Corlys looked at him through the drink.
“Still short.
I’ll give you half a palm.
No one gets to say I picked on a child.”
“You said it.” Rhaegar took the gift before the other man could think better of it.
The stamina-bar kept him working.
Strength was another matter.
That would come when the body grew, and then he would beat it like a rented mule and find out whether the cheat would let it run past a man’s ordinary limit.
Not tonight.
Corlys let go and took him lower on the wrist.
They locked eyes.
The muscle in both arms came up.
“Now!”
The nearest drunk had made himself judge.
The pull started.
They went red and loud together.
The first burst moved nothing.
After that it was who lasted.
“Put it in him!
Put it in him!”
Neither of them knew how to yield.
The arms stayed where they were.
Both left hands found the table edge at the same time.
The extra hold helped.
Toes dug at the boards.
Cords stood in their necks.
The rest of them went the color of the work.
“Harder!”
Corlys’s face pulled tight.
His tongue moved in his mouth without him asking it to.
Rhaegar’s features knotted.
The air in his chest hammered at his throat.
Corlys began to empty.
Rhaegar’s bar was still up.
While it held, the strength in the arm stayed at the best he had.
The heir’s wrist went to the wood.
The judge came off his stool.
“Hardbar Rhaegar!”
Rhaegar threw both arms up.
“Mine!”
The laugh ran out of him and the brandy ran in.
He had spent the whole body on the board and stood too fast.
The supper turned.
The ring went quiet.
Corlys was still in the chair, still rubbing the wrist.
The silver hair and the sea-green wool had a new coat: yellow-green, wet, with red bits in it that had been something on a plate.
Leaves.
Meat gone to mash.
He lifted his head slowly and did not open his mouth.
Anything he said would come with what was on his face.
Rhaegar had a little of his mind back.
He showed his empty hands and put on a smile.
“That was not on purpose.”
From the dais Alyssa came to her feet and shook a fist at them.
“Corlys!
Hit him for me!”
Corlys dragged a hand down his face.
The drink finished the rest.
The fist found Rhaegar’s eye.
Rhaegar covered it.
“You want that?” He left the floor and drove a boot at Corlys’s belly.
There was no weight in it.
Corlys did not fly.
Rhaegar found the mess with his other foot and went down in it.
Corlys took two bad steps, found his balance, and dropped onto Rhaegar’s chest with a fist already up.
Then his color changed.
The throat worked.
The ring broke.
“Out of it!”
On the far stones the dancers were still at their work.
Talk ran.
The musicians kept the time they were paid for.
No one came to shout a side.
No one came to pull them apart.
They stood well back with their mouths shut and watched two boys roll in what they had brought up, hit each other, and bring up more.
Three days after the betrothal the guest ships were gone.
A few fishing boats sat in Dragonstone’s harbor and nothing else.
Jocelyn had gone home to Storm’s End with Boremund.
A lord’s daughter took a long road to a wedding.
A girl meant for a queen took a longer one.
Stormlands houses would send her a string of maids.
Gowns, day-clothes, and the jewels that traveled with her would all be made again.
Rhaegar and Corlys had not stayed angry.
Once the drink left them they set a time to do it properly, with real steel, in a yard.
Cloud sat on the island and hid the sun.
On Dragonstone that was good weather.
Rain would follow, and rain was the fresh water the place lived on.
Grey hemp and long wooden poles came out of the castle in two files: dragonkeepers, some dozens of them, walking the king down to the harbor village.
Jaehaerys took the steps inside that order.
Aemon, Baelon, and Rhaegar came after him with two white cloaks.
The king had put on the close black his house liked and a suit of silver plate over it, worked all over, gold dragons in relief with their wings open.
The cloak was the three-headed red beast on black with a red border.
It looked like a feast.
Dark Sister hung at his belt.
The hair that usually stopped at his ears had been combed up.
A maid had put the beard in order.
The three boys behind him caught the rest of it: perfume out of Volantis.
Rhaegar’s right eye was still a ring of dark.
He did not know why a king dressed like that wanted a boy with a bruise in the column.
It had the look of a man going to drink at a wedding.
The village mouth had one.
A Dragonstone pair, island-born, were taking each other that day.
Jaehaerys stopped and spoke to Aemon.
“Every wedding here asks us.
When you have a wife, this sits with you.”
“They’re the dragonkeepers’ blood.
We should see to them.” Aemon had not heard the piece that mattered.
The bride and groom were already at their own door, waiting on the king.
The people who had always lived on the rock kept an old, plain life.
They did not chase goods and they did not keep themselves pretty.
The two of them were a little past twenty and had the faces of forty.
“The custom is that a Targaryen man who comes to the wedding spends the night in the bride’s house.” Jaehaerys said it as if he were naming the hour.
Rhaegar had it then.
This was not a courtesy call.
The king meant to take the first night.
He had put that right in the ground for the Seven Kingdoms and kept it alive on this island, and he meant Aemon to keep it after him.
Alysanne had been at him for years.
The island women were not to his taste.
So he was in a hurry to hand the work down.
Rhaegar put a private name on him and did not say it.
Baelon had only half the shape of it.
“The first night?”
Jaehaerys did not rush him.
“For a bride on this island, that night given to a Targaryen is a blessing.
A dragonseed from it is the highest honor they know.”
Aemon’s face went open.
“You ended the first night.
Does Mother know?”
The right had been a lord’s for a long time, and only a lord’s.
Smallfolk had not loved sharing a wife.
The wives had loved it less.
Some couples had taken each other in quiet and told no one.
At Queen Alysanne’s urging, Jaehaerys had put a law on it in 58 after Aegon’s Conquest and killed the custom.
Aemon had been three.
Later, other mouths had told him that ending the first night was one of the reasons the realm loved his mother.
Jaehaerys drew the red cloak around so they could see it.
“The clothes.
The armor.
The cloak.
The perfume.
Alysanne put every piece of it on me.”