“Father… he wanted to kill you.”
Maekar said it quietly.
Almost tiredly.
He dragged the back of his hand across his face.
Most of the blood came away.
Not all of it.
Baelon sat upright in the bed, the sheets pooled around his waist, staring at his youngest son with an expression Maekar had never seen on him before.
Shock.
“It is true,” Daemon said, moving quickly toward the bed, the letter still clutched in his fist.
“He poisoned you, Father.”
Baelon’s eyes moved between them.
From Maekar’s blood-streaked face to Daemon’s, then back again.
A long breath left him.
Then he nodded.
And there it was.
A smile.
Small and tired and entirely wrong for the moment.
It seemed like he finally understood.
He placed both hands on the mattress and pushed himself upright.
“I am—”
He never finished.
Instead, Baelon’s hands moved toward his mouth.
Blood.
It came without warning, bursting from his lips, filling his hands and beyond, running between his fingers.
Maekar’s mind went white.
He crossed the distance in a single step, but his hands could not reach his father’s shoulders.
They found his arm instead, his side, grabbing at whatever they could reach, and even then he had to pull with everything he had to keep him from going down.
“Father—”
“Father!” Daemon was already there on the other side.
Together they held him.
Maekar pressed himself against his father’s side, both arms wrapped tight, his cheek against the man’s ribs.
He could feel them.
There was not much in between.
Maekar looked up at him.
Really looked.
His skin had gone the colour of old wax.
A thin line of dark blood ran from the corner of his mouth down his jaw.
Shit.
The Maester had never injected him tonight.
Maekar had stopped that.
So why was it suddenly this bad?
He didn’t know.
He simply didn’t know.
And not knowing pained him in a way that nothing else had tonight.
His eyes fell to the floor.
Gerardys lay where he had fallen, drowning in his own blood, still seeping slowly from the ruin of his neck.
The only Maester on Dragonstone.
Dead.
By Maekar’s own blade.
“We need a Maester!” Daemon’s voice cracked across the room.
But the words were meaningless.
They both knew.
Together, wordlessly, they lowered Baelon back onto the bed.
For a moment he simply lay there, his chest rising and falling.
Then his eyes opened, barely, and found them both.
His sons.
Standing over him.
“My sons…” he murmured.
His voice was barely there.
“I wish Viserys were here.”
A pause.
“He should have arrived by now…”
His eyes slid shut.
“No.”
The word left Maekar’s mouth before he even knew he was speaking.
His small hands found his father’s face, tilting it toward him, searching.
Baelon’s chest was still moving.
Maekar straightened slowly.
He turned to Daemon.
“There is only one way.”
Ser Oswin had served on Dragonstone for eleven years.
He had seen death.
He had seen dragonkeepers dragged away screaming.
He had seen things on this island that he would carry to his grave.
But he had never seen the castle like this.
Every corridor sealed.
Every gate manned.
Guards at each stairwell, each window, each servants’ passage, standing with torches and drawn steel in the dark as the rain hammered the walls from outside.
The Dragonstone household, every man of it, had been pulled from their beds and put to work within the hour.
Ser Oswin walked at the edge of the formation, one hand on his sword, his eyes moving constantly.
In the middle of it all, carried on a stretcher between four of the largest knights he had, was Prince Baelon.
The Prince of Dragonstone.
The Spring Prince.
The man who was supposed to be the next king.
He looked like he was dying.
His face was pale against the white of the linen beneath him, his chest rising and falling in small, uncertain movements.
His eyes were closed.
Every few steps a quiet groan left him.
The faces of the men carrying him were grave.
They reached the gate.
“Raise it!” Oswin called out.
They descended the steps toward the beach, the knights raising their shields above Baelon in a low ceiling of steel, blocking the worst of the downpour.
Oswin pulled his cloak tighter and kept moving.
Then it came from above.
A sound that was not thunder.
A shriek, long and unnatural.
