“Eat something first, my princes.”
A maid called them off the wall-walk.
Rhaegar and the four went where the crenellations broke the wind.
The women had already spread a cloth and set the boxes.
They had been with Rhaena for years and had raised Rhaegar from the cradle.
They knew what he would take.
The stones were cold.
The children liked a meal in the open anyway.
They folded their legs around the cloth and sat.
Five of an age, more or less.
Rhaegar and the Baratheon pair all had black hair and black eyes.
The faces were not the same.
His had a foreign cut that did not belong on a riverlands wall.
Blood tied all five, across three generations.
Boremund at eight and Jocelyn at six were Queen Alyssa’s children by her second marriage, half-brother and half-sister to Rhaena, of an age with King Jaehaerys.
They sat highest.
The two pale boys, Aemon at five and Baelon at three, were the king’s sons.
They sat in the generation of Rhaegar’s dead mother.
Rhaegar, four and a little more, was Rhaena’s bastard grandson.
He sat at the bottom.
Westeros did not weigh such things at a picnic.
If it had, beating Boremund’s grandfather-face black and red would have earned him a hiding from Rhaena that left him hanging.
Rank still told in the passing of food.
Rhaegar took the largest piece of white bread, slathered in honey, and a cup of milk heated off the boil.
He pushed both at Boremund.
“Yours.”
“That’s the one.” Boremund packed it in.
A small cherry cake went to Jocelyn.
“Thank you.” She ate in tidy bites and saved the cherry on top for last.
The two pale boys watched it the way dogs watch a bone.
An apple tart to the taller of them.
“Aemon.”
Aemon took it and opened his mouth.
Rhaegar cut him off.
“No speeches from a man who’s missing a tooth.”
Aemon laughed and then chewed with his lips shut.
The first tooth he had lost was a front one.
The gap made him look like a small drunk.
The softest cream cake landed in front of the smallest.
“For brave Baelon.”
“Aha—” Both arms went up.
A bubble of snot stretched from his lip.
A maid was there with a cloth before it fell.
The four of them had glued themselves to Rhaegar’s heels.
He had wanted a following.
He had not wanted this one, and he could not scrape them off.
He ate the way he always did, without talk, and let his mind run.
More than four years in this world.
He had the tongue now.
He had the shape of the place.
He had the shape of a bastard’s life.
There was no inheritance in it, and no softness either.
Noble matches were bargains.
A trueborn marriage existed to make an heir, and to bind two houses.
Love happened.
If it did not, a husband and wife looked away and took other beds.
A string of lovers could even pass for proof a man was worth wanting.
The medicine here was poor.
Many beds made dead women and living mistakes.
A bastard was not a scandal by himself.
When a lordship passed, the girls of that blood often lived.
The boys died of accidents with a regularity that was not accident.
The plague he had brought had not been gentle with the highborn.
In some seats the trueborn heir had gone into the ground with the rest.
An heir was raised from the first year to hold land.
Younger sons learned to ride, to hunt, to keep a lance, and not much else.
Their fathers found them a match or left them to make a life.
When one of those untrained seconds took a seat because the elder was ash, he held it with a hard hand.
Soldiers sent out for stores had come back with a story from the east.
The lord of Antlers had bastards.
Bandits killed every one of them and dumped them in a pit.
Ten days before anyone looked.
Rhaegar had come here grown.
The promised edge that every tale gave a man who fell between worlds was still a broken toy.
The king already looked at him as a problem with a bastard’s name.
He would keep close to the princes.
If a day came when a head was wanted for a banner, he did not mean it to be his.
The edge had woken, after a fashion.
He gathered himself.
Music swelled behind his eyes, all brass and glory.
A dragon mark filled his sight, wings spread.
Then the world went black and a frame stood in the dark.
[System]
Dragon mark
Character
Sleazy
Werther Baratheon
Rhaegar Therys
Skills: In use
Talents: In use
Shouts: In use
Inventory: In use
The first two names ate the box.
His own sat in the corner, half a fingernail, easy to take for a version number.
Three men on one slot.
He did not know what kind of joke that was.
Everything else that should have been his already read as taken.
The only use he had found was this: once he was inside the page, the noise of the world fell off, and he slept as if buried.
He woke sharp.
He had not given it up.
Perhaps the thing wanted a different door.
He still went up to the roofs alone and ran the motions of skills that would not answer, hunting for another way in.
He came back to the cloth.
The Kingsguard were still down the wall.
The maids had their rest.
He leaned toward the Baratheon pair and kept his voice low.
“Is there a Werther in your house?”
Jocelyn shook her head.
“Not that I ever heard.”
Boremund had sat with a maester at Storm’s End for a stretch.
He wiped his mouth and thought it through.
“We are only in the fourth generation, counting me.
Grandfather’s line made a lot of cousins.
I would know if one of them was Werther.
None is.”
“A bastard, then.”
“No bastard by that name either.” He said it hard, then caught himself.
Rhaegar’s blood was the same kind.
The rest of the sentence stuck.
His face went red and he left it there.
Jocelyn took it up.
“Werther.
Werther Baratheon.
It sounds well, actually.”
Rhaegar did not care about the stumble.
He had the shape of it now.
The cheat that should have opened for him was already in other hands, two dogs he could not see.
Sleazy was a name a man picked in a game and laughed at.
Werther Baratheon sounded like a curse you hung on a boy born to eat supper alone.
He would not let a name like that walk.
He made a story on the spot.
“In Essos, werther means a mud turtle.
Bad luck.
The man who takes it wears it.”
“Is that true?” They said it together.
They liked tales from the east.
“Every word.” He knew no Essosi speech beyond the fact that the dialects were many.
If they caught him later he could say he had heard it wrong.
Jocelyn smiled and nodded.
In her head she was already giving the pretty name to a maester to write down when she went home.
The bad news did not kill the rest of it.
A man thrown between worlds did not get his road cut off.
He still had doors he had not tried.
One of them would be his.
Then he would have men at his back, women in his bed, land under his feet, a crown if he wanted one, the sky, time, the ending of other men’s songs.
He would write a world and sit at the head of it.
The laugh came out of him raw.
“Gah—hah—”
The two white cloaks turned.
They watched him with his chin up, crowing at nothing.
They looked at one another and both shook their heads.
Pity sat on them like weather.
So the talk was true.
The boy had a gift for a blade.
The mind behind it came and went.
He laughed until the air caught in his chest, bit it off, and drowned it in milk.