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CaveLeather
Fat ran out of the split birds and hit the coals with a spit.
Rhaegar’s five were on sticks and nearly done.
Ser Lucamore Strong had the better hand with a fire.
He had taken the work himself for the princes.
Ser Ryam kept the knights on a short ring of watch.
The birds had no meat worth a grown man’s hunger.
Children emptied and filled again.
Boremund and Prince Aemon still knew enough courtesy to wait with Rhaegar.
Baelon was four.
The spit on his lip would not stay put.
He copied Strong.
He turned the burning sticks.
He blew into the gaps to make the fire climb.
Strong had used a twig.
Baelon used his hands.
Rhaegar watched the thin fingers work in the coals.
No blister.
No cry.
Hair that hung into the flame did not catch.
The fire did nothing to him.
The Baratheon pair, Aemon, and Strong sat with the look of people who had seen it before.
No one pulled the boy back.
Rhaegar put his own hand toward the heat and stopped short of it.
The warmth was there.
“Baelon.
Is that a magic?
Against fire?”
“Magic?” Baelon shook his head.
His hands stayed in the coals.
Strong’s eyes were on the birds.
“A dragon does not fear fire.
Did Princess Rhaena never tell you?”
“No.” Rhaegar went backward through the years.
She had not.
“I can as well.” Aemon put his right hand in.
Perhaps it was ordinary to a Targaryen, as dull as saying a man eats when he is empty.
No one asked the blood of the king a close question, and they did not offer the answer.
Or the dragonlords held the gift so cheap, in their pride, that they never thought to name it.
Or they kept it as a hole card.
The Baratheon brother and sister sat right there.
The houses had been in and out of one another’s beds for generations.
They could not ride a dragon.
The rest they already knew.
Rhaegar said nothing.
Baelon’s hands in the fire had put a crack through him.
The birds came off done.
“You took them,” Strong said.
“You divide them.”
He stood the five sticks in the dirt, slapped ash from his plate, and stepped back.
A Kingsguard who had the six works of a knight and a white cloak to his name would not sit down to a child’s catch, even if he had cooked it.
The five birds were not one kind and not one size.
Strong did not go far.
He wanted the measure of the boy.
Children chose their company by liking. New chapters come out on g.com first.
The white cloaks kept a longer count.
They were there to keep the princes breathing.
They were also there to tell the king what sort of creature came near them.
“Ser Strong.
A dagger, if you can borrow one.”
So that was the game.
Make the bastard play generous.
Give the best piece away and look sweet doing it.
He almost laughed.
He was a child now.
The joke ran both ways.
The Kingsguard did not wear a dagger as a rule.
Strong had one off a knight in a dozen breaths.
Rhaegar had him cut every bird to small pieces.
No one had to grab.
The five of them ate until their mouths shone.
The light went.
Harrenhal laid a long shadow on the grass.
Boremund, Aemon, and Baelon talked the hunt and the fire all the way back.
A maid kept Jocelyn’s skirts out of the burrs.
They walked into the last of the sun.
Rhaegar came last, hands laced behind his head, belly out, in no hurry.
The men around princes kept extra rooms in their heads.
He kept a few of his own.
The bird-trick was simple, as simple as the pebble that vanished under a bowl.
Leave the hinge unnamed and a man could die old without finding it.
In the years he had been here, lords took birds with a bow.
Hunters sat a nest after dark with a net, or threw grain on open dirt and shot what came.
Those were living trades.
A father gave them to a son and to no one else.
Meat on the fire, feathers sold for fletching and for a lady’s cap—if this world had no such snare, one hunter who knew it could keep a house.
Nobles were not a clean people.
The world he had come from had been full of men who cheated their own.
Power made a fight.
Dorne was still at war.
Dragons had the sky.
There was magic no one could count.
He meant to grow old in it.
He did not know who the years would put in his path.
The only kin his own size were the Baratheon pair and the two princes.
Doing the trick in front of them was teaching it.
How many books a man had read did not matter.
You could read a mouth when it was still small.
A child who could not hold a thing was a child who would not hold a thing.
He would listen, later, for the bird-snare in other men’s talk.
He had given them a small secret.
If they spent it, that was theirs.
He lost nothing.
It kept the peace and told him who to keep and who to stand away from.
For now, that was enough.
In a world without lamps that burned by themselves, men rose with the light and lay down with it.
After supper the night watch walked the walls of Harrenhal in twos and threes, torches in their fists.
In Kingspyre the household washed and made for bed.
Thunder had been working in the cloud for days.
No flash.
No strike.
A knock, light, on the chamber door.
“Who is it?”
“Rhaena.
It’s me.
Rhaegar.”
“Come in, little Hardbar.”
He pushed the door.
She had not gone to bed.
She sat at the dressing table with a candle and a thin book.
“Shut it.
Come here.” The book went into a drawer.
She tipped her head.
The motion might have fooled a slower child.
He let his mouth tilt and crossed the room.
The chamber was clean.
A red wool carpet.
Yellow check on the little table and the desk, the cloth she liked best.
Five small wooden boxes on the dressing table: every paint a woman could still buy.
She put her hands under his arms, set him on her thigh, and smelled the soap on him.
Her fingers went through his black straight hair.
“This late.
The thunder?”
“It hasn’t come down on me.
I came to ask.” He could not stop the hand in his hair.
Talk only made it busier.
He leaned and pointed at the hearth.
“Baelon put his hands in the fire today.
He didn’t burn.
Ser Strong said Targaryens do not fear flame.”
“That.” The hand on his head went gentler.
Her eyes left him for the fire.
House Targaryen had come from the Valyrian peninsula, east across the water.
Pale skin, silver hair, purple eyes: the common stamp.
Volantis and Lys, among the Nine Free Cities, still held men and women of that blood.
Dragonlords, now, were only this house.
The ones who did not fear fire were the Targaryens who could take a dragon.
Black eyes, black hair, a face that did not match—Rhaegar had taken the other blood and anyone could see it.
She had not wanted a bastard’s look to become a bastard’s argument.
She had carried him on Dreamfyre more than once and never said the words.
She knew he came early to his mind.
He had asked.
She stood and took him to the hearth.
The night was cold.
Iron tongs leaned on the stone.
A small rack split the wood in two beds.
The maid had laid enough to last.
“A dragon does not fear fire,” Rhaena said.
“The dragonlords of Valyria said it until it was a proverb.”
She bent.
Her fingers went into the hearth and pushed the burning wood aside.
Then she closed her hand on the iron rack, red from the coals, and lifted it out.
CaveLeather