Prince Baelon was somewhere in his thirties, tall and powerfully built.
Though he had grown a beard by now, one could still see traces of the striking looks he’d had as a young man.
Quentyn knew him well.
Two years before, after his elder brother, the king’s firstborn son Prince Aemon Targaryen, had died in battle, the king had passed over Aemon’s daughter, Princess Rhaenys, dragonrider of Meleys “the Red Queen,” and named Baelon heir to the Iron Throne instead.
That decision had driven a wedge straight through the king and queen’s marriage, and the two had been at odds ever since.
Even now, the king and queen lived apart, and the rift remained, cutting through a marriage that had once been famously close.
“What happened?”
Quentyn’s eyes went at once to Daemon Targaryen, curled whimpering in his father’s arms.
The boy who would one day be known as “the Rogue Prince” was, for now, still a youth of about Quentyn’s own age, possessed at once of the almost inhuman Valyrian beauty of the dragonlords and the unmistakable rawness of a boy his age.
For all that King Jaehaerys had made a thorough mess of matters concerning his own children, he remained, without question, a seasoned politician.
House Qoherys, which had endured down to the present day, carried a double role: Valyrian nobility close to the royal family, and the Crown’s western bulwark, tasked with balancing the great lords of the Riverlands and keeping watch over the Vale on the king’s behalf.
So both Prince Aemon and Prince Baelon had often flown to Harrenhal in years past, ostensibly to visit Valera, and through those visits Quentyn had naturally come to know Princess Rhaenys, as well as Baelon’s elder son Viserys and younger son Daemon.
Whether it was their close ages or simply a shared taste for trouble, Quentyn and Daemon had grown rather close.
Right now, the boy who feared neither heaven nor earth had his eyes screwed shut, clearly fighting to hold back the pain, while the wound in his lower leg still welled with blood, soaking through the bandages and staining a dark patch across Baelon’s fine black clothes.
“What happened?”
Quentyn came clattering down the stairs, and the moment he got close enough to look, he understood exactly what state Daemon was in.
The boy had likely taken a fall, whether from dragonback or horseback, and the broken bone was grinding through torn flesh, quite possibly having torn a blood vessel as well, which would explain why the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
“Prince Baelon, hasn’t a maester seen to the wound?”
Quentyn, no less anxious himself, examined Daemon’s wound.
Sure enough, a violent impact had shattered the bone, and a shard of it had torn through a blood vessel, producing a grisly injury.
“Let me tell it, Father.”
Quentyn could see the panic in Viserys’s violet eyes, but as the eldest son and elder brother, he was the one person here who couldn’t afford to fall apart.
“Daemon was trying to tame Caraxes today…”
At the mention of that ferocious, serpentine, blood-red beast, Viserys’s voice actually trembled.
Quentyn understood why.
Caraxes, “the Blood Wyrm,” had originally been Prince Aemon’s dragon.
Targaryens claiming a kinsman’s dragon after their death was ordinary enough within the family, but this particular case seemed to carry an unusual weight.
After all, Meleys, “the Red Queen,” dragon of Daemon’s own mother, Princess Alyssa, had been claimed by Prince Aemon’s daughter, Princess Rhaenys, not long after Alyssa died in a difficult childbirth.
Now, with Daemon trying to claim Caraxes in turn, it was hard to say whether there was some deeper meaning behind it.
Then again, none of that was really Quentyn’s concern.
“Everything had gone smoothly enough.
Caraxes had already accepted Daemon, but something went wrong when Daemon tried to dismount.
The little fool wanted to…” Viserys chose his words carefully, speaking with obvious urgency.
“That’s enough.
Get me a clean room.”
Quentyn didn’t wait to hear the rest.
He sent the serving boy at once to clear out a clean bedroom.
Just then, another commotion broke out at the tavern door.
“Prince Baelon, what Prince Daemon needs is a maester’s care, not…”
Grand Maester Elysar’s aged voice arrived before the man himself did.
Two assistant maesters supported the elderly, frail Grand Maester as he shuffled unsteadily through the tavern’s front door.
It was fortunate that the tavern stood so close to the Red Keep.
Otherwise, Quentyn rather doubted the old man could have made it there at all.
