The year 60 after Aegon’s Conquest had already given the realm a winter it could almost bear.
Then the maesters named the thing that followed, and the Shivers went through Westeros like a second season.
Beyond Harrenhal’s main gate the land ran out in a wide plain.
Snow still held the northern towns.
Here the grass lay yellow and dead, and a thin rain came down with a scatter of flakes in it.
The wind cut harder than a clean snowfall.
Rhaegar stood in that wind, wrapped until he could not use his arms.
Rhaena had put coat on coat on him and jammed a thick white felt cap down over his ears.
Only his black eyes showed.
She was not yet forty.
Cold had put a little color in her fair face.
Over a red gown worked with black she wore a white fur.
Her silver-gold hair was coiled tight on her head.
She looked what she was: a Targaryen princess who had chosen a burned castle over court.
Rhaegar kept his feet planted and turned only his shoulders.
“Rhaena.
How much longer?”
Four years at Harrenhal had given him the Common Tongue and enough letters to scratch a simple line.
“Soon.” She brushed melt from his cap.
The brand on his left shoulder woke again.
He twisted until his back was to her.
“Will the king come on the Bronze Fury?”
“The king and queen will be here on dragonback before the hour is out.
The wagons with their household will need three more days.” She caught his collar when he started to squirm.
Cloth dragged on skin and made a little heat.
Heat took the edge off the brand’s burn.
He worked himself around inside the coats and tipped his face to the sky, hunting the cloud.
Two dragons would drop out of it soon.
When they did, every great beast in Westeros that still took a rider would be on the same ground.
Rhaena had told him what dragons were.
Five thousand years of Valyria had ridden them.
After the Doom they had lived and bred on Dragonstone and almost nowhere else.
More than a dozen had names now.
Only dragonlord blood of House Targaryen made a beast accept a weight on its back.
King Jaehaerys rode Vermithor, the Bronze Fury, a foul-tempered brute and the third-largest dragon living.
His wings, open, could put the Red Keep in shade.
Queen Alysanne rode Silverwing: pale green scales, silver wings, seventh in size, as mild as her rider.
Dragonkeepers could walk up and feed her from their hands.
The third rider was the woman holding Rhaegar’s collar.
He could not move the coats, so he pulled his hands into the sleeves, turned again, and stared at Harrenhal’s ruined crowns.
The place was the world he thought he knew, and it was not.
He had an Elder Scrolls system.
He shut his eyes and sank inward, and it opened in his mind.
[System]
Elder Scrolls
Black field
Wheel turning, lower right
That was all of it.
Dark, and a wheel that would not stop.
The names lined up and then they did not.
Targaryen.
Baratheon.
King’s Landing.
Storm’s End.
The rest of the people, and every named dragon, he had never heard.
The kingsroad that should have been a byword was not here.
Balerion, whose skull ought to have grinned in the Red Keep’s hall, was still alive.
The show he remembered would not help him.
He had come in too early.
Harren the Black had raised this pile.
Sixty years back, the same Balerion who had later pulled Rhaegar out of the sky had melted it.
Five towers stood as stumps.
Later men had given them names.
Rhaegar and Rhaena kept to Kingspyre Tower.
Widow’s Tower stood empty over its deep cells.
Wailing Tower held its cavernous vaults.
The Tower of Ghosts held nothing.
Dreamfyre had taken the crown of the highest of them, the Tower of Dread.
She was Rhaena’s.
Dreamfyre was built long and fine.
Pale blue scales ran with thin silver.
Her wings were a lighter blue, her spinal scales silver, and behind the skull a pair of long silver horns bent a little back.
Men in the Seven Kingdoms called her the most beautiful dragon alive.
Rhaegar looked up.
The silver beast at rest seemed to feel the look.
She uncoiled the neck she had tucked along her side and let her head sag over the melted lip of the tower, and she looked at him.
