“Don’t move.”
Quentyn shot his friend a look and pressed Daemon firmly back down onto the bed.
He examined the wound once more, no longer bleeding and now roughly stitched closed, and couldn’t help thinking to himself: remarkable.
In a setting like Westeros, somewhere between the early Renaissance and the Middle Ages, healing a wound this severe was nothing short of a miracle.
No, even back in the world he’d come from, treatment like this wouldn’t have been easy.
It would have required a major operation in a top-tier hospital back in Germany, and a long, careful recovery besides.
“Bloody hell.”
Daemon couldn’t stop squirming.
Quentyn’s treatment had worked almost too well, and that very success had brought with it one unfortunate side effect.
“Why does it itch so much?”
He reached down, trying to scratch at the wound.
Seeing that Daemon still couldn’t hold still, Quentyn batted his hand away.
“Now, now, my dear Prince of the Capital.”
Quentyn bit back a laugh.
He always felt the urge to smile whenever Daemon’s ill repute around King’s Landing came up.
“Daemon the Cripple, or Daemon the Lamer, of the two?
Better pick yourself a new nickname before you go thrashing about any further.”
“Fuck, Quenny.” Daemon swore under his breath and pulled his hand back.
“Can I borrow your mouth for a minute, or what.”
“No.” Quentyn checked over the healing wound.
“Besides, Prince Baelon is right outside.
Do you want your father hearing you talk like a gutter rat?”
“Tch.
Ow…”
Daemon curled his lip in disdain, though Quentyn still caught, in his eyes, a flicker of real respect for Baelon.
“Nyke iderēban skori yn qrinīlus, qopsa dokimia Caraksesi.
Skorkydoso aderī jēdū seōdrioēmū?”
Quentyn put away the forceps and knife and abruptly slipped into High Valyrian.
What he’d said meant: [I remember that the last time we saw each other, you were already close to taming Caraxes.
How did you suddenly end up falling and getting hurt like this?]
He studied Daemon’s pale face.
Reading the books and watching the adaptations in his past life, Quentyn had always harbored one particular question: why, when House Targaryen had flourished so completely under Jaehaerys’s reign, when Jaehaerys and Alysanne had produced thirteen children between them, had so many of them died young or left no heirs, until only Baelon’s line survived to carry a male heir onward?
Now, for reasons Quentyn didn’t understand, Jaehaerys’s sister Valera hadn’t died young after all, but had instead married out and left behind this branch of the family.
That alone had already changed a great deal.
And yet Jaehaerys’s own children still seemed to be following the same course history had originally set for them.
Quentyn felt he needed to be careful.
Something like Daemon’s fall, whose true cause he couldn’t yet determine, was exactly the sort of thing that called for caution.
Hearing Quentyn suddenly switch to High Valyrian, Daemon blinked in surprise.
Then his drawn, tired face turned serious, and he answered, likewise in High Valyrian.
[I don’t know.
You know how it is, Viserys claimed Balerion, the Black Dread, and I figured taming Caraxes myself would be an honor too.
I wanted to slide straight off his wing the moment he touched down, but as luck would have it, Caraxes came down on a stretch of rubble.
Damn it, there was a great rock right there.]
A stretch of rubble?
A great rock?
Quentyn frowned.
That much, at least, made sense.
Maegor “the Cruel” had left patches of rubble and loose stone scattered around the Dragonpit to mimic natural terrain, and Jaehaerys had kept the practice up after him.
No, that wasn’t where the problem lay.
Quentyn went back over the whole business once more in his mind.
Daemon’s eyes were full of confusion, and beneath it, a trace of excitement.
When that great rock had first sent him sprawling, the pain had been bad enough that he’d genuinely thought he might die.
Thank the gods his good friend had been in King’s Landing.
Daemon offered up a silent word of thanks, though, well, he wasn’t entirely sure who he was even thanking.
Either way, he’d already quietly resolved to pay Quentyn back properly for this.
“Quentyn, is Daemon…”
Catching the sound of High Valyrian from inside the room, Baelon’s brow furrowed slightly as well.
He swept his gaze over the people gathered in the tavern.
Robb was doing his best to keep a stern face, but the blankness in his eyes gave him away, and Baelon decided almost at once that the boy didn’t speak High Valyrian.
The tavern owner, the other patrons, and the serving boy were all too far off to have any real chance of overhearing the conversation inside.
Grand Maester Elysar, for his part, was thoroughly fluent in reading and writing High Valyrian, but he was standing much too far from the room to hear.
Quentyn pulled the door open, presenting Daemon on the bed to everyone waiting outside.
“The surgery went well.”
Quentyn hesitated a moment.
As a transmigrator, he was certainly no true believer in the Seven, though in his own judgment, of all the gods worshipped in the world of Ice and Fire, the Seven at least felt the most human, the most present.
And besides, what if whatever lay behind that door of his was somehow tied to the gods of this very world?
So, in the end, Quentyn added: “The Seven be praised.”
Daemon promptly put on a show of discomfort, groaning theatrically on the bed, but the wound that no longer looked the least bit horrifying, and the color steadily returning to his cheeks, gave the boy away completely.
“A miracle!”
Grand Maester Elysar was the first through the door.
The old maester shoved his own assistants aside the instant he laid eyes on Daemon, stumbling forward to the bedside.
Quentyn could have sworn he saw shock, disbelief, bewilderment, and even a touch of feverish excitement all cross the old maester’s face at once.
“This is a wonder that could only be the work of magic.”
Grand Maester Elysar took a single glance at Daemon’s wound before turning at once to stare at Quentyn as though he were gazing upon some priceless rarity brought back from far Essos.
“Boy, how did you manage this?
