“My mother has told me the very same thing.”
Quentyn softened his brow deliberately, let the corner of his mouth curl up, and let his tone settle, as easily as if he were speaking with his own mother.
“She told me that, as a girl, she always envied your eyes most of all, because they were nothing like His Grace’s, or hers.
She said your eyes were like still lake water, always so clear, that people couldn’t help but want to draw nearer to them.”
“Ah, yes…”
Queen Alysanne’s gaze went distant, as though drifting back through some far-off memory.
“We were all still children back then.
Your mother could barely even walk straight…” Alysanne’s fingers traced across the boy’s cheek, then drew back.
Only then did she seem to notice Baelon and his sons standing nearby.
“Come along, all of you.
It’s as good a time as any to tell you about the old days.”
Baelon lowered his own brow and fell into step behind his mother.
Viserys, wearing an expression of mild reproach, helped Daemon down from the carriage.
Daemon looked ready to say something, but his brother cut him off.
The two young men followed quietly behind Baelon, and the whole party made its way toward the Dragonpit.
“I still remember how wretched we all looked, the day we fled Dragonstone.”
Quentyn listened intently.
His mother’s version of that old story was one thing, his grandmother’s another, and the queen’s own account, he suspected, would be different again.
This was, for him, an essential step toward closing the gaps in what he actually knew.
“Dragonstone had suddenly fallen into chaos, and no one knew exactly what had happened.
My mother even suspected, for a moment, that it might be some trap of Maegor’s.
But soon enough, servants loyal to her brought word that Visenya had died, and my mother decided at once to flee with all of us.
She weighed a great many places before finally settling on Harrenhal.
Do you know why?”
Quentyn shook his head.
In truth, he knew a fair amount of the inside story.
His own mother had told him that it was because his great-grandmother, Isolde Velaryon, was Dowager Queen Alyssa’s own aunt, and because his grandmother Lady Agatha and the Dowager Queen had been genuinely close.
His own mother, as an infant, had very nearly died in her cradle, and it was Lady Agatha who had saved her, using some remarkable healing art out of Essos.
Quentyn had later made a point of digging into it quietly, and had eventually confirmed that the so-called “miraculous” Essosi medicine his grandmother used was simply this world’s own native medicine after all, which finally ruled out the possibility that his grandmother might be a fellow transmigrator.
His grandmother, for her part, said that his grandfather Aenys Qoherys had agreed to shelter Alyssa and her children because he too lived in fear of Maegor’s rule, and felt he couldn’t stand by while Maegor tore down everything Aegon “the Conqueror” had built.
That, and because King Aenys had restored Harrenhal to him in the first place, making him a benefactor to House Qoherys.
“Baelon, did you know?”
Alysanne’s tone carried no particular emotion, yet Baelon looked up sharply, a flash of surprise crossing his face as he looked at his mother.
Since her falling-out with Jaehaerys, though Alysanne still treated all her children with the same evenhanded kindness, there had always been some indefinable awkwardness between her and Baelon in particular.
“As heir to the throne, you ought to have the ability to work through a question like this yourself.” Alysanne said calmly.
The Dragonpit’s bronze gates stood open as they always did, letting King’s Landing’s winds sweep through the great structure and carry off the smell of dragon dung and scorched bone.
Beyond the gates, the space opened up wide and empty.
Quentyn looked up at the Dragonpit’s great domed ceiling.
Majestic.
Austere.
Carrying a weight that pressed down on him the moment he stepped inside.
Baelon’s eyes lit up all at once.
“Harrenhal sits at the crossroads of the Seven Kingdoms.
Whoever holds it holds the key to the Riverlands, the Vale, and the crownlands alike.
And Lord Aenys, back then, appeared on the surface to be one of Maegor’s supporters…”
As he said this, Baelon seemed to catch himself, as though he’d just realized something, and his voice trailed lower.
“Yes.
Back then, people all believed my grandfather was one of Maegor’s staunchest supporters.” Quentyn added, right on cue.