Every man in the formation flinched.
Oswin looked up.
A shape descended through the rain.
Vast and dark red, its wings sending walls of wind crashing down across the beach, spraying sand in every direction.
It landed thirty yards ahead of them.
Caraxes.
The Blood Wyrm folded his wings slowly, his long neck swaying.
“Caraxes.”
Prince Daemon’s voice.
He walked ahead of the formation, one hand raised, and the dragon’s enormous head lowered toward him, greeting its master.
“Secure my father on my dragon,” the prince ordered.
Ser Oswin looked at Baelon for a moment.
Then he met another man’s gaze.
It was Prince Maekar, followed by a Kingsguard.
“Ser Oswin.
I name you and Ser Clement temporary castellans of the fortress.
Your task is simple.
Nobody leaves.
Find the traitors.”
The Knight was taken aback for a moment, yet he had heard the whispers about the supposed maturity of the young prince.
They seemed to be true.
“I understand, my prince.” He lowered his head.
“Will there be enough space on the dragon?” he asked, watching Prince Baelon being secured on a rather restless Caraxes.
Yet the dragon seemed to tolerate the number of humans around it, just barely.
Maekar turned around, rain pressing down on him.
“I cannot wait any longer.”
Ser Oswin did not understand.
Maekar walked past Caraxes through the sand.
Ser Oswin saw the prince moving his lips, yet he could not hear him across the distance.
Then he squinted, pushing away the greying hair that covered part of his view.
He looked toward the sky.
It appeared.
Far bigger than Caraxes.
Far darker.
Far more monstrous.
He looked at the Kingsguard beside him as if confirming he wasn’t seeing things.
Ser Clement did not seem particularly surprised.
“Cannibal,” he muttered, turning back toward the dreadful dragon, which had lowered its head and green eyes toward the young prince.
Ser Oswin looked at his hand.
It was trembling.
It had never done that before.
Maekar studied his dragon now in the open, in its full gleam and power.
The Cannibal was, of course, smaller than Balerion and Vhagar.
Yet it was larger than Silverwing, his grandmother’s dragon, if he had to estimate.
He had seen her fly it once, when he was even younger.
The Cannibal seemed to rival Vermithor in size and ferocity as well.
Perhaps even surpass him.
It was battle-hardened and bloodthirsty, traits one could not easily find in a dragon.
Especially against other dragons.
Quickly, he climbed the dragon, using its large left wing.
Maekar took his place between the fins and sharp bones along its back.
He had not noticed it the first time, but now it became even more obvious.
He needed a saddle.
But that was not the issue right now.
Instead, he looked down toward Caraxes, where Daemon met his eyes.
The Cannibal let out a deafening roar toward Caraxes, who did not back down.
Instead, he screamed back.
Maekar calmed him, patting his dark scales.
After a few moments, both dragons took off at the same time, rising toward the sky.
Their direction was west.
West toward the nearest Maester.
Maekar scoffed.
He needed help from the very same kind that was plotting against them.
Utterly pathetic.
They rose and rose through endless rain until they finally broke through the cloud ceiling.
The sun bathed them in its brilliant rays as Maekar squinted.
They would find this Maester, but not in King’s Landing.
No.
In Driftmark.
Lord Corlys Velaryon had been Lord of Driftmark for a long time now.
At least that was what it felt like.
On the sea he had found countless treasures and fought against raging storms, yet the mixture of treasure and storm standing before him now felt different.
Rhaenys Targaryen.
The love of his life.
They stood before a window, rain pressing flat against the glass, the sound of it filling the silence between them.
Corlys turned an ornate dagger over in his hands again and again, the way he always did when he was thinking.
“We haven’t spoken about it yet,” he began, watching her.
“Daemon claiming Caraxes.”
Rhaenys’s eyes narrowed, just slightly.
“He had been my father’s dragon,” she said.
“And now Daemon has him.”
