Ser Oswin stood at the edge of the battlements, both hands on the stone, and looked out.
The storm had faded.
What remained was a grey, colourless sky and a sea that had finally stilled, flat and dark.
Which was exactly why he could see it.
A ship.
Still distant, but moving with purpose, its sail full.
He did not need to see the banners clearly to know what they bore.
Half an hour.
Perhaps less.
And with it, his temporary authority over Dragonstone would dissolve.
The servants he had hidden, the ones who had helped him, would be found.
Everything would come to light.
A muscle in his jaw tightened.
“Ser?”
He turned his head.
One of the guards, a man named Simon, had noticed his expression and was watching him with concern.
Ser Oswin straightened.
His mind was already made up.
“Simon.” He kept his voice low.
“I have reason to believe Ser Clement Crabb is behind the poisoning of Prince Baelon.”
The guard’s eyes went wide.
“Are you certain, Ser?”
“I found evidence in his chambers this morning.” He held the man’s gaze without blinking.
“Say nothing to anyone yet.
Rally only those you trust completely and wait for me in the western armoury.”
Simon hesitated for the span of a single breath.
Then his hand moved to the hilt of his sword and he nodded.
His footsteps faded quickly down the stairs.
Ser Oswin turned back to the sea.
What would you have done, father?
The question came the way it always did.
Uninvited.
He had been born in Oldtown, in a house that was not his father’s house, raised by people who were not his father’s people.
But the smell of incense had been there from the beginning.
The names of the Seven spoken before meals, before sleep, before everything.
He had believed.
He still believed.
His real father was a man of standing.
A man whose name opened doors that should have stayed closed to a bastard boy with no house.
He had never been acknowledged.
Instead he had simply been asked, one quiet evening, to do something.
The very thing that had brought him to this moment.
“Poison him, son.”
So what would you do now?
he thought again.
The answer came back with a scoff.
Nothing.
Because you would never be inside a situation like this.
You would have sent your bastard son first.
Still he would fulfill his role.
As always.
“Incest,” he said quietly.
His eyes stayed on the horizon.
“Madness.
Dragons.”
The words came out like something he was spitting from his mouth.
The gods had made the world in seven aspects.
Order and mystery and justice and mercy, death and beauty and smithcraft.
And these people kicked it with their feet.
He was done being careful.
He turned away from the sea, his eyes hard and clear.
He would survive this.
And besides, there was a rather useful piece of leverage sailing directly into his palm.
He descended from the battlements.
Forgive me, he thought.
He was not sure who he was asking.
Prince Viserys was tired.
He was tired from the journey.
Tired from the waves and the storm that had stretched what should have been a short crossing into something long and miserable.
His legs ached from bracing against the rolling of the deck.
“We have nearly arrived, my Prince,” Otto called from above.
“Finally,” Viserys muttered, and climbed up onto the deck.
Dragonstone loomed before them.
It always looked imposing, even on calm days
“I should try and tame a dragon while I am here, Otto.”
Otto looked at him for a moment before a broad smile spread across his face.
“Indeed.
I am certain one of them would recognise you.”
Viserys nodded slowly, turning the thought over.
He had always admired the old dragonlords of Valyria.
He had spent more of his free time than he would admit building a small model of the Freehold, piece by piece.
“Lower the sails!”
The shout rang across the deck.
Slowly, the ship neared the docks of Dragonstone, a formation of men already assembled and waiting on the pier.
The hull scraped softly against the wood as Viserys looked down at them.
Something was wrong.
He could feel it.
The docks were full of soldiers.
Only soldiers.
No castellans.
No stewards.
No members of his family standing at the front of the retinue with a proper welcome.
Otto appeared at his shoulder and seemed to read his silence.
“Perhaps your father is occupied with something.
Do not worry.”
Viserys said nothing.
Both of them descended the gangplank, a handful of guards at their backs, and beside Viserys, his white cloak catching the sea wind.
Ser Steffon Darklyn.
The Kingsguard seemed uneasy as well.
“Prince.” One of the soldiers stepped forward.
He did not bow.
“What manner of greeting is this?” Otto said sharply, drawing himself up at Viserys’s side.
“We apologise, but the castle is currently under special lockdown.” The soldier’s voice was flat.
“The temporary castellan, Ser Oswin, has ordered us to escort you to safety immediately.”
“What?” Viserys stared at him.
“What has happened?”
The soldier’s eyes shifted.
“Please, my Prince.
We must move quickly.
For your protection, we ask that your men lay down their arms.
Armed retinues cannot be permitted inside the fortress at this time.”
Viserys turned his head and met Otto’s gaze.
Now he was certain.
Something was wrong.
Massively wrong.
“Send for my father,” Viserys said, his voice dropping low.
“Now.”
“I am afraid that is not possible.”
The soldier’s hand moved to the hilt of his sword.
“My Prince.” His tone had changed entirely. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
The courtesy was gone.
“Order your men to stand down.”
