The instant both his hands closed around the horn-spines on the dragon’s back, Quentyn felt the door in his mind shudder violently.
Like some rite of sacrifice out of the most ancient of ages, an exultant chant rang out on every side, and the carved reliefs across the door’s black and white halves lit up, one after another.
The door didn’t even wait for Quentyn to push it.
It simply burst open with a roar of its own.
Quentyn’s eyes went wide.
No.
This wasn’t any scene he’d seen before.
A full, round moon hung suspended at the very center of the world.
The instant Quentyn’s awareness passed through the door, the moon shattered, and dragons came pouring out like a flood of water, a moon-silver dragon roaring as it crashed straight into his arms.
For taming a Valyrian dragon: the gift of Forgotten Knowledge.
A vast tide of knowledge came flooding into Quentyn’s mind all at once, sealing itself away almost as quickly as it arrived, sparing his awareness the worst of its impact.
Scene after scene flickered past his eyes.
For one instant, the boy felt himself wrapped in total darkness, as though bound inside some scalding warm liquid, yet still able to breathe freely all the same.
He drank down the hot fluid around him, growing larger, and larger still, until the darkness finally broke apart, and daylight bloomed painfully bright before his eyes.
He unfurled himself, naturally, instinctively, and what greeted him was a scent of sulfur he already knew well, the salt-tang of the sea wind, air scorching hot against his skin.
The images kept flowing.
He grew larger and larger still, and little by little, rage and strength filled his own body.
He tore apart a black dragon that had tried to seize his own territory, and bit clean through the throat of an old, ravenous red dragon besides.
His hunting grounds stretched from the Shivering Sea all the way to the Summer Sea.
Cunning krakens and enormous leviathan whales alike became his prey.
Time slipped away on a tide of blood and flesh, and somewhere in it, he took a small, jade-colored dragon under his own wing, flying with her, hunting at her side.
Fury surged, boundless.
He saw an empty, ransacked nest, and a jade-colored dragon wailing in grief.
He knew, at once, which dragon had done this.
He would have his vengeance.
Quentyn’s own awareness rose higher and higher in that instant.
He watched a dragon of moon-silver and sun-gold launch itself into the sky, driving straight for the coal-black dragon’s own nest, casting the wicked beast out of its lair and beating it near to death.
The scene ended there, flame rising all around it.
A new scene came rushing in.
An unspeakable grief and fury seized his mind all at once.
He returned to the nest carrying the corpse of a slain leviathan whale, only to find nothing waiting for him but the jade-colored dragon’s own broken bones, and shattered, hollowed eggs.
The jade dragon’s neck lay snapped, her wings burned black, her eggs shattered beneath her body, already empty husks.
He howled, tearing the flesh from the dead mother dragon’s own body, swallowing fire and blood, flesh and bone, all of it, down into himself.
The fire flowed on, and Quentyn watched the coal-black dragon flee, wounded.
He watched the pale silver beast cry out its own mournful wail.
He watched the years pass, wound piling on wound across its body, its wings torn, its horns broken, until, at the very end of its own life, it fell at last into the boundless deep blue.
But all of that had now been burned away by silver fire.
None of it would ever come to pass.
His awareness returned to the world.
Quentyn understood at once what he’d just lived through.
It had been Moon Crown’s whole life, and a future that had not yet come to pass.
What had felt, in his own mind, like an age unfolding had taken no more than a single instant in the world outside.
Quentyn’s eyes came back into focus just in time to see Cannibal loosing another blast of fire, one that had very nearly killed Daemon outright.
The boy drew a deep breath and pressed himself low against the dragon’s back.
Before he could even give the order, Moon Crown was already roaring and hurling itself at Cannibal.
The coal-black dragon had no will left to fight.
Its sickly green fire trailed off into smoke and scattered on the wind, and Cannibal was already airborne, fleeing, lurching drunkenly toward Dragonstone’s western reaches.
Moon-silver fire tore across the sky and slammed hard into the fleeing beast.
Cannibal shrieked in agony as the searing flame split its scales apart in an instant, and the dragon plunged straight into the sea, leaving nothing behind but boiling water and a long, trailing wound of black blood.
Quentyn pressed his whole body flat against the dragon’s back, his hands torn open on the sharp spines beneath them, blood running red across silver, pooling in the hollows between the scales like a small crimson lake, though the boy felt not the slightest pain from any of it.
The burning in his veins slowly began to fade.
