The air bent around the rack.
Meat laid on that iron would have been done.
Rhaena’s fair hand closed on the glow looked wrong in a way no story had prepared him for.
So the dragon-tales had teeth.
He had watched them and read them and still his mouth hung open.
The old line he reached for died in his throat.
What came out was, “That’s something.”
“Dragons cut their caves in the sides of volcanoes and lay there,” Rhaena said.
She gave him what she had.
“A dragon hatches the egg, or a Targaryen does.
“*Perzys ānogar.* Blood and fire.
The same source.
A man with no Targaryen blood, or blood too thin, burns.
He cannot speak to a dragon.
He cannot ride one.
The beast will take him for meat.”
Hearing it from her mouth locked it down.
House Targaryen had held Westeros sixty years and still married brother to sister.
They took an outside match only when no one of the right years stood in the family.
The Faith had fought them for it and they had kept the custom.
The blood of the dragonlords had to stay clean.
Without dragons they had nothing.
Heat off the rack found his face at a foot.
He would not put a hand on it.
He was sure he carried no Targaryen drop.
He had fallen in from outside.
He would not test a fire or a red iron.
Healing in this world was a rumor with a name.
A wound that soured would kill him.
He had not lived here long enough to spend himself that cheap.
Another question rose.
“Fire and hot iron do nothing.
What about dragonfire?”
“*Zaldrīzes izūgagon perzys daor.* A dragon does not fear fire.” She pitched the rack back into the hearth.
“That is common fire.
What is meant to die still dies.” She went to the soft chair and sat, and her face lifted to the painting on the wall.
“Aegon died of dragonfire.”
The man in the portrait was young and finely made, white hair, purple eyes, armor the color of fresh blood.
The three-headed dragon stood on his breast.
Behind him a silver-white beast: Quicksilver.
Under the frame, in a clear hand: Prince of Dragonstone, Aegon Targaryen.
Not the Conqueror.
The Conqueror’s eldest grandson.
Men old enough to have seen both said they had been cut from one face.
Westeros took names from the dead it honored.
After a few generations a First and a Second had to be hung on the end to tell the living from the bone.
Aegon had been Rhaena’s full brother and her husband.
They had two daughters.
The elder was Aerea, third to ride Balerion, Rhaegar’s mother.
He had been seventeen when his uncle Maegor killed him in the war for the succession.
It had happened south of the Gods Eye.
Maegor the Cruel, second to ride Balerion, tore Quicksilver to pieces and burned what was left.
Aegon was already dead of dragonfire as he fell.
The crown Aegon wore had come from his mother’s mouth, not from the High Septon.
Men called him Aegon the Uncrowned.
There was no Aegon the Second.
The style of queen that clung to Rhaena had come from Maegor.
After Aegon died Maegor took her.
He made the High Septon put a crown on him, and the law called it good.
That title was not an honor.
It was a year she did not like to open.
Eighteen years.
It lived in books now.
She was not the girl who had watched it.
Years of ugly work had flattened the worst of it.
Grief went through her and did not stay.
“Sleep.” She blew out the candle, lifted Rhaegar, crossed to the bed, and stuffed him under the clothes.
He did not sleep.
He watched the window and turned her words over.
After Valyria died, centuries back, the world had kept no clean account of magic.
Old books offered sightings that would not sit still.
A few men wandered calling themselves sorcerers.
They were tricksters with cups and sleeves.
Even House Targaryen had lost the working of it.
Their shelves held muddy lines and a child’s portion of dragon-lore.
The blood could take a common fire.
Wildfire—the green stuff—and dragonfire that ate steel and stone would still cook them.
The only thing left that smelled of magic was Valyrian steel.
Men said it had been made with spells.
The best smiths alive could melt a piece and pour it again.
They could not make it new.
Swords, knives for a table, ornaments: a scatter of them across the world.
Each one lost was gone.
The price only climbed.
A Valyrian blade was an heirloom.
House Targaryen held two.
Blackfyre was the wide greatsword.
Aegon the Conqueror had taken the Seven Kingdoms with it.
Aenys the First had been a weak man in the body and had still worn it as a sign.
Dark Sister was the one-handed sword.
Queen Visenya had carried it, then Maegor the First.
It had been stolen in the family’s war.
Maegor had taken Blackfyre up after.
All four of those people were ash.
Both swords hung now on the wall of the king’s bedchamber in the Red Keep.
Young Jaehaerys wore them by turns.
For Dorne he had taken only Blackfyre.
It was the better tool for cutting men.
In the morning Rhaegar woke and went to ground under the dressing table.
He opened the thin book she had hidden.
“What is this.
No heat.
No pace.
The middle is all guesswork.”
He kept it under his breath.
He had been right.
It was that kind of book.
His letters were still new.
He could follow the shape of it.
“The same three turns, new names, and the rest is noise a bed makes.
She was not yet forty.
Those were hungry years.
She had no husband.
A book like that did her no harm.
“Who says a man who falls between worlds has to pour glass and puddle steel?
I can get rich writing this.”
The crafts here were poor.
The appetite was not.
A man with no trade at all had just seen a road.
He was still laughing when his ear caught fire.
“Hardbar.”
Rhaena had him by it and dragged him into the light.
She had been awake.
She had seen him under the table and come quiet.
He had been too pleased with himself.
She had heard every word.
The book left his hands and went back in the drawer.
Her face was red.
Her fists were on her hips.
Shame or temper: both lived there.
He ran.
He put the table at his back, shoved off, and pumped for the door as if the floor were a hundred-yard course, arms chopping at his sides.
His feet left the stone.
She had him.
A few of her strides closed it.
Short legs do not beat a grown woman.
She took a fist of his clothes and lifted.
She sat on the settle, turned him over her knee, stripped his trousers down, and started.
“Ah—ha—ha—” The noise he made had joy in it.
The air in front of his eyes broke into numbers.
[System]
-0.1
-0.1
He had been too afraid of dying to take a wound.
The edge that had come with him between worlds had opened.
Maids hit the door at the sound, saw the beating, and stuck there whispering.
Baelon wriggled through their skirts.
He came for Rhaegar at this hour every morning.
The other chamber had been empty.
He had followed the noise.
The first sight of the slaps shut his mouth.
He watched longer.
Then his finger went out.
“He’s laughing.”
“You’re still laughing?”
“I’m not.”
Rhaena’s temper went up a floor.
She put a hand out.
A maid gave her the long-handled bird-duster they used on the ash.
She used that.
[System]
CRIT -1
CRIT -1
The noise he made after that was not joy.