Westeros differed in many ways from the Western European history Quentyn had once studied, and the maester system was one such difference.
Many Westerosi lords regarded reading as a mark of weakness, and the roughest of them relied on Citadel-trained maesters even to read and write their letters.
As a great seat of learning, the Citadel at Oldtown had held to strict neutrality for thousands of years, sending trained maesters out to every castle in the realm.
They served as healers, tutors, and stewards, devoting their lives to whichever household they were posted to, until death.
The Grand Maester, meanwhile, was the maester who served the king himself, sitting on the small council, and stood as the very best among all maesters.
Before Quentyn could say a word, Grand Maester Elysar’s flushed face slowly eased at the sight of him.
One of the assistant maesters at his side made to speak, but the Grand Maester raised a hand and cut him off.
“Quentyn Qoherys?
Son of Daeron Qoherys, Lord of Harrenhal, and Princess Valera?
I remember you.
The youngest man in the Citadel’s history to forge both a silver and a pewter link.”
“Mm.”
Quentyn nodded, and without so much as turning his head, directed Prince Baelon and Viserys to carry Daemon into the room, while signaling Robb to fetch his tools.
“Boil a pot of clean water.
Do you have any spirits here?
Unwatered, mind you.”
The serving boy dashed off to the cellar at once.
By the time he returned, Daemon had already been carried to the bed by his father and brother, waiting on Quentyn to see to him.
Whether as a transmigrator or simply as Daemon’s close friend, Quentyn had no wish to see any real harm come to him.
Seeing that Quentyn was paying them no mind, the assistant maesters beside the Grand Maester grew indignant once more.
“Grand Maester, heir to Harrenhal or not, he has no business ignoring you.”
“That’s right.
You’re the realm’s Grand Maester.
And besides, how old is he?
How could he possibly handle a wound this severe?”
“I understand now, Grand Maester, you…”
“Understand what, exactly?
Seven hells, boy, did a whore eat your brains?”
Grand Maester Elysar showed no mercy, reaching out to flick the assistant maester sharply on the ear.
“Just watch, and hold your tongue.”
Only moments before, he had already assessed Prince Daemon’s injury for himself.
It was a difficult case.
Had Maester Runeter, who specialized in surgery, been there to treat Daemon the moment he was hurt, saving the leg would have been straightforward enough, though recovery would have been long and painful.
But the trouble was that Maester Runeter was far away in Oldtown.
Of the maesters currently in King’s Landing, he himself, Elysar, had the greatest medical learning, but his own expertise lay in herbcraft.
A wound like this, in all honesty, was beyond what he could manage.
“Boy, don’t go rushing into surgery.
Prince Daemon’s wound is serious.
My advice is to stop the bleeding first and wait for a group of maesters to treat him together.
I have an ointment here that can…”
“Do you want Daemon to bleed to death?”
Quentyn took the tool kit Robb brought him.
The dark-haired boy, badly rattled, nearly turned his ankle bringing it over.
“Or would you rather turn a boy who’s just claimed his dragon into a cripple?”
Feeling Viserys’s hostile stare on him, the Grand Maester sighed, but held to his position all the same.
He knew Quentyn had mastered a great deal of medical knowledge during his time at the Citadel, but he still didn’t dare risk letting a boy not yet fourteen perform surgery.
“I know the consequences well enough.
Which is why, boy, I still urge you: a bleeding-stopping ointment and milk of the poppy are safer than a hasty operation, at least where the prince’s life is concerned.”
Quentyn paid no mind to the Grand Maester’s endless objections.
He simply looked toward Baelon.
Prince Baelon the Brave’s face, just then, was written over with anxiety.
Quentyn recognized the look on his face at once.
It was the same look any parent wore, in this life or his last, at the sight of their child falling or getting hurt.
“Prince Baelon, if you trust me, let me operate on Daemon without further interference.
Grand Maester, I know this falls within your charge, but right now, I am the only one who can save both Daemon’s life and his leg.”
Quentyn said nothing further.
Baelon stood frozen for a moment, looking first at his unconscious son on the bed, then at the Grand Maester.
Drawing a deep breath, Baelon strode forward and planted himself between Quentyn and Grand Maester Elysar.