Not even Runeter could have done this much…”
He turned excitedly to Baelon standing beside him.
“There was never any need to worry.
Prince Daemon’s wound has been treated to perfection.
No, even if the Old Crone herself had come down to do the work, I couldn’t imagine a more flawless piece of surgery.
This boy has upended everything I thought I knew about the surgeon’s craft.”
With that, the Grand Maester seized Quentyn by the shoulder, every trace of the skepticism he’d shown at their first meeting entirely gone.
For one moment, Quentyn found himself close enough to count exactly how many teeth the old man had left in his head.
“Is it, no, not even those whoresons back at the Citadel could pull off a piece of surgery this perfect.
Prince Baelon, I don’t mean Archmaester Vaegon, mind you, Vaegon never specialized in medicine anyway.
No, this can’t just be left as it is, Quentyn…”
The Grand Maester rambled on, half-incoherent, seeming to weigh, even as he spoke, exactly how he ought to address Quentyn.
Then he froze.
Quentyn knew exactly what the old man had just realized.
Since Aegon’s Conquest, his mother Valera was the first Targaryen princess, in any true sense, to have married outside the family.
There was, admittedly, one other branch of royal blood outside the direct Targaryen line: Aemma Arryn, King Jaehaerys’s own granddaughter through his daughter.
But Aemma Arryn’s mother, Princess Daella, had died young of childbed fever, and Aemma had been brought to Dragonstone to be raised by Queen Alysanne herself.
Once Aemma, only eleven years old, had married Viserys the year before, the whole question of how to address her had already resolved itself neatly enough.
But Quentyn’s case was different.
His mother, Princess Valera, was still alive.
How to properly address the son of a living princess was a matter demanding real study in the fine points of court etiquette.
“It isn’t complicated.”
Quentyn gave a wry smile and gently pushed the wrinkled old Grand Maester back.
“Daemon’s injury wasn’t complicated, as these things go.
All that was needed was to prevent infection, clear out the bone fragments and any contamination from the wound quickly, then set the broken bone and stitch the vessel and the wound closed…”
“Even the smallest part of what you’ve just described would be beyond most of us…”
The Grand Maester’s attention was instantly caught up in the method Quentyn had described, his gaze going distant, as though he were already weighing whether such a thing could truly be done.
Quentyn took the opportunity to slip free of the Grand Maester’s grip and stepped over to Baelon.
“Any ordinary assistant maester could manage the rest from here, but…”
Quentyn glanced at the Grand Maester, still lost in thought, and at the assistant maesters trembling nearby, and lowered his voice.
[I’d suggest, for the time being, that Daemon go back to Dragonstone to recover.]
He said this in High Valyrian.
Quentyn caught the flicker of understanding that passed through Baelon’s eyes.
A clever dragon indeed, Quentyn thought to himself of this “Prince of Spring’s Dawn.” His memory of Baelon from his past life was thin at best.
All he really recalled was that Baelon’s death had set off a whole chain of consequences afterward, planting the single greatest hidden threat that would eventually detonate into the Dance of the Dragons.
But now that he’d actually come to know his cousin, Quentyn understood clearly that Baelon was nothing like what the epithet “the Brave” suggested on its own, some bold knight who’d once dared throw a punch at Balerion, the Black Dread, and nothing more.
[You suspect someone is targeting the dragon bloodline?]
Baelon likewise lowered his voice.
The Prince of Dragonstone’s High Valyrian was quite fluent, and he deliberately kept his words soft enough to be little more than a breath at Quentyn’s ear.
[I don’t know.]
Quentyn shook his head.
[Too many coincidences, Baelon.
Maybe it’s a coincidence Daemon chose today to tame his dragon.
Maybe it’s a coincidence he decided to show off dismounting.
Maybe it’s a coincidence Caraxes happened to land on a patch of rubble.
Maybe it’s a coincidence there were large stones in that rubble.
Maybe it’s a coincidence that Maester Runeter, the one man skilled enough in surgery to have helped, had just returned to Oldtown.
But all these maybes, piling up together like this…]
Quentyn didn’t finish the thought.
Baelon’s eyes had already sharpened, though he seemed to still be turning something over in his mind.
Left standing off to one side, Viserys watched Quentyn and his father murmuring together, faintly puzzled and unsure what to do with himself, until he finally went to check on Daemon instead.
The instant Daemon spotted Viserys approaching, he stopped his groaning at once.
Quentyn had told him not to move, but there was nothing stopping him from moving his mouth, or his eyes.
With that thought, Daemon pulled a face at his brother.
“Seven hells, it hurts like nothing else, but hey, big brother, I’m a dragonrider now too!”
“I told you already, don’t try anything difficult until you’ve built a proper bond with your dragon.” Viserys’s face was the picture of exasperated affection.
“But you never listen.”
“Well, I’ve got Quenny, don’t I!”
Daemon said, shameless as ever, “And besides, now I can fly a dragon wherever I like.
Not like you, old man, still won’t leave the Dragonpit?”
A shadow crossed Viserys’s eyes for just a moment, but he glared and snapped back at once.
“And what if Quenny hadn’t been in King’s Landing right now?
By the time he made it here from Harrenhal, you’d have lost the leg already!”
Listening to the two brothers bicker, Quentyn cut in.
“Flying a dragon before your leg’s fully healed?
Ha.
You’d better pick one of those two nicknames I mentioned, and quickly.”
Daemon fell silent at once.
After a moment’s thought, and now certain that Daemon was entirely out of danger, Baelon finally nodded.
“I’ll send Daemon to Dragonstone to recover.”
He paused, then added with real gravity:
“Thank you, cousin.”
With that said, Baelon’s expression shifted abruptly, as though, having settled one weighty matter, he now had another waiting to be announced.