When he had his breath back, Rhaegar looked at Baelon, who had blown another bubble, and tipped his head at Aemon.
“Your brother is three.
Who called him brave?
Did he murder a pigeon, or was it a fish?”
Aemon thought about it and had no answer.
He did not know.
Ser Ryam Redwyne came down the wall.
“Last year, at the start of winter, they carried Prince Baelon to the Dragonpit.
He had a wooden sword.
He hit Balerion on the nose.
Ser Samgood, who was holding him, said the boy was either very brave or very mad.
He called him Brave Baelon after that.”
“I see.
Thank you, ser.” Rhaegar kept the rest behind his teeth.
A courtier’s compliment, then.
That courtier had taken the Shivers last year and died of it.
Two of the seven white cloaks had gone in the plague.
Ryam had stepped into Samgood of Sour Hill’s place.
The way he told the story, he had not loved the man’s manner.
“Do you have names like that?” Rhaegar asked the others.
“No,” Boremund and Aemon said together.
Jocelyn watched and said nothing.
Outside Dorne, women in Westeros did not take the field, and so they rarely took epithets.
The ones they did get were seldom kind.
Baelon had one at three.
Rhaegar would have one too.
He slapped his palms together.
“Then I’ll name myself.”
A man who had fallen between worlds needed a name that could stand up in a hall.
He needed it before someone else hung a worse one on him.
He could already hear a tourney cry.
*The lists are open.
Here rides Rhaegar the Lame.
Rhaegar the Dwarf leaves his horse.
Stinkhand Rhaegar knocks a man down with his palm.
The victor is the Crookneck Knight.
Ladies, cheer him.*
The thought went down his back like cold water.
Recognition could come later.
Say a name often enough and other mouths would follow.
He wanted something that sounded like a man who killed people.
He stood.
His right hand smoothed his cropped hair.
“Tear—”
He shook a red cloak that was not on his shoulders.
“Less—”
He dropped into a squat, elbows braced on his knees.
“Death—”
Fists stacked under his nose, eyes nailed to the far stones.
“God.”
Four children stared up at him with their mouths open.
Wonder sat on them like a blessing.
Boremund’s eyes went wide.
“That’s it.”
Jocelyn said, “What?”
Aemon said, “Yes.”
The bubble on Baelon’s lip burst.
“Is it good to eat?”
Rhaegar put his head back and laughed at the sky.
That was the shock he had wanted.
The Seven ruled this continent.
They had no Death God.
The face of dying here was the Stranger, and the word did not mean what he had meant.
The only living thing in Westeros that already wore death in its name was a dragon: Balerion, the Black Dread.
The men Aegon the Conqueror had beaten had given the beast that style in the Valyrian way, so that losing to it would sting less.
Ser Ryam rubbed his smooth chin.
“Death without crying.
It sits oddly on the ear.”
Lords in a steel age lived rich and bored.
Gossip moved faster than ravens.
It was how the days got spent.
Rhaegar had been here four years.
He had the skin of the customs and the first joints of the letters.
A name in that weather did not keep its shape.
Back in the barracks Ryam tried it over supper with the knight across from him.
“Death without crying.
That’s a heart like steel.” The knight had not been raised on books.
To him it sounded like a vow. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Later, honing his sword, the same knight passed it to the smith who traveled with the men.
“Hard as iron?” The smith picked a bent bar off the pile and rang it on the anvil.
“I’ve got crude steel like that in the rack.”
Most of Harrenhal was maids, cooks, and soldiers.
Highborn or not, they were short of play.
Talk was the sport they had.
By the time the story reached them, Rhaegar had named himself a crude steel bar, and that was a thing a kitchen could understand.
Crude steel, iron, tin, stone, a stick of oak: if it was hard and shaped like a rod they had one word for it.
Hardbar.
A few of the old men-at-arms said it with their mouths and made the rest of it with their hips, aimed at the maids.
They did not get far.
Women with forearms thicker than a soldier’s thigh came out of the kitchens with rolling pins and ran them off.
In the morning Rhaena was at her breakfast when Rhaegar tore through the hall with too much blood in him.
“Hardbar Rhaegar!
Sit down and eat.”
The words went through his skull like a hammer.
He understood, for the first time, what it meant when two tongues shared a world and did not share a mind.
He stared at her.
“Tearless Death.
One day.
How does that become Hardbar?”
“Watch your mouth.” Rhaena found a pear and threw it.
She knew exactly how the name had been born.
If another soul had hung it on him she would have found the tongue that did it and taken it out.
He had chosen it himself.
She turned it over and could not see the harm.
One of the white cloaks was Ser Pate, called the Cudgel.
A man was meant to be hard and straight.
A boy who would face a name that raw, this young, would stand up in his boots when the years came.
That was how she read it.
Rhaegar collected Aemon and the rest and they left Harrenhal at a run for the Gods Eye.
He did not know, on the grass, that he and Hardbar were already the same creature.
The Kingsguard who kept the princes also kept the record of their days.
Ryam sent the week’s account to the Red Keep, the strange byname in it.
King Jaehaerys looked at the letter and said it suited the boy.
Queen Alysanne read the same line and made a small sound of delight.
In Westeros a house’s arms and words, the names of its blood, and a rough accounting of their faces were written down.
Copies went out, in time, for other lords to keep.
A life’s doings went into other books, and those stayed on their shelves unless there was cause.
The assistant maester who kept the royal days took a heavy volume from the case, opened it to the leaf for Rhaegar Therys, and wrote Hardbar in the blank that had been left under the name.