Little by little, Quentyn felt his own arms stretching outward, endlessly, unfurling like a pair of wings.
That was the only thought left in Quentyn’s mind.
As though sensing that very thought, Moon Crown spread its wings wide and launched itself into the air, the gale it kicked up whipping dust and sand across the white cloaks of both Kingsguard knights below.
In the same instant Moon Crown took flight, the coal-black dragon burst back up out of the waves.
It glanced once toward the sky, just in time to see Moon Crown pulling away, and with the distance already too great to close, dared not press the fight any further, diving instead in blind panic into Dragonstone’s own wild, barren hills.
In that instant, the fury that had only just begun to fade came surging back like a rolling tide.
Quentyn steadied himself at once.
In his past life, browsing the ASOIAF forums, he’d once read a rather niche theory from some well-regarded poster: that dragonriders and their dragons could form a mysterious bond between them, sharing sensation itself, and from that, a smaller, more obscure hypothesis had grown.
Dragonriders, some argued, were really nothing more than another form of warg, or skinchanger, and the theory’s proponents pointed to the bond between Jon Snow and Ghost as evidence, though there had never been any truly direct proof to confirm it one way or the other.
His own firsthand experience now told him that some mysterious bond truly did exist between dragon and rider, and, in all likelihood, one that could be developed further still through training.
Still, whatever the case, this wasn’t the moment for celebration.
This sudden, unplanned dragon-taming had thrown his own plans entirely off course.
If it had been the hatchling from his mother’s own egg, that would have posed little difficulty.
But this…
this was a fully grown dragon he had just tamed with his own two hands.
Would Jaehaerys and Alysanne even accept a dragon in House Qoherys’s own hands?
Quentyn didn’t know.
By now, Cannibal had vanished entirely from sight, and Moon Crown’s furious roar rolled out across the whole of Dragonstone’s sky.
There was no longer any value in giving chase.
What mattered most now was settling, as quickly as possible, whatever trouble his own newly claimed dragon might bring.
Quentyn made his decision at once.
He freed one hand and patted the dragon.
“Arlī jās, Hūrīlion, qrinuntās rūhagon, arlī jīs!”
(Go back, Moon Crown.
Stop your attack.
Let’s go back!)
Moon Crown let out one last, reluctant roar toward the distant hills, but in the end, obeyed.
The great dragon folded its wings, docile now, and came down to land on the open ground near the docks.
It was then that two dragon-cries rang out, one after the other, from somewhere above.
Moon Crown drew its wings in at once, wary, the great membranes folding close over Quentyn, shielding him, while the dragon let out a low, rumbling growl toward the sky.
A lithe, blood-red dragon broke first through the cloud layer, its beautifully corded muscle set off by broad, pink-membraned wings, a coronet of gleaming bronze crowning its head, its whole body bristling with spines and talons, giving it a fierce, martial bearing all its own.
The instant it spotted Moon Crown, the red dragon let out a roar of its own and made to dive straight down.
Moon Crown showed no fear at all, wings crossing to shield Quentyn firmly behind it, moon-silver fire already gathering in its throat.
Just then, the red dragon suddenly drew its wings in tight, twisted its whole body in midair, and shot out its claws, catching hold of the cliffside beside the docks.
“Grandmother!”
The woman on the red dragon’s back stared, wide-eyed with shock, at the sight of Alysanne stepping out from behind the boulder, arms spread wide, placing herself squarely between the two dragons.
The silver, gentle-natured dragon crept out from the high ground east of the docks, casting one furtive glance toward her own rider before letting loose a great roar of her own toward the two dragons still locked in their standoff.
Gael crept out, trembling, from her hiding place, her skirts caked with dirt and sand.
She cast a timid look toward her mother, then crept quietly over to help Daemon up.
“F—” Whatever curse Daemon had been about to loose, he swallowed it back down at once.
Something’s not right here.
The silver dragon with the pair of thick, heavy horns fell silent, glancing first at Moon Crown, then at the crimson beast, and finally settling its gaze on Alysanne, plainly at a loss for what to do.
Sweat had already begun beading on Daemon’s palms.
He recognized both dragons at once.
The silver one was his own grandmother’s Silverwing.
The blood-red one belonged to his cousin Rhaenys Targaryen: “the Red Queen,” Meleys.
The swiftest, and the most cunning, of every dragon now living.
The woman on the dragon’s back leaned to one side, studying the scene before her with open uncertainty.