“I would be lying if I said it did not bother me.”
“Bother?” Corlys let the dagger rest, taking her hand.
“But does it anger you?”
“It does.”
“I see.”
“What about the brother?
Have you met him?”
Rhaenys paused.
“I have,” she finally said.
“He is very peculiar.”
Corlys tilted his head.
There was something in her voice.
He opened his mouth to press her on it.
Then the roar hit them.
It came through the walls, through the glass, through the floor beneath their feet.
Corlys turned sharply.
“Is it Meleys?”
Rhaenys was already moving toward the door, shaking her head.
“No.”
He followed her out into the courtyard.
Cold air and rain met them immediately.
Around them, guards were already emerging, hands on weapons, eyes on the sky.
“There.” Rhaenys raised her hand.
Two silhouettes broke through the ceiling of cloud.
Dark shapes against a darker sky, descending fast, wings spread wide.
Corlys squinted.
Then he didn’t need to.
They came closer and the shapes resolved into what they were, and his mind worked quickly the way it always did, sorting through what he was seeing and what it meant.
“Caraxes and…” He stopped.
“What is that other dragon, Rhaenys?”
“The Cannibal,” she said, worry in her voice.
“Why are they here?”
Corlys had no answer.
He watched the two beasts descend, enormous and heavy, Caraxes sinking toward the courtyard and the Cannibal dropping further out onto the rain-soaked grasslands beyond the walls.
He could make out two figures on the red dragon.
On the dark one he could see nothing.
No rider, no movement.
“Has it been tamed?
By the Targaryens?”
Rhaenys did not answer.
The dragons landed.
The ground shifted faintly beneath Corlys’s boots.
Around him a retinue of guards had formed, shields raised, closing in a half-circle at his back.
“It’s Daemon!” Rhaenys called out, already moving toward Caraxes.
Corlys registered this without turning.
His eyes stayed on the Cannibal, settled now on the rain-soaked grass, faint steam rising from its dark scales where the rain touched them.
“Uncle!”
Only when Rhaenys called out again did he finally turn.
Daemon was climbing down from Caraxes, moving carefully, one arm supporting a figure beside him.
Another man, barely managing his own weight.
Corlys understood the broad shape of it immediately.
He turned to his guards.
“Help him.
Quickly.
And fetch the Maester!”
They moved at once.
But Corlys was already walking the other way.
Toward the Cannibal.
He just couldn’t help it.
He stopped a few yards from the enormous beast and stood there in the rain, looking up at it.
Then movement.
From the great dark wing, something descended.
Small and careful, finding its footing on the wet grass.
Silver hair, soaked by the rain.
A child.
Corlys’s mind moved fast through the list of Targaryen children matching that age and colouring and arrived at exactly one name.
“Maekar.”
Corlys Velaryon looked at the boy standing in the rain beneath the shadow of that monster.
A new piece had appeared on the board.
One he had not known existed.
One that had apparently been there all along, hidden just out of sight, lurking in the darkness.
In the dark of the small sept, a man knelt before seven great statues.
He was clad in a wide dark robe, a hood drawn over his face, though the faintest shimmer of metal could be seen underneath.
He had not even taken off his armour.
He murmured something, his words swallowed by the stone walls around him.
Then slowly he raised his head toward the statue on the far right.
With his gauntleted hand, he pushed the greying hair from his face.
It was still soaked from the rain, clinging to his temple.
Now he had a clear view of the statue.
The Stranger.
Of all seven, it was the only one without a true face.
Just shadow where features ought to be.
The gods of Westeros were said to watch over the living.
The Stranger watched over something else entirely.
“Stranger,” he said devotedly.
“Please take Prince Baelon into your grasp.”
The candles around him did not flicker.
Only silence answered him.
“Do not let what I have done be for nothing.”
He held the Stranger’s eyeless gaze for a moment longer.
Then he left.
Will Baelon survive?
Who is the man in the Sept?