Grand Maester Elysar shook his head, still trying to say something more.
But by then Quentyn had already carried his tools into the room.
There, a pot of hot water and a bottle of strong, unwatered spirits stood ready, the fire roaring in the hearth.
The serving boy and the tavern’s portly owner, who had come running at word of what was happening, cowered behind the counter, not daring to move.
Robb shut the door and stood guard before it, like a small sentinel.
At Daemon’s bedside, Quentyn drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and let his awareness sink down into the depths of his own mind.
The reason he was confident he could do what even the Grand Maester could not lay precisely in the one thing that set him apart as a transmigrator.
There was a door inside his mind.
A vast pair of doors stretching from earth to sky, one half black as night, the other pale as bone, with an intricate pattern carved down the center where the two halves met.
Quentyn had known, since he was very young, that certain accomplishments would let him push the doors open, and that beyond them would wait some reward for whatever he’d done.
And each time he passed through, what lay beyond looked different.
The last time, after he had read through three hundred weighty volumes, he had pushed the doors open to find an endless night sky, with knowledge itself streaming and drifting among the stars.
That time, he had gained the ability he thought of as “Total Recall”: whatever he read or saw, he never forgot.
Quentyn reached out and pushed the doors open with all his strength.
An intoxicating fragrance flooded his mind at once, though rather than dulling his senses, it left him sharper and more clear-headed than before.
Beyond the doors stood a colossal tree, its crown lost somewhere above the sky, its roots buried somewhere below the earth, laden with fruit.
Sensing that Quentyn had opened the doors, one of its branches bent low and offered a single fruit down to him.
For healing a hundred souls: the gift of the power of Life-Weaving.
This was the reward for the hundred patients he had treated, both during his time at the Citadel and after his return to his own lands, and its effects were nothing short of extraordinary.
Put simply, this gift had given Quentyn a surgeon’s hands beyond any living master’s.
Even in a world like Westeros, somewhere between the medieval and the early Renaissance, he could now perform complex surgery with his bare hands, and even achieve results that might as well be called magic.
Sealing off pain, creating a sterile field, closing a wound with flawless precision, and the like.
This power was the true source of his confidence.
Until now, though, Quentyn had only known what the gift was in theory; he had never had the chance to put it to use.
Now, at last, was the time to try.
Quentyn plucked the fruit and ate it in a single bite.
Warmth began to flow down into his hands, and his fingers grew suddenly nimble and sure, while the structure of the human body rose unbidden into his mind, whole and complete.
Letting out a long breath, Quentyn drew a pair of forceps and a small knife from the tool kit, rolling them once through the spirits.
Something like light seemed to turn behind the boy’s dark violet eyes, and the injured part of Daemon’s leg became, to his sight, almost transparent, flesh and muscle laid bare, bone and vessel displayed before him as though stripped of everything that hid them.
He unwound the makeshift bandages with quick, efficient movements, exposing the torn wound beneath.
Daemon’s lower leg was twisted at an unnatural angle, bone jutting through torn flesh, a sight grim enough to turn the stomach.
Before Quentyn’s eyes, faint threads of pale green light quietly appeared, weaving an invisible net across the wound.
Tiny points of light sank into the injury, destroying unseen threats of infection while dulling the worst of the pain, and Daemon’s breathing steadied beneath it.
“Good.
Hold the vessel aside for me.
I need to remove the bone fragments and stop the bleeding.”
The threads obediently drew the critical vessel aside, and Quentyn’s hands, steady now almost to the point of stillness, guided the forceps to draw out the bone fragments lodged in vessel and flesh.
The threads swarmed in at once to close each small wound behind him.
Before long, the bleeding slowed and stopped, and every lesser injury had been dealt with.
Quentyn set the broken bone firmly back into place, and the pale green threads sank into the shattered bone itself, slowly knitting it back together.
Only once that was done did Quentyn guide the threads spun by his gift of Life-Weaving to close the largest wound of all.
“Ngh…”
Daemon couldn’t help a low groan as he slowly came around, and the first thing his eyes fell on was Quentyn, still working over his wound.
“Fuck, Quenny.
I owe you my life.
This really fucking hurts…”