The king and queen had put the first night in the ground for the Seven Kingdoms and kept it breathing on Dragonstone.
They meant Aemon to keep it after them.
Rhaegar had names for the pair of them.
He did not say those either.
Aemon still could not take it.
“That is a betrayal of a marriage.”
“Look at the dragonkeepers.
Who put the Valyrian in their mouths?
Why can they walk up to a dragon and not go down its throat?”
Jaehaerys turned on the men around them and let the voice carry.
“Because they are Targaryen get.”
Their blood was not clean.
Not one of them wore silver-gold hair or purple eyes.
The king’s word was still an honor.
Chests came up.
The ones his gaze touched bent at the waist.
Aemon had no clean way to refuse, so he pulled his brother in.
“And Baelon?
When he has a dragon, does he do this too?”
Jaehaerys did not hurry it.
“Our blood is not a hardy strain.
Marry outside the Valyrian houses and in one generation—two at the most—you lose the right to come near a dragon.
Every man of us who can ride keeps this custom.”
Maids told girls and boys what a bed was for before they were given to one.
Jaehaerys had brought Aemon and Baelon to a wedding on the back of a betrothal so the house lesson would sit where they could not pretend they had not heard it.
“Dragons are the root of our rule.
In the old Freehold each dragonlord family kept scores of them.
Some kept a hundred.
Eight hundred years back, in the Second Spice War, the dragonlords sent three hundred beasts to a single field.
You know what they eat.
Do you think the sons of one house could have kept that many fed?”
Three hundred.
Rhaegar did not know if the number was true.
It had the shape of a man hanging an old right on older bones and using the house to pin two boys to it.
Jaehaerys saw the look.
“You need not doubt it.
Your name comes from Volon Therys.
That town sat on one of the fields.
If you ever have the road, walk the ruin.”
Rhaegar had nothing.
What history he had learned began when Aegon took the Seven Kingdoms.
The Freehold before that was a closed book.
“Aemon.
Baelon.
When you take wives, the duty is yours.
The queen will speak to Jocelyn.
She will understand.” Jaehaerys’s eyes went to Rhaegar and stopped there.
He left the rest unsaid.
Ser Ryam Redwyne came up with a stack of towels.
“You have two years yet.
You and Jocelyn can spend them getting used to the thought.
Take the towel.
Go up the Dragonmont and look for eggs.”
He held another out.
“Baelon.”
Aemon took his and did not move.
“And Rhaegar?”
Rhaegar did not know either.
The king had spent half a morning on Targaryen business and then pointed at a mountain.
He had not come along to hear the house laugh at itself.
Jaehaerys’s brow drew in.
He gave it a breath.
“I took you up last year.
The stone is bad.
Keep Baelon from running off.
Rhaegar goes with you.”
“All right.” The mouth said it bright.
The rest of him did not.
Count the life before this one and he and Jaehaerys were of an age.
The pause, the face—the king had been waiting for Aemon to ask.
A man who sat in the Red Keep and gave orders all day, and took the music that came back, had forgotten how to lie to his own sons.
He knew the name was Therys.
He was still sending a bastard up a mountain full of dragons.
Rhaegar held that thought and then put it down.
Rhaena was in the castle.
Jaehaerys would not kill him in the open with her under the same roof.
The speech about the dragonkeepers had been for his ears.
A test of the blood.
A rumor that had reached the king.
Some other use.
The three sat in him and would not settle.
Three boys on that rock was not a plan.
Jaehaerys had a night to spend.
The white cloaks would not go up.
Before the column broke he named two dragonkeepers who knew the paths and sent them after.
The village wedding had no long rite.
Both houses fed the rest.
There was song and there was dancing and that was the whole of it.
Rhaegar watched the bride take Jaehaerys by the arm.
The crowd put him into the house with noise enough to carry halfway up the slope.
Rhaegar took the front of the line.
He had folded the white towel into a cap.
The path went up, and he gave it a tune he had no right to.
“The king says walk the mountain.
“Rhaegar.” Aemon’s day had already been long.
“Stop.
You haul it like that and you’ll call something out of the rocks that we don’t want.”
Baelon liked it.
“That’s only two lines.
What comes after?”
“I haven’t made it yet.” He remembered the start.
The rest had gone.
Rhaena kept out of the game in King’s Landing.
Rhaegar had no other door into Jaehaerys’s head.
He would take the next step when it came.
The brand was on the shoulder.
If he did not pick a fight with a beast, did not steal from its kill, and did not put a hand in a nest, nothing up there had a reason to come for him.
The path bent and climbed to a seaward crown.
Young legs held.
The two dragonkeepers stopped with their hands on their backs and pulled at the air.
The three boys still had talk in them.
“My princes.” The older keeper bent and pointed the long pole at a peak that was breathing smoke.
“That is where they live.”
“That far still?” Last time Aemon had gone with his father on dragonback.
The black stone ran on, peak after peak.
Dragonstone had no horses that would take a path like this.
His legs had opinions.
The keepers looked at each other.
The older one did the talking.
“More than ten years now since Balerion left the island.
The hottest north peak is Vhagar’s.
The others will not try her.
She pushed them down the slopes and that is where they stay.”
“She’s the largest left here,” Aemon said.
“Balerion went back to King’s Landing and he has not come out of the Dragonpit.” He stopped and turned his head to Rhaegar.
Aerea and the Black Dread had come home torn in a way no one could name.
What the princess’s death had looked like still shut mouths.
The beast in the deep caves under the pit had gone mean.
When Aemon and Baelon ran the place, the keepers put themselves in the road and would not let them near him.
“Leave it,” Rhaegar said.
“That was years.
She has been in the wind.
She has watched me grow.”
What he had for Aerea was guilt and nothing prettier.
If she had not held him against her and brought him into the Red Keep, the infant who had come down in the ruin would have starved there.
Calling her mother did not stretch the truth.
She had been the one who pulled him back into the world.
He had not seen Balerion in more than ten years.
Every year he went with Rhaena to Oldtown to sit with Aerea’s twin, Rhaella.
They had gone to the Red Keep for feasts more than once.
A bastard did not walk into the Dragonpit.
He had never stood in front of the old dragon and looked.