Seasons in this world ran long.
A summer could last years, even a decade.
The maesters called that a long summer.
The snow had gone from the riverlands a year since, and the air still had early spring in it.
Harrenhal had no tenants.
For miles beyond the walls the plain stood in grass as high as a man.
Snakes and beetles, rats and ants, fought in it for the next day.
The Gods Eye was still cold.
The children did not care.
Rhaegar went in first and the boys followed.
Only Jocelyn stayed on the bank, with the maids and their blankets.
A dozen knights kept a watch and argued about cutting the weeds.
The two Kingsguard had come out of their plate.
They stood waist-deep and held Boremund and Baelon under the belly, teaching them to swim.
Rhaegar and Aemon had gone out a good twenty yards.
A boulder sat under the water there.
They could perch on it with their heads clear.
Rhaegar looked back at the towers.
“Aemon.
Have you ever seen a dragon drink?”
Aemon thought about it.
“I don’t think so.”
The eggs put in his cradle and in Baelon’s had never cracked.
They would have to grow and claim a beast on Dragonstone.
The king’s dragon and the queen’s did not make friends.
Aemon knew little of how a dragon spent a day.
Rhaegar asked because Dreamfyre moved.
On the Tower of Dread she opened her wings and came off the stone.
She did not climb.
She glided to the lakeshore, set the hooked bone of her forelimbs in the water, put her head down, tasted the lake, and then looked at him.
The sun stood high.
It found the pale blue and the silver in her scales.
On the bright water, big-billed fishers picked their way in and tried the fallen thing with their beaks.
The birds stood as tall as a man.
Warm weather had brought them up from the south.
They clamped whatever they found to see if it would go down whole.
Wild cats and dogs along the bank had learned that.
There were stories about children as well.
They came in packs, and they did not fear men.
More than once a beak had shut on Rhaegar’s head while he swam.
He would get the long neck in his fist and the bird would scream and throw feathers.
He hated them.
The fire came low across the water, gold shot with red, and ran on for dozens of yards before it died.
Steam stood up in a white wall.
The maids screamed.
The Kingsguard knew dragons.
They told the men to put the swords away.
She was hunting.
Heat rolled in the smoke.
The fishers had found a mouth that was not theirs.
Dreamfyre spent her days asleep on the height and had not bothered with the little lives at the water.
A dozen black bird-corpses rocked on the lake now, waiting to go down her throat.
“She’s beautiful,” Aemon said.
He was already choosing, in his head, which dragon on Dragonstone would be his.
Rhaegar said nothing.
He put his hand on the brand on his left shoulder.
The burn in it never stopped.
He had learned, over the years, to sleep on top of it.
Flame made it worse.
When Dreamfyre loosed fire close enough, it had put him on the ground and kept him there.
He locked his jaw and pushed lake water against the mark.
The cold took a little of it.
The skin there was ridged and dark red.
Every man who had seen it said a hot iron had made it.
Why it covered the left breast, the shoulder, and the back in the shape of a palm, no one agreed.
It looked like a hand.
It looked more like a claw.
The nails were points, not the blunt moons of a man.
A dragon’s forelimb carried one true thumb-claw.
The other four bones had been drawn out into the spars of the wing.
The hind foot had three toes forward and one behind.
The Grand Maester’s reading had found the most favor: an old rite from the father’s house.
Rhaegar had come into the world as an infant.
No one had thought to ask him how the mark had got there.
He was not fool enough to tell them.
When he fell between worlds there had been two powers at war, and a pale shining thing with a man’s shape and reaching arms had taken hold of him.
He thought the brand had to do with dragons.
Aemon saw the hand on the shoulder and the twitch in the face.
“Does it hurt again?”
The only draught in this world that truly stopped pain was milk of the poppy.
Maesters made it.
It worked.
It tasted of milk.
The name was all the warning a man needed.
“It has never not hurt.
Leave it.
Come on.
I’ll show you how to take birds.” Dreamfyre had finished her meat and the smell had got into him.
He started for the bank.
I’ll cook a bird and let a dragon play leech.”
“Wait—” Aemon twisted after him and swam as if the lake owed him something.
He did not ask if the birds would come.
If Rhaegar said a thing, the thing got done.
Rhaegar had made a pebble vanish under a wooden bowl.
The four of them still spoke of it as if it were a wonder.
The maids rubbed them dry and got them into clothes.
Rhaegar told the grown folk to keep off.
He took the four into the grass beyond the walls.
“Here.
Cut it down.”
The mound was low.
A few flat stones crowned it.
Boremund, Jocelyn, Aemon, and Baelon hacked at the weeds with wooden swords.
Rhaegar dug.
Worms came up, more than a dozen.
The others closed in to watch.
“That’s vile.” Jocelyn looked at the red twist of them in his palm and went to gooseflesh.
“We aren’t eating them.”
He pulled broad green leaves from the cut pile and broke off thin, tough stems.
The thickest worms went on the stems.
He rolled each leaf into a cone, wide at the mouth, tight at the tail, and pinned the baited stem through it.
Five traps.
He set them on the dirt with the mouths up, chopped the rest of the worms with a wooden edge, and scattered the mess around.
Then he took them to another mound and put them in the grass.
Boremund had one eye in the gap.
“That will work?” He had seen a bow used.
He had seen a boy climb to a nest.
He had not seen this.
“If the wind stays down.”
This was a world that had not crowded itself to death.
The animals had not learned to fear men.
Birds least of all.
Food showed, and they came in a pack.
That was why men built scarecrows.
“There.” He was already up and running.
The four went after him.
The flock on the ground broke for the air.
Five birds had the cones in their beaks and would not drop the worms.
The leaf blinded them.
They could not rise.
They hopped and beat and went nowhere.
Rhaegar only had to bend and take them.