The Citadel sent ravens through the realm.
The Shivers was done.
The Seven Kingdoms were in summer.
The riots had been put down.
Peace did not follow.
The Dornish came up from the south killing.
The king of Westeros wore a chain of styles: Lord of Dragonstone, King of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, Protector of the Realm.
Dorne had never bent.
It called itself a kingdom still.
The Dornish hated two words in that chain that were not his: Seven Kingdoms, and Rhoynar.
Their years had been as lean as anyone’s.
Dorne sat at the foot of the continent, shut in by mountains, dry, more sand and salt than soil.
The winter had burned the riverside fields down to nothing.
They lived through the cold and the sickness.
Grain does not come back easy from a desert.
Men with no road left took a leader they called the Vulture King and went north into the stormlands to take what they could eat.
The Prince of Dorne and his lords had no part in it.
The thing still put a shake in the realm, because a traitor named Borys Baratheon had joined that host.
He had run to Dorne to fight for Storm’s End.
He was uncle by blood to Boremund and Jocelyn.
He knew those roads.
He looted as he pleased and said he would have the castle.
Lord Rogar Baratheon was already dying.
He came to the Red Keep and asked Jaehaerys for the right to spend what strength he had left on Borys and on Dorne.
The king said it in the hall, in the hearing of men: he would have not only the king’s leave, but the king’s own sword.
That sentence went through the Seven Kingdoms.
The young king would climb Vermithor, the Bronze Fury, and ride to war with the stormlanders.
Dorne and the stormlands were at swords.
The king was in the field.
Boremund, Jocelyn, Aemon, and Baelon stayed at Harrenhal.
Lord Grover Tully found that reason good enough to stay with them.
Rhaegar was six.
The easy years were over.
The dull ones had begun.
What this world knew lived in the Citadel at Oldtown.
A man who passed in a craft forged the link for it himself.
Six links made a maester.
He wore them on a chain at his throat.
A lord could write and ask for one.
The maester advised.
He kept ravens.
If there were children, he taught them letters and the bones of the realm.
Harrenhal’s old solar had been cleared.
Small desks stood at the windows.
Maester Naelin held a book up so five faces could see the page.
“House Hogg is done.
House Dondarrion.
Arms and words.”
He set the book down, passed his right hand over his bare scalp out of habit, and turned the leaf with fingers that shone.
His eyes were poor.
He put his nose to the vellum to be sure of it.
Rhaegar watched the yard and rolled a lock of hair that had grown down to his mouth.
The man had been bald before thirty.
That road was closed.
A maester swore away his name.
No wife.
No child.
A life given to the Citadel.
Rhaegar put that bastard’s door aside without another thought.
The volume was the maester’s own.
Brown hide, pages long as an arm, thick as a fist, heavy as a stone.
Naelin heaved it in both hands.
“Dondarrion bears a forked purple lightning bolt on black.
What does it mean?
You.
Yes.
You.”
Boremund pointed at his own chest.
He was the oldest and the largest.
Naelin found him every time.
This was not the hour to be seen.
Rhaegar and Aemon sat up as if hinges had caught them.
Jocelyn closed a paper flower in her fist.
Baelon shoved whatever he had stolen into his mouth at once.
They were royal and they were a lord’s children, and the maester still had them.
They had tried to refuse the work.
A few sentences had put the blood in their faces.
Rhaegar had decided to learn.
What he had brought with him was older than this world, and a boy of six could not spend it.
Letters and the customs had to be built from the ground.
When the book released them, there was a harp.
That was the other work of the morning.
The last lesson ended.
They were gone before Naelin had shut the cover.
Rank in Westeros was a clean blade.
Knights made for service were the lowest rung of nobility, men who trained for war until they died.
Landed knights and lords kept farms, mines, and the work of hands.
Smallfolk were counted with a lord’s other stock.
In war they were called up, given poor steel, and sent to end.
Above that sat the great houses and the blood of the king.
Seven of those seats held a continent vast enough that each domain ran like a country, parceled to lesser lords, rich on tax alone.
A thin scatter of free folk, peddlers, and sellswords lived in the shadow of all that.
The Citadel held the letters and the ravens.
A message went through a maester or it did not go.
Maesters went to lords.
A farmer’s son learned the plow and the snare and nothing else.
A knight’s work was the sword, the horse, the water, the hunt—bow and hound and spear—the harper’s hand, and the page.
Any of it was easy to begin.
Mastery was another matter.
All of it but swimming could feed a man if he got that far.
Steel and the hunt wanted a knight to teach them.
Letters and song wanted a maester.
A horse cost a horse.
Great houses spent more on every piece.
After the noon meal Rhaegar came out of his chamber with a pair of short breeches in his fist.
Rhaena had his arm before he made the stair.
“Where do you think you’re going in the rest hour, little Hardbar?”
“The Gods Eye.
To swim.”
“Did you tell the white cloaks?”
“They’ll come with Aemon.” He did not see the need to send a runner.
One Kingsguard lived on Aemon’s heels and the other on Baelon’s.
She looked both ways, took a pear from behind her, and pushed it into his hand.
“Eat it.
Now.”
“Thank you.” He went down the steps with the fruit already at his mouth.
Lord Maegor had nothing.
Rhaena lived on the stipend the crown allowed a princess.
In the earlier years it had kept servants, a dragon, gowns, and stones for her hair.
Winter and plague had thinned the realm.
Harvests fell.
Prices rose.
Even coin did not always find a seller.
Hands were in the fields or they were nowhere, and the roads had gone slack.
The four children of the king and of Storm’s End were fed from the royal purse.
Rhaena would not ask her brother for more than the stipend.
That was her pride.
She loved pears.
There had always been a dish of them in her solar, and she had liked putting them in a guest’s hand.
Now she only stole them to him.
They had been large once, and sweet.
These were knotted and sharp.
He had gone into her chamber when she was not there and looked in the scrap basket.
She had not eaten one herself in a long time.