He’d puzzled over this same question himself, back when his grandmother Agatha used to tell him the story.
“When Prince Aegon and Dowager Queen Rhaena chose to press their claim to the throne, my grandfather sided with Maegor, allowing him to make camp and resupply at Harrenhal…”
Quentyn didn’t need to finish.
Everyone present already knew how it went: once resupplied at Harrenhal, Maegor had mounted Balerion, the Black Dread, at once, and torn Prince Aegon and his dragon Quicksilver apart without mercy, winning what history would come to call the Battle of the God’s Eye.
“Valera was still too young to remember any of it herself…
Quenny, didn’t Lady Agatha ever tell you about this?” Alysanne asked, pulling off her gloves and handing them to a dragonkeeper who had already been waiting nearby.
Aside from members of House Targaryen itself, only two kinds of people were permitted to make the Dragonpit their permanent post.
Seventy-seven strong, able-bodied men made up the Dragonguard, patrolling and standing watch on the Dragonpit’s ground floor.
Every one of these warriors hailed from Dragonstone, and House Targaryen furnished them with the finest swords and armor, so that they might keep this place secure.
The other kind were the specially trained dragonkeepers, responsible for delivering food to the dragons, and for guiding them back to their nests whenever their riders had need of it.
“No, my grandmother never told me any of this.
She much prefers telling me old myths and legends from the East, or the story of how she and my grandfather fell in love.” Quentyn kept shaking his head, back and forth like a rattle-drum.
The almost childish gesture filled Alysanne’s eyes with warm affection.
“Good boy.” Alysanne stroked Quentyn’s hair, then turned her gaze back to Baelon.
“And you’d do well to remember: judging where a man’s true loyalty lies is never a simple thing.
Take Lord Aenys Qoherys.
Before your uncle and aunt marched on King’s Landing, a band of outlaws calling their leader ‘Blueheart’ Harren joined forces with the Faith Militant and rose in rebellion, laying siege to Lord Aenys inside the Wailing Tower.
Maegor seized the opportunity, flew straight to Harrenhal on dragonback, and burned the outlaws to ash.”
Alysanne spoke like a patient tutor instructing her students, walking Quentyn and Baelon through the old story.
“Whatever Lord Aenys truly felt about Maegor, once faced with the Black Dread, and a Black Dread that had just saved his own lands, he had no choice but to bend the knee.
What’s more, the lord himself lay gravely wounded at the time, and it fell to a mere woman to offer Maegor bread and salt, and meat to feed his dragon.
And so Maegor simply assumed the lord’s loyalty was his.”
By this point, a dragonkeeper, dressed in a grey robe cinched at the waist with nothing more than a dark grey cord, stood waiting nearby.
[Your Grace, Silverwing has already worked through two fat sheep.
Her appetite is in fine form.]
The dragonkeeper spoke in High Valyrian, though with a heavy accent.
Quentyn could even make out a fair number of onomatopoeic sounds woven through his speech.
Perhaps it came from spending so much time around dragons?
Quentyn quietly filed the observation away.
“Māzīs zaldrīzoōghari dārilaro Valaero” ([Bring me Princess Valera’s dragon egg.])
Queen Alysanne’s own High Valyrian, by contrast, sounded far warmer to the ear, and closer to the version Quentyn himself knew.
Wait.
A dragon egg?
Quentyn’s pupils contracted sharply for an instant before settling back to normal.
By his reckoning, his mother had been born in 39 AC, when the royal family still kept up appearances of harmony, and there should indeed have been a dragon egg placed in her cradle, as was tradition.
For whatever reason, though, that egg had never hatched, and his mother had never seemed particularly drawn to dragons since.
[Your Grace, Princess Valera’s egg has already turned to stone.
Whatever do you want with it…]
[Just bring it.] Alysanne ordered the dragonkeeper to fetch the egg, and went on with her unfinished story.