“You dare—” Otto began.
Behind them, the eight men of Viserys’s retinue drew their swords in unison.
The soldiers on the dock answered in kind.
Ser Steffon stepped forward until he stood half a pace ahead of Viserys, one hand on his blade.
Nobody moved.
The wind came off the water and filled the silence between them.
Viserys looked at the men facing him.
He counted.
Three to one.
Perhaps more.
And these were Dragonstone men, castle guards who had trained on this rock for years.
Ser Steffon tilted his head, just slightly, and spoke without looking away from the soldiers.
“Order it, my Prince.
I will open the way.”
Viserys believed him.
That was almost the worst part.
He had seen Ser Steffon spar.
He knew what the man was capable of.
And perhaps they would even get through.
Perhaps Steffon would cut the first two down before the others closed the gap, and perhaps Otto would survive the chaos, and perhaps—
His eyes moved across the dock.
A young guard at the far left, barely older than he was, his knuckles white around the grip of his sword.
Beside him an older man, whose hands were steady but whose eyes kept moving to the boy next to him.
These were not his enemies.
He did not even know if they knew what they were part of.
Order it and I will cut through them.
Cut through them.
As if they were meat.
As if they were not men standing in the cold with families somewhere on this island, with names, with—
“My Prince.” Steffon’s voice came again.
Viserys closed his eyes for a moment.
He thought of his father.
Somewhere inside those walls, alive or not, he did not know.
He thought of Maekar and Daemon, who was always somewhere dangerous.
He thought of the blood that would pool between the dock stones if he gave the word.
“Sheathe your swords,” he said quietly.
His men looked at him.
The hesitation in their faces was almost worse than defiance would have been.
“My Prince—” Otto began.
“I heard you, Otto.”
“Sheathe them.”
One by one they obeyed, the sound of steel sliding home the loneliest sound he had ever heard.
Ser Steffon did not move.
“Ser Steffon.” He looked at him directly.
“Please.”
Something passed across the knight’s face.
He looked at Viserys and then bent and placed his sword on the stones at his feet.
The soldiers moved forward immediately.
As they closed around him, Viserys kept his chin up and said nothing.
But his hands, hidden in his cloak, were shaking.
The doors burst open.
Ser Clement looked up from his meal.
A soldier stumbled through, one hand braced against the doorframe, the other pressed flat against his stomach.
Blood seeped between his fingers, soaking through the fabric of his uniform.
Clement was on his feet before the man had even the breath to speak.
“Ser Oswin’s men.” The soldier’s voice came in pieces, each word costing him.
“They’re saying…
they’re saying you poisoned the Prince.”
“I heard them planning it, but they saw me—”
He pressed harder against the wound, his face pale.
“They’re coming.
They’re already on their way.”
The table went over.
Oswin.
Oswin.
He had turned this castle inside out.
He had questioned servants, intercepted ravens, pulled men from their beds in the middle of the night.
He had stood beside him half a dozen times.
The whole time.
Right beside him.
He should have known.
He pulled his sword from its scabbard.
“There is something else.” The soldier steadied himself against the wall, his breath shallow.
“Someone I trust saw movement at the docks.
A ship came in.”
Clement went still for a moment.
Prince Viserys.
“Sit down,” Clement said, looking at the wound.
“You have done enough.”
“Ser—”
“Sit down.”
The soldier lowered himself against the wall and Clement was already through the door.
He moved fast.
At the first stairwell he found two men he recognised.
Men from the Westerlands.
He had drunk with them.
He knew their names.
He pulled them close and spoke quietly and quickly.
Their expressions shifted as he talked.
They nodded and followed him without a word.
Further down, near the great hall, he found four more.
Men he had personally questioned in the early hours of the investigation.
He told them what he had told the others.
By the time he reached the lower corridor his sword was still drawn and there were nine men at his back who had heard the truth from his own mouth and chosen to believe it.
It was not many.
It would have to be enough.
“We take them at the main gate and protect the Prince!” he shouted, and his men answered with a single hard sound.
They turned the corner and stopped.
A large retinue filled the corridor ahead.
In the middle of it, flanked on both sides, Prince Viserys and Otto Hightower, their expressions tight.
Both sides slowed to a halt.
The silence lasted only for a moment.
“What you are doing is treason!” Clement shouted.
He watched the men in front shift.
Some of them hesitated.
“You’re the traitor, Ser Clement.” The foremost guard shook his head, jaw set.
“Ser Oswin explained everything to me.
Stop pretending.”
Clement’s eyes moved past him.
There.
Near the back of the formation.
A white cloak, his hand already on the blade of a guard beside him.
Ser Steffon Darklyn met his gaze.
Neither of them needed to speak.
“Free the Prince!” Clement roared, and ran.
“Protect the Prince!” the other side answered, not one of them seeming to notice the irony.
The corridor collapsed into bodies and steel.
One guard turned too late, his throat slit.
A second stumbled into the sword, getting impaled.
