“Ser Clement,” Maekar greeted the man now positioned outside his door.
It was a strange coincidence.
The moment he had shown his true colours and stopped hiding in the shadows, weighing his options, Jaehaerys had assigned him a Kingsguard for protection.
“My Prince, it is an honour to be serving you.”
Maekar squinted his eyes for a moment.
“The honour is mine, Ser.
I’ve heard of your prowess.
They speak of you and Ser Ryam as the strongest knights in the kingdom.”
Ser Clement seemed slightly surprised by Maekar’s flattery, yet he also appreciated it.
“Thank you, my Prince.
I am but your protector from now on.”
Maekar nodded.
He had long needed a sword of his own.
The two household guards, Roland and Lionel, had joined the City Watch after Maekar assured them that their service would still be needed in the future.
While Maekar was pondering this, a servant walked towards him with quick steps.
“Prince Maekar.
The King requests your presence in his chambers,” the man said, lowering his head.
Maekar looked at Ser Clement for a moment.
The knight seemed just as oblivious as he was.
“Lead the way.”
As they walked through the hallways of the Red Keep, Maekar crossed paths with another member of the royal family.
A new one.
“Prince Maekar.”
Aemma Targaryen greeted him with a gentle voice.
She was Viserys’s wife, a kind young woman with light silver hair and soft blue-grey eyes that showed her Arryn blood.
Her round belly was clearly visible under her dress.
She was already several months pregnant with her first child.
“My Lady.
A good day, is it not?”
Aemma nodded and gave a slightly forced smile.
She looked a little tired, but she always tried to be warm and polite with everyone.
“Where is Viserys?
I haven’t seen him all morning,” Maekar asked.
“Dragonpit,” Aemma answered plainly, pressing her lips together for a moment.
She seemed worried about her husband.
Maekar nodded knowingly and opened his mouth to speak, but he was interrupted by a massive roar.
The sound echoed off the thick stone walls.
Both of them glanced out of the nearest window.
A massive green dragon shot past the window, blocking the sun for a moment.
“Mother…” Maekar whispered to himself.
Aemma did not hear it.
“It seems Prince Baelon, your father, is back from Dragonstone,” Aemma said cheerfully.
“Indeed,” Maekar said, watching the dragon head towards the massive Dragonpit.
An inner urge, or perhaps something else, had long since pulled him there too.
And he knew exactly why.
So he decided tonight was the night.
He cast another glance at Ser Clement before parting ways with Aemma, finally reaching his grandfather’s chambers.
It was truly weird, calling a man who was born after him grandfather.
“None of that.
Come,”Jaehaerys said.
Maekar walked over and joined him.
The view stretched out before them in full, the entirety of King’s Landing laid bare beneath the pale morning sky, rooftops and spires and the distant glitter of the bay beyond.
It was the kind of view that deserved to be painted and hung somewhere in the endless corridors of the keep, where it might outlast the men who had looked upon it.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
“Ser Ryam told me of your progress,” Jaehaerys said at last, still looking at the horizon.
“You will receive lessons from him and Ser Clement regularly from now on.” A pause.
“You will become a great warrior of House Targaryen.”
Maekar did not answer immediately.
The wind moved through his hair, which had been growing longer.
He had not yet decided whether to keep it that way.
Perhaps in this life he would.
Perhaps not.
“Did you hear it?” he said.
“Yesterday.
The roar.”
Jaehaerys looked at him for a moment.
“I did.
Viserys told me it was Balerion.
He reacted suddenly, without provocation.” The old king turned back to the horizon.
“Perhaps your brother will bond with him sooner than expected.”
Another small smile crossed Maekar’s lips and was gone before it fully arrived.
Jaehaerys noticed it.
Something shifted in the old man’s expression.
“There was something else I wished to speak with you about,” he said.
“Grand Maester Elysar came to me.”
A cold thing moved through Maekar’s chest.
A mistake.
His own mistake, and he knew it.
He had let his emotions play their game in that chamber, had spoken too openly to an old man whose entire purpose was to observe and report.
He had been careless.
In his first life, carelessness had cost him everything.
He kept his face still.
Jaehaerys turned from the railing and took Maekar’s hand in both of his own, the way old men held the hands of children when they wanted them to truly listen.
“Maegor was a cruel man,” he said quietly.
“Just as his name suggests.
