Chapter 118: The City Exhales
ULF
Smoke got into everything. It was in Ulf's collar and under his tongue and in the cup of water a squire pushed at him on the Serpentine, so drinking tasted of pitch. He'd stood in front of the Iron Throne long enough for his legs to stiffen. Then a runner brought word that the granary on Cobbler's Square hadn't surrendered, and the war put its hand back on his shoulder.
Cole was waiting at the Old Gate with forty men and no patience left. His white cloak had gone grey down one side from the tunnel crawl.
"Thirty inside. Maybe forty," he said. "Harbour men who didn't make it to the ships. They've barred the doors and they're shooting into the square."
"Have they been offered terms?"
"Twice. They shot the man who carried them the second time."
A bolt cracked off the cobbles two paces from Cole's boot. He didn't flinch. "I want this finished before dark. Not quieted. Finished. Leave one hole in the city overnight and half of Flea Bottom decides the war's still running and settles old debts on its neighbours."
"Pull your men back under the arcade."
"They can take that door."
"They can take it, and eleven of them die on the threshold." He handed off his cloak. "I'll take the door."
Cole held his eyes a moment, then raised two fingers, and his men went back in good order, boots scraping wet ash.
Ulf crossed the square in one motion. Soru put him against the granary wall before the crossbowmen had finished tracking where he'd been standing, and he came up the stone with his shoulder hardened, Tekkai turning two bolts off him with a sound like hail on a shield. The barred door went in on the third hit. After that it was close work in the dark between grain sacks, dust thick enough to choke on. Rankyaku cut the legs from under the front rank without killing them. He broke a wrist, then an elbow, then a jaw. Somebody screamed for his mother in a Dornish accent. Then a sword hit the floorboards, and another.
Nine dead. Six of them killed by Cole's archers in the first hour, before he ever came through the door. He made himself look at each one.
"Twenty-eight taken," Cole said, counting them onto the cobbles. "That's the last pocket. Fishmonger's went an hour ago, the Guildhall gave up its bows without a fight."
"Feed them, and see to their wounded."
"They shot a man under a truce flag."
"Feed them anyway." Ulf wiped his blade on a grain sack. "Every man in this city is deciding tonight what kind of people took it."
The city exhaled then, and it wasn't a gentle thing. Cities don't breathe gently after battles. It was the ragged, smoke-choked breath of a place that had spent the morning burning and was only now beginning to understand it had survived. Fires still smouldered in the harbour district. The outer walls were scarred black where dragon-flame had washed them. Cole's men were still carrying bodies out of the streets, Green and Black both, and smallfolk who'd simply been between them. Bells rang somewhere in the Street of Steel. Nobody had ordered them rung.
Grand Maester Orwyle had turned the Small Council chamber into a counting house. Wax tablets covered the table in untidy ranks. His sleeves were wet to the elbow with somebody else's blood.
"Two hundred of ours," Cole reported, coming in at Ulf's shoulder. "Six hundred of theirs, most in the harbour district when the dragons hit. The garrison commander formally surrendered his remaining forces. The city is secured. Rhaenyra is in the black cells."
"Six hundred and forty-one," Orwyle said, without looking up. "And your two hundred is two hundred and thirteen. I have walked the harbour myself, Lord Commander. Twice. I will not set my seal to a number I have not counted with my own hands, nor hear a rounder one read to the lords tomorrow because it sits easier in the ear."
"It sits easier because it is easier," Cole said.
"It is a lie that costs nothing today and everything in a year." Orwyle turned a tablet around. "There is also the dragonseed. Denys Waters. Ashclaw went into Blackwater Bay with him aboard. Do I write him among ours, or among theirs?"
The chamber was cold. Buckets went hand to hand in the yard below, a rhythm that had been going since noon.
"Ours," Ulf said. "He rode against us because nobody ever offered him better. Write his name whole."
Orwyle wrote it out, slowly, both names.
"And the civilian quarter?" Ulf asked.
"Largely intact," Cole said. "You kept the dragons on the military targets. The ballista towers, the garrison positions, the fleet anchorage. The smallfolk know it. There's gratitude in the streets. Not love, not yet, but gratitude. They're not rioting. They're not fleeing. They're waiting to see what kind of rulers we'll be."
"The kind that don't burn cities." Ulf moved to the writing desk. "Has the message been sent to the village?"
"Already riding. Helaena will have it by nightfall."
He'd kept it short, in his own hand. Some things needed a man's face behind them. *It's done. The city is ours. The children can come home—almost. Wait for my word. There's one more thing I need to secure before it's safe.* He'd sealed it himself and given it to one of Cole's riders, a boy of eighteen who'd gone into the tunnel first at dawn.
"The one more thing," Cole said. "Daemon."
Ulf spread the treasury records across the command table, the papers Orwyle had carried out of Rhaenyra's chambers. "Half the crown's reserves. Drained in the last six months. All authorized at night, after the council had retired, signed by Rhaenyra alone. And every transaction traces back to the same hooded figure, a man with a Valyrian steel ring whose sigil has been filed away." He met Cole's eyes. "Daemon didn't just manipulate Rhaenyra. He used her to empty the realm's treasury. He's been building a war chest for something. And whatever it is, the fall of King's Landing doesn't stop it. It only changes his timeline."
"So we find him," Cole said.
"We find him. Before he finds another throne to whisper behind. Before he decides Helaena is the next queen whose ear he wants."
Dusk came up off the water grey and low. He went down to the outer yard while men beat out the last of the stable fire with wet sacking, the smell of it sharp and wrong. Vermithor and Silverwing turned slow circles over the Dragonpit hill. Below, the harbour was a black clutter of burned hulls and broken ballista towers.
Cole found him there. "The 'almost' in that message," Ulf said, without turning. "It means when Daemon is found. When the shadow is lifted. When the city is safe enough for a queen and her children to walk its streets. That's the one more thing."
"She'll read it as three more days."
"She'll read it as Aegon isn't in it." Two hundred and thirteen, he thought, and Waters made two hundred and fourteen, and none of it looked smaller for being counted. The gate ground open below them and the boy rode out at a canter, north, toward the river road and the village and a woman who would be standing in the doorway before the horse was in the yard.