His blood was boiling.
The instant he touched Vhagar, that was the only sensation left to Quentyn at all.
He reached out and ran his hand across the great dragon’s rough hide.
Vhagar’s scales were small and closely set, blending seamlessly into her thick, heavy skin.
They didn’t feel rough beneath his palm, though Quentyn knew well enough that skin and scale together could turn aside most weapons the world had to offer.
A warmth passed from her skin into the very depths of his own blood, and that warmth only made his blood boil harder still.
Only once his hand left the dragon did that indescribable feeling slowly begin to fade.
For one instant, Quentyn’s awareness sank into his own mind, and he pushed against the door there.
This time he noticed something different.
On the pale half of the door, the broken moon quietly brightened, and something like a stream of fire seemed to trickle down across it.
The door still wouldn’t budge, but at least this much was proven: contact with a dragon truly could help him push it open.
His awareness returned to the world.
Quentyn took hold of the rope ladder and climbed up onto the dragon’s back, following behind Baelon.
The great dragon tilted her head to glance once at Quentyn, then drew her gaze away, lowering her body and settling into position to take flight.
Nearing a hundred and fifty years of age now, she wasn’t quite so ancient or sluggish as “the Black Dread” Balerion, though she moved with a certain heavy, deliberate weight all her own.
No harness in the world could be fitted to a beast so vast.
Like Balerion before her, Vhagar’s saddle was fixed in place along her spine with specially forged dragon-spikes, driven deep into flesh and bone, with the tangled rope ladders trailing loose beneath the saddle, leaving her whole back looking a tangled mess.
The dragon-spikes Visenya herself had once driven into the beast’s neck were still lodged there, firm as ever, though Baelon could no longer reach the original reins fixed to them.
He had to make do instead with the guiding rod set into the saddle, and the newer dragon-spike reins fitted alongside it, to direct her.
“Might be the blood of my own mother running in my veins.”
Quentyn laughed the question off, brushing past whatever Baelon had actually meant to ask.
Baelon didn’t press the matter.
He first helped secure Quentyn’s own harness, then fastened himself firmly into the saddle.
Quentyn noticed that Baelon never once used any of the High Valyrian commands he’d imagined a rider would need to direct a dragon.
Vhagar seemed to grasp Baelon’s own intentions directly, without need of words at all.
The moment both of them were secured, the great beast beneath them let out a roar that shook the whole of Harrenhal, and an instant later, weightlessness struck all at once.
The dragon had taken flight.
Quentyn caught the faint curve of a smile at the corner of Baelon’s mouth.
Harrenhal shrank smaller and smaller in view, dwindling from the greatest fortress in the Seven Kingdoms into a small, delicate ornament laid flat against the earth, until at last, as Vhagar broke through the cloud layer, nothing remained below but a vast, boundless field of white.
There was no sensation of wind screaming past.
For whatever reason, none of the usual effects of open, high-altitude flight, the loss of body heat, the crushing press of the wind, ever seemed to touch either Quentyn or Baelon at all.
Quite the opposite.
Up here on the dragon’s back, all Quentyn felt was a gentle, pleasant breeze.
The dragon’s flight was remarkably smooth, smooth enough, in fact, to remind him of riding a high-speed train in his past life.
“Quenny, you gave me something to think about.”
It wasn’t until Vhagar had climbed to her full cruising height that Baelon finally let go of the guiding rod, his expression turning serious.
“Before you brought it up, I’d never once considered the question, whether someone might have been working against us this whole time, right under our noses.”
“It’s only a guess, Baelon.” Quentyn said with a sigh.
“But if Daemon’s fall really was arranged on purpose, then whoever carried it out, or whoever organized it, must be no ordinary hand.”
“The Faceless Men?”
Baelon blurted the words out, then seemed to catch himself, adding a little apologetically: “That’s a secretive order of assassins out of Braavos.
They say they can kill a man without a sound, and leave everyone believing he died of natural causes…
You know the business with Elissa Farman, don’t you?
The Sea Snake used the Faceless Men’s own order to put fear into my father.”
Quentyn played along, feigning sudden understanding.
“But would the Faceless Men really have any reason to move against Daemon?”
Quentyn himself didn’t believe they were capable of something like this.
As he recalled, in the original story, the Faceless Man Jaqen H’ghar was rumored by some to have been hired by Littlefinger, sent to King’s Landing to murder Eddard Stark and stir up exactly the chaos Littlefinger had wanted all along.