He burned.
He broke.
He destroyed what should have been protected.” His pale eyes held Maekar’s without wavering.
“I do not wish to see another member of this house walk that road.”
The words were measured.
Calm.
They did not sound like a warning.
But they were.
Maekar said nothing.
“Viserys,” Jaehaerys continued, releasing his hand and turning back to the city below, “with Balerion beneath him and his brothers at his side.
That is the future I see.
A stable realm.
A just reign.
That is the legacy this family must carry forward.” He glanced at Maekar.
“That is the legacy you will carry, Maekar.”
Maekar nodded.
He hated every word of it.
Not Jaehaerys, not the man himself.
He could tolerate Jaehaerys.
Respect him, even, however unwillingly.
The old king was sharp and patient and had held a realm together for half a century, and those were not things Maekar dismissed lightly.
But Viserys.
Viserys was kind.
Viserys was gentle.
Viserys was the sort of man who apologised for the space he took up in a room, who weighed every word before he spoke it.
Maekar had known men like that his entire first life.
They never burned.
But the things around them always did, slowly, quietly, while they stood and hesitated and looked for a peaceful solution to problems that had long since stopped being peaceful.
There were many things he could tolerate.
Serving a weak man was not among them.
“Father!”
The voice came from behind them, bright and carrying, and the double doors swung open before either of them could turn.
Baelon Targaryen, Prince of Dragonstone, Prince of Spring, and somewhere in the complicated arithmetic of this new life, Maekar’s father, filled the doorway in his riding leathers.
His face was still flushed.
Most likely from his recent flight.
“Baelon, how was Dragonstone?”
Jaehaerys embraced his son, and Baelon returned it with warmth.
He had always been louder than his brother Aemon.
Lustier, people said, full of a vigor that announced itself before he entered a room.
Even now, at forty years old, fresh off a long flight in leather and wind, there was still something of that about him.
“Still the same old castle,” he joked.
Jaehaerys laughed quietly and released him.
Baelon turned.
And there was Maekar, standing at the railing where his father had been a moment before, watching him with those violet eyes that had never once looked like a child’s eyes.
Not from the very beginning.
Baelon looked at his youngest son for a long moment.
He had been away three months this time.
Three months at Dragonstone, dealing with the business of a Crown Prince, the petitions and the accounts and the endless particular complaints of island lords who believed their problems were the most pressing in the realm.
But he had thought of Maekar more than once during those three months.
The boy was five now.
Baelon had been brave and spirited at five.
He had followed Aemon everywhere, gotten into everything, broken two vases and a maester’s nose in the same week and laughed about all three.
Maekar had never been any of those things.
He was taller than Baelon remembered.
Silver-blond hair grown past his ears now, violet eyes steady and unhurried, his posture so straight it almost looked deliberate.
He looked, Baelon thought, precisely like a Targaryen prince was supposed to look.
Alyssa had died bringing him into the world.
Baelon had never blamed the boy for that, had never allowed himself to, had told himself firmly and repeatedly that such thinking was the refuge of weak men who needed somewhere to put their grief.
He believed that.
He did.
And yet there were moments, standing in front of those eyes, when he felt the distance between them like a physical thing, something he did not entirely know how to cross and was not certain Maekar wanted him to.
“You have grown,” Baelon said, trying to sound warm.
Maekar looked up at him.
Then, unexpectedly, he smiled.
It was small and brief, but it was there.
“I did,” Maekar said.
Jaehaerys watched them both.
Baelon knew was that three months was too long.
Whatever this distance was between them, letting it grow wider would not help it.
“Maekar,” he said, “What would you say to a flight on Vhagar tomorrow?”
He watched his son’s face.
It was the first time, in all of Maekar’s five years, that he would have been on a dragon’s back.
Better with him than alone, Baelon thought.
Better with his father than with anyone else.
For a moment Maekar went very still.
Then something cracked open in his expression.
“Yes,” he said.
Quickly.
Baelon blinked.
Then he laughed, warm and genuine.
Jaehaerys, behind them both, allowed himself a small smile.
Maekar accepted the offer readily.
Why wouldn’t he.
He wanted to see his mother’s dragon again.
But before that.
He excused himself quietly, offering a brief farewell to Jaehaerys and Baelon, and collected Ser Clement.
There was still time before the sun set.
Enough to train.
