Broadleaf, little vine, little thorn.
He came off the slope in a roll and ran for Harrenhal on hands and feet.
He knew that ground.
He could make them pay for it.
An arrow stood in a trunk beside him.
He left it there.
He ran until the trees at the edge of the pear rows, and dropped into a pit full of weed.
“Keep him.
If he reaches the gate we all die.” The scar knew what Harrenhal would become once the boy was inside it.
They had walked in because Rhaena fed whoever came up the road.
If Rhaegar got home the gate would shut.
After that it would be the king’s writ and knights until there were no men left to hunt.
He lay in the pit and listened.
The dog had not come.
The fight had put the animal on its belly in its own mess.
The scar had dragged it and it would not walk.
When the voices went away it started on the dead.
The sellswords came shouting down his line, closer to the hole.
He had the iron in both hands, half up, ready to go through the weed and finish them.
Three lights were moving out from Harrenhal.
From the pit he could not see them.
He had fought a duel under the old soldiers’ eyes and left the castle after the men who had lost it.
Rhaena had torn strips off the three of them and put every servant in the hall to wait.
Deep night, and no boy.
Guilt did the rest.
West and south were water.
Four cooks took cleavers east.
The three old men took swords north.
The steps stopped.
The six seemed to hold.
He set himself to come out of the grass.
Sellswords in the black.
Rhaegar in the black.
Three old soldiers with torches, turning their heads in a wood they did not know, and six bows already on them.
Three screams.
He had heard those throats since he was small.
“Here!
The bastard’s here!” A sellsword loosed at the pit.
Rhaegar put the sword in front of his face and let the rest of the shafts find him.
He went through the man and opened the chest.
A boot put him in the dirt.
The sellsword turned to run.
Two strides.
Rhaegar came off the ground and took the head from behind.
More arrows.
In the first fight he had kept a count.
Now there was only the work of cutting them down.
One man dropped the shortbow and drew.
His longsword went through Rhaegar’s belly.
Rhaegar’s sword went through his heart.
“Four.” He was already moving.
Shafts went past.
Then there were no more shafts.
They ran.
The scar did not have to say it.
A boy with a dozen arrows in him who was still killing did the saying for them.
“You four dogs.”
The hunt turned around.
“Come back and finish it.”
The bar in him was full enough.
His legs were still a child’s.
The gap widened.
“Back.
You die tonight.
Tonight.”
They were about to be nothing but sound in the trees.
His eyes were red.
The curses ran out of him raw.
The canopy ahead came off in a sheet.
Wind threw the leaves.
Trunks thick as a man’s waist went down in rows.
The cry that followed was not the low sound a dragon makes in a yard.
It was the long, sharp noise they make when they mean to burn a field.
Gold-red fire went into the wood and laid a wall dozens of yards long.
Fire again, low, along the dirt.
A third time.
Trees blew apart.
Flame stood up.
Pale blue scale took the red.
The ground moved.
Two steps put her on the scarred man.
The mouth opened.
Teeth like longswords found his clothes.
He shut his eyes.
The teeth did not come through.
What he had done in his breeches may have been enough.
He looked.
Every rider who used the road knew Dreamfyre.
His legs went.
He shook on his knees and howled at the place a saddle should have been.
“Your Grace—Rhaena—mercy.
Your Grace, mercy.”
He put his face in the dirt for a dragon and called it hope. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Burning wood shifted.
Rhaegar walked through the fire with the longsword.
The man was still begging Rhaena.
There was no saddle.
There was no woman on the neck.
There was only the boy, arrows in him, a sword through his belly, his own clothes burning.
“What are you?”
Rhaegar stopped five yards off.
He looked at Dreamfyre.
He looked at the man.
The sword came up.
“Dracarys.”
The fire took the scar and the trees beside him.
Rhaegar watched until there was white ash and nothing that had been a face.
When the last of them was dead the tightness went out of him and the pain came in.
He made it to a fallen trunk and sat and started on the arrows.
The burning wood pleased Dreamfyre.
It pleased him.
Leather, shirt, breeches were gone.
He sat naked on timber that was still on fire.
He got the sword out of his belly by inches.
The body tried to fold around the hole.
The flame did not cook him.
It ran up into the five-claw brand on the left shoulder and went into it.
Dark red became a gold that gave off light.
He felt no heat on the skin.
The veins around the mark stood up.
What moved in them looked like slag under the hide, red from inside.
The holes in him closed while he watched and left only a red seam.
The brand had taken the fire and was paying it back into the meat.
A dragon does not fear fire.
He knew he had no part of a true dragon.
There was no Targaryen binding between his head and hers.
When he was smaller he had thought Dreamfyre, Vermithor, and Silverwing came to him.
Time with Dreamfyre had corrected that.
She did not come to him.
When she closed the distance, the nose was always on the brand.
After the blood-bar and the stamina-bar he had tried the thing every way he could.
Meat on a fire: the mark drank common flame.
He had climbed her back with his heart in his teeth.
Wood-fire, for now.
Wildfire, and the dragonfire that ate steel, he would not touch.
He had not lived here long enough to spend himself on that.
Perhaps a day would come.
It was not this night.