But all Jaqen had actually managed, in the end, was to fall in with Littlefinger’s own scheme, slipping in among the Night’s Watch’s own escort party in an attempt to murder Eddard before he ever took the black.
And later, when he crossed paths with Arya, Jaqen had found himself all but powerless before Tywin Lannister. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
That alone was proof enough that the Faceless Men held no real foothold in Westeros, nothing that would let them stage a death convincingly enough to fool anyone here.
Baelon fell silent.
“Whatever the truth of it, if that person, or that order, missed their first strike, and if they’re truly careful, truly disciplined, they’ll be lying low as rats by now, or ready to sever their own tail like a lizard, just to survive.”
“So we’re meant to just sit with the knowledge that someone dared move against my own son, or even…” Baelon couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought.
Ever since Quentyn had first planted the suspicion in his mind, Baelon had begun to see shadows everywhere.
For the first time, it occurred to him that the misfortunes that had struck his own brothers and sisters over the years might not have been simple accidents after all.
He didn’t dare share this suspicion with Jaehaerys or Alysanne, fearing what the shock might do to his aging parents, and could only quietly look into the matter himself, using this very journey as his cover.
“Is there truly nothing to be done?”
Beneath them, the great dragon let out a sudden, mournful cry.
Even Quentyn could feel the sorrow in the old beast’s voice.
Quentyn quietly filed that away as well.
“The only thing we can do is build a place that looks safe, and slowly draw them out until they show their hand.”
“Dragonstone?”
Quentyn nodded.
“If their target is dragons, then their scheme has to have some foothold on Dragonstone.
If their target is the royal family itself, then their scheme has to have some foothold in King’s Landing.
So long as we can make sure one of the two looks safe, we can lure the wolf into shedding its sheepskin and baring its fangs.”
Baelon fell into silence once more.
So did Quentyn.
In all honesty, he had no idea whether his own reasoning was even sound.
But building the specter of an unseen enemy, whether or not that enemy truly existed, was bound to unsettle House Targaryen all the same, and a frightened Targaryen, more often than not, was one prone to acting without full command of their own reason.
Baelon’s thoughts ran further still.
Jaehaerys and Alysanne had both grown old now, and their day to leave this world would surely come, just as it would for “the Black Dread” Balerion in time.
Once they were gone, the number of Targaryen dragonriders would fall, all at once, to just two.
Could two dragonriders alone truly protect their whole family?
Baelon didn’t know.
The great dragon came down smoothly onto the lair, where Daemon and Gael were already waiting below.
The moment Quentyn climbed down from the dragon’s back, Kingsguard Ser Clement Crabb led him at once to a waiting carriage.
Daemon, too impatient to let Quentyn linger even a moment longer, dragged him straight aboard the Wandering Husk.
Quentyn hadn’t even had the chance to properly say his farewells to Baelon, let alone catch a glimpse of “the Black Dread” Balerion himself, still sleeping soundly somewhere deep within the lair.
A pity, that.
Quentyn had rather hoped to get close enough to Balerion to see whether the contact might help pry the door open a little further still.
“Heh heh.”
The sea wind off Blackwater Bay in his face, Daemon threw an arm shamelessly around Quentyn’s neck and hopped, limping, to his side.
“Pity the old man won’t let me ride Caraxes, or I could’ve taken you up for a proper flight.”
“Your leg’s fully sound now?”
Quentyn eyed Daemon’s leg with some suspicion.
By his own reckoning, the injury he’d deliberately left behind should have taken the better part of half a month to heal fully, and true, complete recovery ought to have taken half a year at the very least.
He had no wish to have the Citadel’s own medicine-obsessed scholars come sniffing after him over some miraculously fast recovery.
“Doesn’t matter.
I can just strap myself to the saddle.” Daemon gestured at himself without a moment’s hesitation.
“And honestly, brother, aside from a bit of itching and a bit of weakness, it feels about the same as normal now.”
“Call me uncle.” Quentyn said with a grin.
Daemon let out a scoff and shoved him away.
“Fuck you, Quenny.”
Quentyn swept his gaze once across the deck.
Gael, unable to bear the salt-thick sea air, had retired to the captain’s cabin to rest, with Ser Clement Crabb in attendance.
The deck itself was full of busy sailors, no small number of them silver- and gold-haired, along with a scattering of errand boys.
