinking into the soft velvet cushions of his chair, staring up at the gilded Lysene chandelier overhead.
Whoever had twisted the world’s timeline this far out of shape must have been some transmigrator who came before him.
But why had they left nothing behind…
He said as much to himself, lifting the anatomical drawing that had taken him so long to complete, and fell into thought.
More than two hundred years before, the Valyrian Freehold, which had ruled half the world, met its end at the very height of its glory.
The dragonlords who had once ridden their dragons across the heavens fell in a sky full of fire.
House Targaryen was the only dragonlord family to survive.
Before the Doom, House Targaryen had lost out in the scheming of the Forty Dragonlords.
To survive, the dragonlord Aenar Targaryen chose to heed the prophecy of his daughter, Daenys the Dreamer, and fled with five dragons, his kin, and his sworn men to the Freehold’s frontier fortress of Dragonstone, where they took root and, in the end, escaped the destruction of the Doom.
The forebear of House Qoherys had once been a dragonless Targaryen.
Once that ancestor was certain he would never bond a dragon, he chose to found this cadet branch and become a sworn vassal to the main line.
In the days of the Freehold, dragonless scions and unfavored sons held no standing at all among the dragonlord houses.
Like ordinary Valyrian nobles, they had only two paths open to them: strike out for the colonies, or remain within the family to serve as retainers to the dragonlords, contributing their blood to the line.
Over the centuries that followed, House Qoherys had not faded away as other cadet branches had, but endured stubbornly through repeated intermarriage with the main line, all the way down to when they followed Aenar Targaryen to Dragonstone.
After House Velaryon of the Tides and House Celtigar of Claw Isle swore their fealty to House Targaryen, House Qoherys was no longer the first choice for a dragonlord’s marriage.
Still, over the hundred years on Dragonstone, the two houses intermarried on several more occasions.
Ninety-six years before, Quentyn’s great-great-grandfather, his own namesake and a master-at-arms of Dragonstone, had followed Aegon Targaryen “the Conqueror” in the conquest of all of Westeros save Dorne.
The North, the Vale, the Westerlands, the Reach, the Riverlands, the Stormlands, the Iron Islands…
The fertile lands the First Men had carved out with bronze and fire, the kingdoms the Andals had shaped with steel, warhorses, and the faith of the Seven, the foreign shores where the displaced Rhoynar had finally made their home, all of it came under Targaryen rule beneath the shadow of dragons.
To reward that Quentyn Qoherys for his service, to repay him for his years as a teacher, and to raise up a Valyrian noble loyal to the Crown, King Aegon granted him the largest castle in the Seven Kingdoms: Harrenhal, burned to ruin during the Conquest by the dragonflame of Balerion, “the Black Dread,” along with the lands surrounding the God’s Eye.
That much was the story as Quentyn knew it.
By rights, the next step should have been Harrenhal’s infamous curse taking hold, making House Qoherys the great fortress’s first victim.
But from there, the story had gone racing off into territory Quentyn did not recognize.
House Qoherys, which by rights should have been annihilated in 37 AC during Hoheart Harren’s Rebellion, had miraculously survived.
Back when he was still a child crawling about on the floor, Quentyn had pried at his family’s history through careful questions put to his father, Daeron Qoherys, his mother, Valera Targaryen, and his grandmother, Lady Agatha, who was still living at the time.
Sure enough, the story had carried a strange, unsettling flavor from the very beginning.
Quentyn learned that his great-great-grandfather had married twice.
The first marriage had been to Aegon I’s own aunt, Benella Targaryen.
His great-grandfather, Aegon Qoherys, was born of that match.
Unhappily, his great-great-grandmother had died before the Conquest itself.
After being granted Harrenhal, in keeping with Aegon I’s own design, his great-great-grandfather took a second wife: Lady Lysa, daughter of Edmyn Tully, Lord Paramount of the Riverlands and Lord of Riverrun.
With Lady Lysa he fathered a second son, Hoster Qoherys.
The misfortunes began there.
Before his great-great-grandfather died in a fall from his horse in 9 AC, his great-grandfather Aegon had died suddenly and strangely.
His great-grandmother, Isolde Velaryon, faced with the deaths of both her husband and father-in-law within the span of a few short days, was filled with dread.
When she discovered she was with child, that dread reached its peak.
Isolde fled back to her birth family on Driftmark, disregarding Lady Lysa’s pleas to stay, and voluntarily gave up her own line’s claim to the succession.
It was there that she gave birth to Quentyn’s grandfather, Aenys Qoherys.
