“Sharingan, open!”
The child’s shout ran the empty halls and came back off the stone.
No one stood where the voice seemed to be.
Boremund pushed the black curl out of his ear and listened.
“Left corridor.
Stay on me.” He took the dark at a run.
A girl and two smaller boys came after him.
Rhaegar did not talk much.
The household still said his wits were thin.
The children knew better.
He told stories that held, and he made toys out of scraps, and they hunted him for both.
They tore through a castle built for thousands.
Maids followed, and two Kingsguard in silver and white.
The grown folk kept their distance.
They did not stop the game and they did not join it.
“Dragonfire!”
The word went around a ring of corridor and came back thinner.
“Wrong way, Boremund!” Jocelyn’s voice was sharp.
He pulled up and scratched his head.
“This place is too big and too empty.
I think I’m lost.”
She looked both ways.
“It rings like the passages at Storm’s End.
The sound went the long way round.
We go back and take the right.”
“Right.” They turned, hooked the two princes by the wrists, and ran.
A roar rolled down from above, then a raw shout.
All four heads went up.
“He’s on the roof.
I knew it.” Jocelyn caught her skirts and took the spiral stair.
Boremund fed himself Rhaegar’s private language as he climbed.
“I never know what he’s yelling.
I know the feel of it, though.
That fighting power would take eight Swords of the Morning.”
“Stop taking words off him.” The stair was telling on her.
She slowed and still found breath to scold.
“Fighting power.
Who in the Seven Kingdoms but you lot would nod at that?
Say it in a hall and they will laugh you out.”
Boremund put on a grave face.
“You wouldn’t understand.
It’s a compact.
Knights of justice keep score.”
“Found you!”
The tower-head was broken stone.
They put their shoulders to a split door and spilled onto the wall-walk.
Rhaegar was there with a short wooden sword, cutting at a straw man.
A fat red lump stood on his brow.
On the Tower of Dread, Dreamfyre had folded herself into her nest.
Her long neck hung down the melted wall, one left eye on the boy’s flailing.
Now and then she scraped a curved horn against the stone.
She looked as bored as a dragon can look.
The four of them piled in on him.
The adults took a stretch of wall and sat.
The white cloaks talked, and their eyes did not leave the children.
Harrenhal had learned to live with Rhaegar’s noises.
There was no pattern in them and no tongue anyone knew.
Play, they called it, and stopped listening.
He could remember, from before, the men who asked why a grown body sat through children’s drawings that moved.
He had hooked an arm around a neck and put muscle against a blank face.
*Brother, do you know how many years One Piece has run?*
“Rhaegar Therys.” Boremund took a wooden sword from the scatter on the stones.
“I challenge you again.”
Baratheons came large.
At eight, Boremund stood two heads over a boy of four.
Jocelyn had the same height in her.
The maids showed no worry.
They unrolled a blanket and set out bread and fruit.
The Kingsguard shook their cloaks straight, folded their arms on the crenellations, and settled in to watch.
“Three strokes,” Boremund said, and set his feet.
“You’re done.”
Rhaegar touched the lump on his head and pointed the wood.
“Four.
You lose.”
That was the talk.
Then they stopped talking.
The blades met.
Three cracks, a fourth.
A red print opened on Boremund’s cheek.
“Four.
I win.” Rhaegar hid the sword at his back and put his chest out in a pose he liked.
Boremund was not angry.
He had lost enough days in Harrenhal to be used to it.
“That isn’t how it should go.
I have the strength.
I used the new stroke I learned.”
Rhaegar stuck the sword in the dummy and slapped dust off his coat.
“You shut your eyes at the end.”
“I didn’t mean to.” Boremund wagged a finger in front of his own face.
The lids tried to fall.
“The point comes in and they close on their own.”
A weapon at the eyes makes a man blink.
A blow coming in makes the arms fly up to the head.
Those things live in the body until work beats them out.
The last two years had been a wreck of a realm, and Boremund had missed that work.
With only those two holes, Rhaegar could own him.
Rhaegar was a man in a short body, and he had swung at posts before he ever fell out of a sky.
If that could not put down a true child, he might as well walk into the Gods Eye and leave the place for some other stray soul.
The Kingsguard kept their voices low.
“Used to be two strokes, and the Baratheon boy was on his back.”
“He’s growing into the reach.
The Targaryen brat has to earn it now.”
“I’m done.
Before dark I’ll send a man for the wine.”
They had money on the bouts.
Rhaegar looked at them.
Helms on, same plate, same cloaks.
Only a mouth and a pair of eyes in the slit.
Voice was the only way to tell them apart.
Seven white cloaks in the realm.
They kept the king and they kept the rest of the blood.
These two had been sent for the pale-haired princes.
The vow said nothing about a cup.
In a winter like this, hard drink went down easy.
Harrenhal held old men, women, and children.
There was no cellar of wine.
If the knights wanted a taste they paid for it at an inn three miles off.
The Shivers had taken two of the Kingsguard.
Ser Ryam Redwyne was twenty, new to the cloak this year, one of the two men raised to fill the holes.
Ser Lucamore Strong had the years and the command.
A whole strength of men-at-arms had come with them and been put in another tower against trouble.
*You might thank me,* Rhaegar thought, and kept it off his face.
He was sure of the source.
The force that had wrapped him when he came into the world had burned Aerea out for saving him.
Now, at four, it had shaken the realm again.
That same force had kept his ordinary flesh from coming apart in the fall.
It had kept, with him, every small living thing that rode on a man’s skin and in a man’s breath.
Where he had come from, people had lived with those things for a thousand years.
The blood knew them.
The medicine was better than anything in Westeros.
They had not been a danger to him.
Here the healing was half prayer, and no one had met what he carried.
That was a slaughter.
Not long past, Rhaena had taken him south on Dreamfyre to Oldtown, to kin.
They had stopped on the road.
He had caught a chill and sneezed for days, then bounced back on his feet.
Bodies differ.
Some who took it from him showed nothing.
Merchants moved.
Travelers moved.
In less than a month the sickness had run out of Oldtown through the Seven Kingdoms.
From the way men described it, he knew the shape.
He had had influenza before.
Catching it was luck.
Living through it was luck.
He was no maester and he could not brew a cure.
He could only hope the Seven of this place would look the other way long enough for the realm to crawl out.
He had brought death with him on the first day.
His mother.
The men and women in King’s Landing cooked by dragonblood.
The smallfolk already named him unlucky.
Add the plague, pile every corpse on his name, and the line of the dead come to collect would run from Harrenhal’s gate to the Red Keep.