“Grab their swords!” Ser Clement heard Steffon shout, but he had his own fight to take.
The leader came at him hard.
They exchanged three blows in quick succession.
The man was stronger than he looked.
Then a fist came from the left, Ser Clement caught it on his forearm, and drove his boot into the man’s unprotected thigh.
The guard buckled.
Clement’s blade found the gap between gorget and chin.
The man’s eyes went wide.
Then he collapsed.
Around him the fight was raging.
Viserys’s men, freed in the chaos, blades pulled from fallen guards, fought as well.
The fighting pushed through the main doors out into the open, men stumbling through the large doors.
Clement stepped over a corpse and kept moving, blood plastered across one side of his face, warm and already beginning to dry at the edges.
He did not want to think about how many of them he had known by name.
Slowly, the last of the resistance collapsed.
The remaining men were disarmed or down, and the courtyard settled into the particular quiet that only follows violence.
He scanned what remained.
Prince Viserys.
Otto Hightower, pale but standing.
Eleven bloodied men between them, a ragged combination of his own and the Prince’s, holding themselves upright through will as much as anything else.
The rest were on the ground.
Beside him, Ser Steffon leaned forward with his hands on his knees, chest heaving, his white cloak a deep red.
“Ser Clement.”
The voice came from the doorway.
Ser Oswin stepped through, moving carefully around a body at his feet, unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world.
Behind him came men.
More than before.
Significantly more, torches in hand, filling the passage at his back like a tide coming in.
Clement spat blood onto the stone.
“Ser Oswin.” His voice came out low and even, which surprised even him.
“Have you no honour left at all?”
Oswin stopped.
His expression was almost sad.
“Honour?
You speak of honour?”
Ser Clement’s jaw tightened.
He glanced at Steffon beside him.
The Kingsguard gave a single nod, and both men shifted their footing at the same time, blades rising.
Oswin’s guards advanced.
Then something moved in the sky.
Viserys flinched before he understood why.
A roar.
Then another.
Around him every man present went still.
He looked up.
Two shadows fell across the courtyard, growing rapidly.
The impact of the landing shuddered up through the stone beneath his boots.
Viserys had spent considerable time studying dragons.
More than most.
He had read every account he could find, memorised riders and colours and names, had even entertained the quiet hope of claiming the Black Dread.
So he recognised Meleys immediately.
His cousin Rhaenys’s dragon.
What she was doing here he could not begin to guess.
But that was not the question his mind nagged on.
The second dragon was black.
Its eyes were green and it was larger than Maleys.
He knew which dragon had no rider.
He knew which dragon could not be claimed.
It couldn’t be.
But it had to be.
He was still trying to form the thought when a small figure dropped from the black dragon’s wing and landed on the wet stone below.
Maekar.
His brother.
His younger brother, who was six years old, who Viserys had last seen at a feast in King’s Landing looking bored by the food.
A hand touched his arm.
He turned.
Rhaenys stood beside him, having appeared from somewhere in the chaos.
She looked at him with an expression that was almost warm, which on Rhaenys meant something.
“Viserys,” she said simply.
“You are unharmed.”
“I—” He looked at her, then back at the courtyard.
“Is that—”
“Yes,” she said.
“How long has he—”
“I only recently found out myself.” Something moved briefly across her face.
“He is full of surprises.”
Maekar walked through the gap between both groups without slowing.
For exactly one second they held each other’s gaze.
Viserys could not have said what his own face was doing.
Then Maekar looked away and turned to face Oswin’s men.
The black dragon moved with him.
Its great neck curling overhead, its shadow falling across the courtyard.
“Men of Dragonstone.” Maekar’s childish voice echoed over the courtyard.
“Open your eyes.
You have been deceived.”
He watched the soldiers shift.
Watched the doubt that had already been living in some of them.
Swords lowered.
Others followed.
“Rhaenys.” He kept his eyes on the courtyard.
“What is happening?”
“Your father was poisoned,” she said.
“By the Maester.
And by that man.” She nodded toward Oswin.
Viserys said nothing.
“He is alive,” she added, noticing his confusion.
“He is at High Tide.
They brought him there.
It is a long story.”
Then Maekar turned to Oswin.
He stepped closer, his voice too low for Viserys to hear, murmuring something only the traitor could understand.
Oswin’s face twisted.
“Yours is the way of blasphemy.
Mine is not.”
Yet Maekar almost laughed.
“The hour is late,” he said.
“And my dragon is hungry.”
“Will you tell me who orchestrated this or not?”
Oswin shook his head.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Maekar only nodded, before Viserys watched his little brother turn towards him.
Oswin pulled out his sword.
Viserys’s mouth opened trying to warn his brother.
But then the Cannibal’s head came down.
The sound it made had no name.
Oswin’s scream began and ended within the same breath, there and then simply not.
The courtyard fell utterly silent, and for the first time, Viserys feared the monster his little brother had revealed himself to be.
Tomorrow will be off day for me