“Pentos has plenty of silver-haired girls.
I hear there’s dark-skinned ones too, not quite as skilled as the Lyseni girls, mind you, but a good sight better than King’s Landing’s own crooked lot.”
Daemon traced an exaggerated curve over his own chest with both hands, straining to puff out muscle that hadn’t quite finished coming in yet.
He glanced back once, checking to make sure Gael hadn’t returned to the deck.
After all, when they’d first boarded, Gael had gritted through her own seasickness just to stay up on deck beside Quentyn, listening to him talk of history, and of myths and legends out of the East.
Daemon could tell well enough that Gael had followed none of it, not really.
She’d been sheltered so thoroughly by her parents that even the usual education expected of a proper lady had passed her by, more than a little.
“Magister Regio?” Quentyn searched his memory for the name.
He found nothing there.
But he had heard the name before, in this life’s own memory.
“I hear the Pentoshi council of magisters means to name him a candidate for prince?”
“Which is exactly why he’s been so eager to keep good relations with Grandfather.” Daemon’s face twisted with open contempt at the mention of “the Prince of Pentos.” “He’d rather not end up with his own throat cut.”
Here was an opening.
Quentyn seized on it at once.
Pentos’s political system was a peculiar thing.
This Valyrian-founded colony-city had copied the old Freehold’s own model of free fortress-governance: forty prominent families would first elect their magisters, and the magisters would in turn elect a prince to serve for life.
In name, the prince stood as Pentos’s highest authority.
In practice, though, real power stayed firmly in the hands of the council of magisters, and the prince served merely as their chosen scapegoat.
Whenever the harvest failed, or a war was lost, the magisters would offer their prince up as sacrifice to the gods.
Which meant no sane magister actually wanted to be chosen prince.
Every one of them would fight tooth and nail to build up enough support that the other magisters would think twice before naming him, and that, precisely, was Quentyn’s own opening.
“What’re you thinking about now?” Daemon, noticing Quentyn had gone quiet again, teased him with the ease of long habit.
“You’re always drifting off like this, thinking about one thing or another.
Come on, brother, we’re both thirteen.
You don’t need to go acting like my father, or worse, my grandfather.”
“I’m heir to Harrenhal.
Someone has to think of Harrenhal’s own interests.” Quentyn let out a long sigh, turning a touch wistful as he faced into the sea wind.
“Mm…
let’s talk about something more fun, then.”
The Wandering Husk had already sailed past Driftmark by now.
At the island’s eastern tip, the legendary navigator “the Sea Snake” Corlys Velaryon’s own newly built seat, High Tide, stood perched atop its cliffs, its extravagant silver spires catching the sunlight in a brilliant glare.
A streak of red broke through the clouds and came down to land within that beautiful castle.
Dragonstone’s own volcano was already drawing near.
“Quenny, do you know about Dragonstone’s wild dragons?”
Daemon leaned in close to Quentyn’s ear, his voice dropping into something conspiratorial.
“Wild dragons?”
Quentyn let just the right note of confusion cross his face.
He knew little enough of Fire & Blood in any real depth, but he did know that, more than thirty years from now, during the Dance of the Dragons, Dragonstone would be home to Cannibal, Sheepstealer, and Grey Ghost, three truly wild dragons that had never once been tamed.
“I knew it!” Daemon slapped his own thigh, delighted, then winced and grimaced for a good while before he recovered.
“As far as I know, there are seven wild dragons on Dragonstone right now, dragons that have never once been tamed.”
Daemon counted them off on his fingers, one by one.
“When I was taming Caraxes, I heard from the dragonkeepers at the lair that they’d finally managed to catch ‘Topaz.’ She’s a strong little female, and it took the dragonkeepers real effort to drive her back into Dragonstone’s own courtyard.
She’s already brought us three eggs of her own.”
“Then there’s an ugly, mud-colored dragon, hatched, they say, even earlier than Caraxes.
Loves nothing more than raiding sheep flocks, so the dragonkeepers all call her Sheepstealer…”
Quentyn listened as Daemon rattled off Dragonstone’s known wild dragons, one after another, as familiar with each as with an old friend.
The beautiful “Jade.” “The Whale Hunter,” who loved nothing better than a fight with a whale.
And clumsy old “Rotten-Tooth.”
“And last, the two fiercest, oldest, and largest wild dragons of them all.”
Daemon dropped his voice low, his tone turning conspiratorial once more.