Chapter 117: Battle for King's Landing — The Throne Room
ULF
The throne room doors were barred from within. Ulf set his palm against the oak and the wood carried it up his arm: one bolt, thrown in a hurry, and behind it boots shifting on stone, too many men packed too close, breathing fast and shallow. They knew the battle was lost. They'd barred the door anyway.
Rhaenyra's proclamation was still folded in his left hand. The ink had smudged under his thumb on the stairs and the smell of it was on his fingers, iron and oak-gall, fresh enough to have been written the night before. Whoever had stood at her shoulder while she signed it was somewhere past this door.
"Tekkai."
He hardened his shoulder, triggered Soru, and drove the whole moving weight of himself through the doors. The bolt broke like dry kindling. He was inside before the nearest guard finished turning his head, and Rankyaku cleared the first rank, the compressed blade of wind catching two men across the chest before their spears came level. His blade went into the gaps in the second rank. Short strikes. Wrist, thigh, the shoulder joint. Nothing that took longer than it had to. Cole's men came through the doorway behind him in a rush, swords out, and the green banners of the loyalist coalition spread under the high windows where the midday sun came down in white bars through the smoke.
"Hold!" Cole's voice went up over all of it and flattened the noise. "The Queen is to be taken alive. Any man who strikes her answers to me. Any man who harms her answers to the Lord Commander. This is not a sack. This is a restoration."
Six of the guards were left standing. Four of them lowered their spears at the order.
The other two came on.
They shouldn't have. They'd watched three of their own go down in less time than it takes to draw breath, they had nowhere to put their backs, and they crossed the floor at a dead run with their mouths open and no sound coming out. Ulf caught the first spearhead against a hardened forearm and let it skid off him with a shriek of steel, then broke the man's collarbone with the flat of his hand and put him on the tiles. The second got a cut in, high, across Ulf's ribs where the tunic hung loose. Then Ulf took him by the throat and set him down against a pillar, hard enough to empty him, gentle enough to leave him breathing.
He hated that part. He always would. Two more men bleeding on the floor because they'd sworn an oath to somebody nine months ago and nobody had told them they were allowed to stop.
The rest of it went out of the room. Their captain came forward, an older man with a scar riding up under one eye, and got down on his knee, palms open where they could be seen. "The garrison surrenders," he said. His voice held. His hands did not. "We were following orders. The Queen—she wasn't herself, these last months. Something changed in her. It frightened the men who'd served her since Dragonstone. Some of them ran rather than stand another watch outside her door."
"The hooded advisor," Ulf said.
The captain's head came up. "You know about him?"
"We're about to know more." Ulf lifted two fingers at Cole's serjeant. "Take them into custody. They'll be treated fairly. The same justice that will be extended to everyone who fought in this war."
Then the hall went quiet, and there was nothing left in it but the sound of somebody's blood dripping on tile, and Rhaenyra Targaryen sitting on the Iron Throne with her hands laid along its bladed arms.
She had been the sharpest thing in any room she entered. Ulf remembered her at Driftmark with her chin up and half the realm afraid of her, and the woman on the throne now had that face buried somewhere under it. Her silver hair hung tangled and unwashed. Her cheeks had fallen in against the bone. Her hands shook where they rested against the blades, and she wasn't looking at the men in her hall. She was looking at the space just past Ulf's shoulder, and there was nobody standing there.
"You," she said. Her voice came out scraped thin. "The White Bastard. The dragon-thief. The man who killed my son."
Behind Ulf, a Rosby man with a burned hand took a step forward with his sword still up. Cole's arm came across his chest and stopped him dead.
"Put it down," Cole said, without turning around. "Every one of you. Put it down."
"I never killed anyone named Lucerys." Blade lowered, Ulf came down off the dais steps slowly. "I was never at Storm's End. Whatever you've been told, whatever the hooded man has been whispering in your ear, it's a lie. He's been feeding you falsehoods for months. Using your grief. Turning you against your own allies."
"Lucerys died at Storm's End." Her voice cracked open on the name. "Aemond killed him. But the dead man said. He said you were there. He said you helped them, that the Greens conspired to murder my boy and you were part of the conspiring, and he knew things, he knew things nobody living could have known—"
"The dead man lied. Same as he's lied about everything else." Ulf held up the folded proclamation so she could see her own hand on it. "His name is Daemon Targaryen. He survived the God's Eye. He's been hiding for months, using you, draining your treasury while he fed your fear. He isn't your advisor. He's your destroyer. Everything you've done since the spring, the executions, the purges, the lords you marked for death who never lifted a finger against you, was his design."
She stared at him. Something moved behind her eyes that wasn't clarity, but stood next to it.
"He had a ring," she said. "Valyrian steel. The sigil filed off. He told me he'd ground it down because he wished to be forgotten." She swallowed. "But I recognized it. I remembered the dragon. I remembered the blood-drop beneath the jaw."
"Daemon's personal seal. The Rogue Prince's signet." Ulf kept his eyes level with hers. "You've been his prisoner, Rhaenyra. Not his ally. You're going to answer for what you did under his influence, but you'll answer in a court, with a chair and a maester writing it down. Not on a killing floor. That's the whole difference between his justice and ours."
He nodded to Cole. The Lord Commander came up the steps with chains, light ones, more sign than restraint, and she rose to meet him without being told. She came down off the Iron Throne on her own feet and left it standing empty behind her, and it looked worse empty than it had with her on it.
She didn't resist. She talked instead, low and constant, and the words weren't for anyone in the room.
"There's a debt owed," she said. "He kept saying it. A debt owed, and it's been owed since before I was born, and it comes due whether I will it or not. I hear it at night. Not him. The other one, underneath him. It says the same six words all night and it never once stops."
The chain closed on her wrists and the two halves of the cuff met with a small clean sound, and she screamed. Not at Ulf. At the vaulted ceiling, at the smoke going out through the high windows, at whoever she thought was standing up there listening.
"I never asked him for it! I never asked to be repaid!"
Fifty men heard her. Lords Rosby and Stokeworth heard her, and the serjeants, and the four kneeling guards, and every one of them was going to carry that into an alehouse before the week was out.
Cole's men got her as far as the threshold before she stopped and turned back.
"He'll come for you too," she said. "When you think you're safe. When you've won. He never stops. He never forgives. He never—" Her voice caught. "He said I was the rightful queen. He said he'd help me hold the throne. All he did was empty my treasury and fill my head with poison." For a breath the old woman surfaced in her, upright and terrible and entirely sane. "Don't let him do to you what he did to me."
Then they took her down toward the black cells, and the sound of the chain went with her, and Ulf stood alone in front of the empty Iron Throne with his ribs bleeding into his shirt. The city was his. He'd expected that to feel like the end of something.
He was still hearing her count it. *A debt owed since before I was born.* Whatever Daemon wanted, he hadn't been building it for Rhaenyra, and he hadn't stopped building it, and he was somewhere in this city or out of it by now with half the crown's silver behind him.
He stayed where he was. Out past the broken doors a serjeant was already calling for a maester and a cart, boots went both directions down the Serpentine, and somewhere below in the yard a man was shouting the count of the dead up at a window, starting again each time he lost it.
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