Vermithor’s bulk was bronze to the last scale.
Even folded, the brown wings ran some thirty yards.
The neck, thick with spines, swung slow from side to side.
Eyes the size of millstones raked the yard.
His lip had curled off the long teeth.
He looked ready to burn the gate and everyone in it.
Silverwing came behind him without that show.
She did not hunt the ground for a claim.
She was built on Dreamfyre’s measure, head to tail no more than half of Vermithor.
Her spines were short, her horns short, a ring of them set back along the crest.
On a grey day the pale green of her scales went dull.
The silver in the wings did not.
Both beasts were still hot from the air.
Rain and the last thin snow hit the scales and went to steam.
A low mist stood around them.
In four years Rhaegar had gone with Rhaena to King’s Landing for the birth feasts of two princes, and more than once to the castle on Dragonstone.
Jaehaerys and the queen had been receiving guests.
He had not seen these two dragons until now.
A clever beast that lives with a man takes something of the man.
Men said a dog grew bold off its master’s temper.
A dragon was a more knowing thing than any dog, and the mark went deeper.
Rhaena had come through war, a husband’s death, and the betrayal of a woman she had loved.
She had walked away from court and shut herself in Harrenhal.
Dreamfyre kept the same caution.
She fed, and then she kept to her tower.
Alysanne was mild and meant well.
Silverwing had taken that from her.
She would not pick a fight with another dragon.
She did not snatch at living meat.
In the open she looked like a creature that wanted no quarrel.
Rhaegar had kept dogs, once.
Vermithor wore the name Bronze Fury because Jaehaerys did.
The king’s face was easy.
Under it, Rhaegar thought, was a hot man held down by will.
A dragon took one rider.
No one else climbed that back unless the rider carried them.
The king and queen had each brought one sworn sword, and four children with them.
Rope ladders dropped from both saddles.
Eight people came across the grass.
“Your Grace!”
No escort had kept pace with dragonflight.
There was no column, no banners but the two already in the old soldiers’ hands.
The greeting was all the ceremony they had.
Jaehaerys was twenty-six, tall, well made.
His silver hair was cut to the ear in the fashion of the capital.
Black close clothes, a fur-collared coat over them, and at his belt the old sword Blackfyre.
He put his hand on Lord Towers’s shoulder.
“Are you well, my lord?”
“Well!
Very well!” The greeting wiped the sickness off the boy-lord’s face.
His back came up as if the cane had been a lie.
“Rhaegar has grown.” The king’s eyes touched the wrapped child and left him.
He went past Rhaena without waiting on an answer.
“Inside.
It is cold out here.”
Alysanne took Jaehaerys’s hand and Rhaena’s and drew them toward the keep.
The three of them were born of the same father and the same mother.
The courtesies were short.
After that it was family talk.
The king’s eldest, Aemon, a small white-haired boy, stopped in front of Rhaegar.
He saw the coats pinning Rhaegar’s arms and put his own on his hips.
“Look at you, you bastard cousin.
Caught at last.”
Rhaegar stood half a head shorter and could not swing.
He planted a hand on Aemon’s belly.
“Look at you, you bastard uncle.
Let me out of this and I’ll knock you down inside.”
Aemon leaned his weight in.
They shoved toward the gate like that, each using the other for a post.
Aemon tipped his head.
“I can write my name.”
Rhaegar’s shoulder dug in.
“I can eat three eggs at once.”
“Can you still catch rats tonight and roast them?”
“Harrenhal has no rats.” He said it as fact.
The four of them were Boremund Baratheon, eight this year, and his full sister Jocelyn, six; and the princes, Aemon at five and Baelon at three.
The Baratheon pair had lived long in the Red Keep.
Rhaegar already knew all four.
Royal or not, they were children.
A loop of string had held Jocelyn for days.
A game of thrown stones had made Boremund and Aemon strut.
Rhaegar was a man wearing a boy’s height.
He had them in hand without raising his voice.
Dragonflight is quick coming and quick going.
After a plain supper the king and queen left Harrenhal for King’s Landing.
The Shivers was still eating the realm, and the work of it would not wait.
Rhaena put the four new children in rooms, named the maids who would have them, and came to Rhaegar’s chamber.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
“Why did you not speak to the king at supper?” She pushed a pear down into the blankets.
He set the pear on his chest and put his head out.
“He looks at me as if I sour his wine.
Why should I walk up and talk?”
He was not yet five.
A king did not take a dislike that clean without some older debt behind it.
“Sleep.
Leave it.”
She had not thought him sharp enough to feel the cold in Jaehaerys.
He was still small.
She did not want to put the rest of it on him.
She stood.
“Rhaena.
That year.
Why Rhaegar Therys?”
He did not push her when she shut her mouth.
Time would loosen it.
He knew there had been a fight with the king on the day of the name.
The queen had been holding him.
He had understood none of the words then and could not call them back now.
He did not care to talk with grown men and women.
The household whispered that his wits were thin.
Rhaena knew better.
He was early and he would not be bounced on a knee for sport.
She saw the look on him, thought it through, and sat again.
“The king did not want you named at all.
He said the Faith might take a bastard for a banner and rise a second time.
That fear was not empty.
It was not ten years then since the uprising ended.
The Poor Fellows and the Warrior’s Sons still had men in the hedgerows.”
Rhaegar watched her.
When Rhaena was fond of a person she used the name.
When she was not, she used the title.
She had said *the king*.
The old talk had been ugly.
“I held him to it until he gave way.
He meant to call you Jack Waters and give you to a smith.
The queen talked him off that ledge.” She put a finger near his face.
“You do not have to understand it tonight.
You will keep it.
You will not speak it.
Not to anyone.
Least of all to him.”
“I know.” He drew the blankets up.
She wanted him to have the truth and feared he would throw it in the king’s teeth.
The two wishes did not fit.
That was how she loved him.
“Waters is the name they hang on crownlands bastards.
And Jack.
Throw a brick in King’s Landing and you will hit two.
I would not let him put a name that cheap on you.”
The king’s choice still almost made her laugh.
“Therys is the back half of Volon Therys, the last town where your mother was seen.
It sits oddly, but it is a proper Valyrian name.
Rhaegar was a god of the old Freehold, the one who kept the flocks.
You are the first in Westeros to carry it.”
“All that weight, and I am a shepherd.” He thought the name wanted changing.
Her palm cracked against his brow.
“The men who raised Valyria five thousand years ago were shepherds before they were anything else.
That god stands third, after the dragon-god and the fire-god.
Do not spit on a gift.”
“All right.
All right.” Westeros belonged to the Seven.
The old Valyrian powers had been dead so long they had not left a statue the size of a thumb.