“In truth, my mother wasn’t entirely certain of it herself, but Harrenhal was a better choice than Driftmark.
She believed that most people would assume she’d flee to Driftmark for safety, which meant Driftmark, and the castles of her own protectors, were sure to be the first places Maegor searched.” Find the original chapter at novelping . com.
From somewhere deep within the Dragonpit came a low, indistinct roar, and Quentyn felt his own blood stir at the sound, not only the transmigrator’s own longing for dragons, but something else too, some resonance buried deep in his blood itself.
“Your father, at first, still hesitated.”
Alysanne looked at Baelon, and suddenly smiled.
“But there was no time to waste, so we set out at once.
Your father carried Valera, I carried my mother, and together we flew our dragons out of Dragonstone, circled around the Vale, and landed at Harrenhal.
To this day, I still remember the look on Lady Agatha’s face when two dragons came falling out of the sky.”
Quentyn’s expression shifted at once to open curiosity.
“Fear?”
“No.” Alysanne shook her head.
“Joy.
Your grandmother and my mother embraced each other right there among the ruins of the Hall of a Hundred Hearths.
She said how glad she was to see us alive at all…”
A shadow crossed Alysanne’s expression, and Quentyn, sensing it, lowered his own head in quiet sorrow along with her.
That was because, while Alysanne and Jaehaerys had indeed escaped safely…
…their second-eldest brother, Viserys, had not escaped Maegor’s clutches.
Enraged when he learned of the others’ flight, Maegor had tortured Prince Viserys for nine straight days.
Once the prince finally died, Maegor had his broken, mutilated body left out in the open courtyard as bait, hoping to lure Dowager Queen Alyssa out of hiding.
“She had us hidden away in the cellars beneath the Wailing Tower.
Rather ironic, really.
Harren and his sons couldn’t escape the Black Dread’s flame down in those same cellars, but we did.”
The dragonkeeper, along with a younger one, emerged from deep within the Dragonpit carrying a great bronze pot between them.
The younger dragonkeeper lifted the lid, revealing the dragon egg inside.
Quentyn’s eyes were drawn to the egg at once.
He couldn’t have looked away even if he’d tried.
For one moment, Quentyn felt like nothing so much as a moth, and the thing inside that bronze pot, a single flame calling to him relentlessly, burning fierce enough that he’d have thrown himself into it and shattered to pieces gladly, if it came to that.
It was a dazzling golden egg, its surface like molten gold still flowing, streaked here and there with delicate patterns of pink.
“This was your mother’s egg, back then.
My sister Rhaena set it in her cradle.
We all thought it would hatch into a dragon just as lovely as your mother turned out to be, gold enough that we could tease Vermithor together about his color.”
Alysanne’s voice was heavy with quiet sorrow.
“But your mother was far too frail when she was first born.
My mother, at one point, thought she wouldn’t make it at all.
Though with your grandmother’s help, Valera’s health improved, the egg never hatched.
As a little girl, she loved nothing more than holding that egg close while she watched her two brothers train, or listened to my stories.
But when we fled, there simply wasn’t time to bring the egg along, and by the time we made it back to Dragonstone, your mother’s egg had already gone cold…”
But the egg, as Quentyn saw it, was nowhere near as hopeless as Alysanne’s account made it sound.
True, it had gone cold, and though it remained beautiful on the surface, to a Targaryen eye well acquainted with dragon eggs, it was, for all practical purposes, no different from an ordinary stone.
But in Quentyn’s own sight, a flame was still burning within it.
He could even make out gold and fire flowing together somewhere deep inside the egg, faint, but unmistakably still there.
“Your mother married your father not long after, and little by little, she came to prefer books and flowers over dragon eggs.
So the egg stayed behind on Dragonstone, and was later sent on to King’s Landing.”
The egg’s gold was reflected in Alysanne’s blue eyes, like a sun rising over a great blue lake.
“I think it’s time it went back to where it belongs.”