She was strikingly beautiful, her long black hair bound into a braid, gathered up beneath a coronet of Valyrian steel.
“Grandmother, what’s happened here?
Who is that?”
The overlapping membranes of Moon Crown’s wings parted just enough to reveal Quentyn’s own handsome face.
The boy weighed his words carefully.
By strict reckoning of kinship, Rhaenys was his own niece, though she happened to be a full six years his elder.
“Rhaenys.
It’s me.
Quentyn.”
In the end, Quentyn kept it simple.
Alysanne’s brow tightened for an instant, then eased.
“Rhaenys, calm yourself.
Here’s what happened: we were caught entirely by surprise when Cannibal and Moon Crown fell into their own dragon-fight, and both beasts attacked us without any care for who we were.
If Quenny and Daemon hadn’t faced those dragons down so bravely, you might not have found any of us alive at all.”
Gael chimed in feebly as well.
“That’s right.
That’s exactly right.”
Daemon shot Rhaenys a sour glance, and looked ready to say something himself, but a single look from Alysanne stopped him cold.
Up on the dragon’s back, Rhaenys sat in thought a moment.
Without any visible signal from her at all, “the Red Queen” Meleys slowly climbed down from the cliffside.
The great dragon no longer seemed eager to attack, but she kept a wary eye fixed on Moon Crown all the same, as though ready to strike the very instant the other beast so much as twitched.
Moon Crown glared back at the Red Queen with equal ferocity.
Quentyn could feel every muscle in the great dragon’s body coiled tight, ready to spring at the crimson beast opposite them at the barest provocation.
“Forgive me, Grandmother.
I’ve come too late.”
Rhaenys unclasped her harness and swung down neatly from the dragon’s back, pulling off her gloves as she crossed to Alysanne’s side, her head bowed low.
She had already made it back to High Tide, and had been just about to sit down for something to eat, when the sound of roaring from Dragonstone had reached her.
Sensing at once that something was wrong, she’d flown straight back.
But she had still arrived too late.
“It’s all right.”
Alysanne let her own composure ease, and drew Rhaenys into a warm, affectionate embrace.
Quentyn weighed the situation carefully.
By his own earlier reckoning, Jaehaerys most likely held no clear objection to a dragon passing into the hands of his own kin, and Alysanne, on questions like this, had always been rather easily swayed.
His mother’s own dragon egg, too, was a kind of standing proof that Jaehaerys had already resigned himself to the possibility that he himself, or his own descendants, might one day claim a dragon of their own.
And even if Jaehaerys went back on his word, there remained the simple question of whether an aging Jaehaerys and Alysanne could still manage long flights at all.
Daemon was still only a novice rider, which left House Targaryen with only two dragonriders it could truly call upon: Baelon, and Rhaenys.
As heir to the throne, Baelon could hardly afford to spend long stretches of time away fighting a war of his own.
So long as Quentyn himself stayed mounted and ready, it would prove no easy thing for Jaehaerys to move against him directly, and if he moved against Harrenhal instead, the king’s own hard-won reputation for wisdom would be shattered to nothing in an instant.
After all, Quentyn had only tamed the dragon to protect the royal family in the first place.
As for compelling a dragonrider to swear himself into the Kingsguard…
since the white cloak’s own order had first been founded, there had never once been a case of a landed lord’s sole heir taking up that cloak.
Forcing the only heir of a great house into the white cloak would ruin Jaehaerys’s own good name just as surely.
With Maegor’s own example standing as warning enough, Jaehaerys had grown almost obsessively protective of his own reputation as king.
He would never allow anyone to tarnish the honor of the Iron Throne’s own master, which meant, in the end, he had no real choice but to accept things as they now stood.
Having had the chance now to study the great beasts up close, Quentyn had already worked out a rough sense of their relative size.
Moon Crown was truly massive, the largest, and the most powerfully built, of the three dragons now gathered here.
The Red Queen was somewhat smaller than Silverwing, though more powerfully muscled, while Silverwing herself ran longer and leaner, her wings broader still.
And Moon Crown, in turn, was larger even than Silverwing, cutting an even more imposing, majestic figure.
With that thought settled, Quentyn kept his seat firmly on the dragon’s back, making no move at all to climb down.
“Grandmother, the dragon…”
Rhaenys loosened her arms from around her grandmother, hesitated a moment, then lowered her voice.
“Quenny isn’t even a Targaryen, after all…”
Rhaenys said quietly.