The training ground was mostly empty at this hour, a few attendants moving quietly between the racks, collecting discarded equipment, sweeping sand.
The torches had not yet been lit.
The last of the daylight came in low and flat across the yard, casting long shadows.
Maekar picked up his sword and went to work.
The movements were still wrong in ways that frustrated him.
His arms tired too quickly.
His grip shifted when it shouldn’t.
He knew what the correct form felt like, could picture it precisely, and the gap between that picture and what his body actually did was a daily irritation he had not yet made peace with.
He swung.
Reset.
Swung again.
Ser Clement stood a few paces behind him, watching, and reached out once to adjust the angle of his elbow with two fingers.
Maekar swung again.
The silence stretched.
“Tell me something about yourself, Ser,” he said, without breaking his rhythm.
Clement was quiet for a moment.
“I am from Crackclaw Point,” he said.
“That is all?”
There was something almost like humor in Maekar’s voice.
He took another swing, and another, the wood of the dummy absorbing each blow with a solid sound.
Clement cleared his throat.
He was not entirely sure where to begin.
“My father was a small lord,” he said at last.
“We were rich and poor at the same time, if that makes any sense.
The land was ours but little else was.”
He paused.
“Every few months a larger lord would come with his men.
He always wanted something.
Grain, coin, boys for his levies.
My father always gave it.
He had no choice.”
“I watched it happen my whole childhood.
The same man arriving at our gate with the same expression, and my father going out to meet him with the same smile that wasn’t a smile.”
Maekar had stopped swinging.
He stood with the sword at his side, his back still to Clement, looking at the dummy.
“What did you do about it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Clement said.
“For a long time, nothing.
I was a child.”
“Then I grew.”
Maekar turned to look at him.
Clement met his eyes.
“I left,” he said simply.
“I trained.
I made myself into something that lord would have to think twice about.” He looked at the yard around them, at the dummies and the sand and the fading light.
“Power is the only language men like that understand.
I decided to learn it.”
The yard was quiet.
Maekar looked at him for a long moment.
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“It is.”
He turned back to the dummy and raised his sword again.
A cold shiver ran down Ser Clement’s spine.
He stood there in the fading light and realised, with a clarity that arrived slightly too late to be useful, that he had spent the last half hour speaking to a five year old about power and lords and the language of violence.
Had spoken to him the way he might speak to a man.
He stared at the back of Maekar’s silver head and said nothing.
It was perhaps that moment, more than any other, that made him certain.
Whatever the Prince before him was, normal was not the word for it.
Not by any measure he possessed.
The last rays of sunlight finally disappeared beneath the walls of the keep.
Maekar discarded his wooden sword against the rack without looking at it.
“You can come with me, Ser,” he said.
Clement blinked.
“With you?
Where?”
“Just follow me.”
He left the courtyard without further explanation.
Clement followed, because what else did one do.
They moved through the keep in near silence, through corridors that had emptied with the evening, past the occasional flicker of a lamp and the distant murmur of voices behind closed doors.
Maekar walked with that straight-backed, purposeful stride of his, giving no indication of where he was going or why.
Then, in a corner that Clement had walked past a hundred times without ever truly looking at, the Prince stopped.
He raised his hand.
His small fingers moved slowly across the stonework, deliberately.
They stopped on one particular stone, slightly crooked, set a hair’s width deeper than its neighbours.
Maekar pressed it.
The wall moved.
Clement stared.
Impossible.
“Impossible,” he repeated out loudly.
Maekar glanced at him briefly.
“My Prince.” Clement stepped forward, lowering his voice despite the empty corridor.
“I do not know how you found that, but these passages were built by King Maegor .
They are not safe.
There could be traps.
We could become lost.
No one would know where to look for—”
“We won’t,” Maekar said simply, and stepped into the darkness.
“Where is your sense of adventure, Ser?” His voice came from somewhere ahead, calm and faintly amused.
“Are you truly content with standing at doors?”
Clement opened his mouth.
Then he followed, because apparently that was what he did now.
The wall closed behind them.
The darkness was absolute.
No lamp, no crack of light, nothing.
Clement stood very still and listened to the sound of his own breathing and the quiet, unhurried footsteps of a five year old somewhere ahead of him in the black.
He cursed.
Inwardly.
He had not agreed to this.
He was fairly certain he had not agreed to any of this.