Later still, Hoheart Harren’s Rebellion broke out just as history said it would, and Hoster’s son, the infamous “Wedding Guest” Gogen, was brutally murdered, ending that branch of House Qoherys’s bloodline.
Aenys, at the time, was serving as squire to Maegor Targaryen.
Once his own namesake, King Aenys Targaryen I, learned of Aenys’s true parentage, the king restored Harrenhal to him.
It was from that point that the timeline had begun to unravel.
In short, from that point on, House Qoherys had backed the winning side again and again, and had even seen Quentyn’s own father, Daeron Qoherys, wed a Targaryen princess.
That princess was his own mother, Valera Targaryen, sister to Jaehaerys I, “the Conciliator,” who now sat the Iron Throne, and to “Good Queen” Alysanne.
Just then, someone knocked lightly on the wooden door of the tavern room.
“My lord Quentyn, the man you asked to meet, Master Garwyn, has arrived.”
A voice, still faintly boyish, came from beyond the door, and close on its heels followed a heavier, more full-bodied voice.
“Little Robert, grown so tall already?
Seems the old saying holds true, bas— ah, bastards always grow up sturdy.
Whatever the Seven take away, they’re generous enough to give back elsewhere…”
The door creaked open at that moment.
“Garwyn, I feel obliged to remind you of two things.
First, his name is Robb, not Robert.
Second, he is your liege lord’s squire, and to use such disrespectful language toward your liege’s squire, does that not strike you as offensive?”
Quentyn turned his chair around.
The dark-haired boy entered first, taking his place at Quentyn’s side, his back straight as one of the spears set into the walls of the Red Keep.
He looked a little younger than Quentyn, with hair as black as a raven’s feather, bronzed skin, a lean build, and long, slender fingers.
He was plainly a boy well-suited to the bow.
Robb Rivers, bastard of House Blackwood of Raventree Hall, was one of the very few people in this age whom Quentyn actually knew.
Five years before, on his way to study at Oldtown, he had gone out of his way to pass through the Blackwood valley.
With the dream of knighthood, and, far more importantly, a handful of malt candy and a pouch of copper coins, he had won over the bastard boy, who at the time had still been running bare-bottomed through the village, hunting birds.
Quentyn’s gaze settled on the burly man, who had clearly frozen for a moment.
The man looked to be somewhere in his forties, his pate shining smooth and round without a single stray hair, a coarse black beard perfectly concealing his double chin, and an ornate silk coat hanging loose off him, so that he put Quentyn in mind of nothing so much as a bloated walrus.
As the representative of the King’s Landing Cloth Merchants’ Guild, Garwyn Chambers hailed from House Chambers of Lakeport, a wealthy landed knightly family sworn to House Qoherys.
As the second son of his house, Garwyn Chambers possessed no particular skill at arms to win himself a knighthood.
So instead he had chosen to bring cheap Riverlands wool to King’s Landing, have it woven and sold there, and through this trade had become one of King’s Landing’s most renowned merchants.
He’s put on weight, Quentyn thought, comparing the man before him with the Garwyn of his memory, and felt a flicker of wariness.
His appetite, it seemed, had grown right along with him.
“There is more than one nobly-born bastard at His Grace the King’s court.
If you jested with them to their faces the way you just did, I imagine you know far better than I what the consequences would be.
After all, they are not your liege lord, and they will not forgive your mistakes.”
Quentyn nodded to Robb, signaling the dark-haired boy to fetch a chair for the great King’s Landing merchant, and then his young face went abruptly stern.
Garwyn came back to himself and hastily bowed low, an ingratiating smile already on his face.
“Now look at me, my lord…”
He hurried to take the chair from Robb’s hands, and with one hand clasped the boy’s own.
“Seven hells.
Do forgive old Garwyn’s wretched tongue.
Ah, I ought to have downed a few pints of good strong barley ale first, so as not to go spouting nonsense in front of my lord Quentyn.”
Robb, for a moment, seemed at something of a loss.
“That’s enough, Garwyn.
Leave my squire be.”
Quentyn said, with some exasperation.
A hungry old fox, and no mistake…
Quentyn rendered his private judgment of the man.
Sure enough, at Quentyn’s words, Garwyn withdrew his hand at once and turned to seat himself, the awe fading from his eyes, leaving nothing behind but a merchant’s shrewd self-interest.
Of course, that self-interest was concealed neatly beneath a veil of loyalty.
“My lord Quentyn, as you well know, the common folk and noble lords of King’s Landing are partial to velvet out of Myr.
Or failing that, the lesser goods that come from Braavos.
The price you’re offering, I’ve no quarrel with it myself, but…
I fear my fellow merchants won’t be able to stomach it.”