Chapter 120: Settling into Ash
ULF
Someone had gone through the royal apartments drawer by drawer. The tapestries were down, two of them slashed where a blade had cut them free of their rings. A writing desk lay on its side with the lid pried off and the hinges bent back. In the solar the wine cabinet stood open and empty, and the floor was gritted with broken glass that crunched under Ulf's boots. Whoever had held these rooms last knew the city was lost and had spent his final morning taking whatever would fit in a saddlebag.
Some things survived. Jaehaerys's old chambers, tucked deep in the family wing behind a door too plain to be worth forcing, had been left almost untouched. Even Rhaenyra's garrison, it seemed, had drawn a line at looting a child's room.
Jaehaerys stood in the doorway and didn't go in. Seven years old, still in his riding cloak, staring at the small bed against the wall. The wooden dragon his father had carved sat on the shelf where it had always sat, paint chipped along one wing. Aegon the Elder had cut it in the brief window before the war swallowed him. The blanket Helaena had embroidered lay folded at the foot of the mattress, grey with dust, exactly where it had been left.
"I don't remember this room," he said quietly. "The village, the cottage, the fishing boats, the smell of salt. That's home. This is just stone. Old stone that belongs to someone else."
"You were three when we fled," Helaena said. "You remember the village because that's where you grew up. This. This is something you'll have to learn again. But it's yours. The keep, the city, the throne. It's all yours. You just have to claim it."
"It doesn't feel like mine. It feels like someone else's memory."
Ulf knelt beside him. The boy's shoulder was hard as a knot under his hand. "That's because someone else lived here while we were gone. Someone who didn't care about the carved dragon or the embroidered blanket. But they're gone now. And this room, this keep, this city, it's yours again. It'll take time to feel like it."
"How much time?"
"As much as it needs."
Jaehaerys didn't stay in the room. He walked. Down the family wing and back, out along the gallery above the yard, touching the wall at intervals with two fingers as he went, counting something under his breath. Ulf followed at ten paces and said nothing. At the end of the west corridor the boy stopped at a door blackened halfway up its frame, the wood bubbled and split.
"What happened here?"
"Fire. In the riots, before your mother went to the village. The scullery boys put it out with sand."
"Did anyone die?"
"Two. A steward and a girl who worked the linens." He could have softened it. He heard himself give the boy the number instead, and was glad. Jaehaerys nodded and laid his palm against the burnt frame, testing it for heat that had gone out a year ago. Then he wiped the soot off on his cloak and kept walking.
Jaehaera found them at the top of the stair, barefoot, her braid half undone. "Is the door at the bottom locked?"
"Which door?"
"The one that goes down." She said it flatly, without dread, the same voice she used for the number of eggs at breakfast. "The one where she is."
"It's locked," Ulf said. "There are four men on it. Two more at the turn of the stair."
"Every night?"
"Every night."
She considered that with her whole face. "Then we're staying."
"We're staying."
"Good." She took her mother's hand and didn't ask another thing about it, which was worse and better at once.
They ate together that night in the great hall, the first real meal there since before the Dance began. The food was simple: bread and salt fish and the last autumn apples out of the Reach, gone soft and sweet at the core. The hall was far too big for the five of them. The long tables stretched away empty and dark, the torches throwing their shadows up the stone until the shadows were the largest things in the room, and the whole space smelled of cold ash and lye where the servants had scrubbed the dais. Helaena would not eat in her chambers. "The keep needs to see its queen," she said. "Even if its queen is eating salt fish with her children."
Jaehaera arranged her bread into patterns, tearing the crust into narrow strips and laying them out in shapes that almost looked like dragons. Maelor wanted nothing except to be near his brother. He shifted his stool down the bench twice to get closer, then ate half an apple and fell asleep before the meal was done, his head drooping onto Jaehaerys's shoulder. The older boy didn't move him. He sat there instead, still and patient, breathing slow, holding his own arm out of the way so his brother's neck wouldn't crick. Six months in a fishing village had taught him that stillness. Waiting was the only thing that had kept the fear small enough to carry.
"He's heavier," Jaehaerys said. "Since the boat."
"He'll be heavier still by spring." Helaena reached across and thumbed a crumb from Maelor's cheek. "You'll be carrying him up stairs and complaining about it."
"I won't complain."
"You will. Your father did."
Ulf watched the four of them and made himself sit in it, because it wasn't going to last, and because there was a fifth chair somewhere in this that would stay empty for years. Aegon was three days south with Dalla, sleeping in a cottage that smelled of tar and net-rope, and no one at this table could say his name aloud within these walls. That was the price. Tonight, for the first time in a long while, it was the only one being charged.
The raven came after the children were down.
Standing at the window of the royal apartments, Ulf read the scroll, a candle held close enough to warm the parchment. *Lord Stark's vanguard is three days from the capital. He has heard reports of the Black Queen's erratic court and wishes to discuss the matter before formal judgment. He also inquires, pointedly, about the identity of the dragonrider who commands two beasts.*
Helaena read it over his shoulder, her hair loose, still smelling faintly of the hall's smoke.
"Stark has questions," she said. "About Rhaenyra. About Daemon. About you."
"Three days. The outriders said nine." He turned the scroll toward the light again, as if the ink might have miscounted. "And he's heard about her court already. That means it went north ahead of us. Someone's been talking to the Riverlands for weeks."
"He's been marching a long while."
"He's been marching for weeks with twenty thousand men. He's going to arrive with an army and a sense of justice that doesn't bend." Ulf met her eyes. "Whatever questions he has—I'll answer them. And if the answers aren't enough, I'll defend myself the same as I've defended everything else."
"Trial by combat?"
"If it comes to that. But first, the truth. As much of it as I can tell without exposing secrets that aren't mine to share." He folded the scroll along its old crease. "Stark wants to know what kind of man commands two dragons. He's about to find out."
Helaena said something else, and then said nothing, and by the time he had trimmed the candle she was asleep across the foot of the bed with her boots still on. Ulf pulled the blanket over her legs. Then he sat down with the scroll and read it a fourth time, counting three days against every man in this keep who might have sent word north, and the candle burned down another finger while he counted.