“Mind your manners.” Rhaena had caught him turning in the coats again.
She hiked her skirts and crouched to put the layers back where she had put them.
They were not alone in the wind.
Everyone who lived in Harrenhal had come to the gate.
Lord Maegor Towers was sixteen, last of his house, poor as a septon’s mouse, pale to the lips.
His whole strength was one cook and three old men-at-arms.
Rhaena had walked away from the contests of court and brought four maids, three cooks, and a dragon.
Count Rhaegar and the castle that could have held thousands held fourteen souls.
One old soldier kept the Towers banner stiff in the wind: five black towers on white.
Another held Rhaena’s three-headed red dragon.
Lord Towers sat a camp stool.
The robe washed nearly white and the bent stick in his fist were the two things he liked best.
He smiled at Rhaena.
“King Jaehaerys could not keep still either, when he was small.
A boy should move.”
“Rhaegar moves too much.
One day he will walk himself into the Gods Eye and drown.” Her mouth was hard.
Her hands on the boy’s coat were not.
“I have seen him swim in the bath—” The laugh broke.
He coughed until Rhaegar thought the man’s lung would come up in his hand.
An old soldier near fifty came in from the side.
He had raised the lord from a child.
He undid one button at the throat and knocked softly between the thin shoulders.
“The coat is tight,” Towers said.
“Worn to meet a king.” He would not say he was already dying.
Color stood in his face from the lie.
He had sold what could be sold.
This was the last garment fit to be seen in.
Winter cloth pulled over padded wool made it worse.
Rhaegar had asked Rhaena why she did not give the man a coat.
She had given him no answer and told him to watch.
He had watched.
A lord could starve in a clean pride before he took charity and called it kindness.
She finished with Rhaegar and rose.
“Have you taken your medicine?”
Towers smiled and shook his head.
“The man who sold it has not come in two months.”
“Damn this winter.
Damn this plague.” Rhaena said it at the sky.
The cooks and maids muttered with her.
Westeros kept no honest calendar of seasons.
A summer might run ten years and men would name it a long summer.
A winter might come down like a hammer.
This one had put snow even on the mountains of the west.
Winter, then the Shivers.
The sickness did not care if a body wore silk or wool, or whether it was a man’s or a woman’s.
Once it took hold, there was no medicine.
It was in the Seven Kingdoms.
It was in King’s Landing.
It had crossed the water to Dragonstone.
Lord Lyman Lannister had died of it at the turn of the year.
A few days past, Princess Daenerys Targaryen, seven years old, had taken the first chill and been dead before the day was half gone.
The Red Keep was no shelter now.
Letters had told Jaehaerys there was still one place the Shivers had not touched.
He and the queen had settled it between them: the two princes would come to Harrenhal, and with them the two Baratheon children the royal household had in its keeping.
Harrenhal stood on the Gods Eye in the riverlands, the greatest castle in the Seven Kingdoms, raised by an ironborn king and left a ruin when Aegon the Conqueror set Balerion on it.
The land around it was riverland.
The stones were the crown’s.
A king granted them for service and took them back when a line failed or a name was attainted.
The other towers had stood empty.
Four years ago, at Rhaena’s asking, Jaehaerys had put her in them.
The plague stayed out of Harrenhal for a simple reason.
Fourteen people lived inside the largest fortress in the realm.
The rats had starved or gone.
There was no blood left for a sickness to climb.
The cold had them all shaking when two dark shapes tore out of the cloud.
“They’re here,” Rhaegar said first.
“Stand still.” Rhaena’s hand found his shoulder.
A small child she could manage.
A child who could run had given her no peace.
The old soldier got Lord Towers on his feet.
Rhaegar stood against Rhaena’s skirt.
The household made a line behind them.
Two dull impacts rolled across the grass.
One dragon large, one smaller, both down in the far pasture.
They folded the wing-leather along their forelimbs, set four feet to the frozen ground, and came on.