Chapter 122: The Interrogation
ULF
Water dripped somewhere behind the wall, slow and patient, and had been dripping long enough to cut a groove in the floor.
The black cells were cold in a way that had nothing to do with the season. The stone sweated. The torches guttered in the damp, and the smoke hung low enough to taste, oily on the back of the tongue.
The man chained to the wall was a Black loyalist officer named Ser Brynden Waters, taken during the harbor defense. Bruising covered the left side of his face, purple gone yellow at the edges. His left arm rode in a sling. His eyes were clear, though, and they hadn't left the door since Ulf came through it.
Ulf sat down on a stool across from him. Somewhere between the harbor and this cell, Waters had decided Rhaenyra's cause wasn't worth dying for. That kind of decision showed in a man's shoulders before it ever reached his mouth.
"Get the sling off him and look at that arm," Ulf said.
Orwyle set his ledger on the floor, knelt, and worked the knot loose. His chain clinked with every movement. He turned the wrist, pressed twice below the elbow, and grunted.
"Cracked, not broken. It will knit if he stops sleeping on it." The Grand Maester sat back on his heels and retrieved the ledger. "Ser Brynden. I am going to read you a line, and you are going to tell me what it means. Not what you suspect. What you know."
"Water first," Waters said.
Ulf handed him the cup. He drank it dry, his hands shaking around it, and didn't apologize for the shaking.
"'Gifts, by Her Grace's hand,'" Orwyle read. "Forty-one entries between the second moon of the year and the fall of the city. No recipient named. No council signature. Every one of them approved at night." He looked up. "Half the crown's reserves went out under those four words. Where did it go?"
"I'm a soldier. I don't count coin."
"You were quartermaster to the harbor companies for eleven months," Orwyle said. "You counted every barrel of salt fish that came off a Velaryon hull. Do not waste my time being modest."
Waters laughed once, without any humor in it, and the sound didn't carry past the walls.
"The orders came down in bundles," he said. "Pay this. Requisition that. Half of them contradicted the other half. In the ninth moon we were told to strip the Mud Gate garrison and put them on the river. Two days later we were told the Mud Gate was the most critical post in the city and why in seven hells was it empty." He shifted against the wall. "We stopped asking which order was real. We just waited for the third one."
"Whose hand were the orders in?"
"Hers. Always hers." Waters glanced at the door. "But she wasn't writing them alone."
He let that sit a moment. Down the corridor a bolt slid, and Waters flinched hard enough to rattle the chain.
"The door's shut," Ulf said. "Nobody's coming through it."
"You don't know that." Waters wet his lips. "Does he know I'm here?"
Ulf gave him nothing, because he had nothing to give. He'd come down these stairs expecting a court schemer. Some minor lord with a talent for whispering, the sort the Red Keep grew like mold in a wet year. A man like that didn't put this kind of fear into a soldier who'd held a burning harbor for nine hours.
"The hooded advisor," Ulf said. "Tell me about him."
"I never saw his face. None of us did. He came at night. Always at night, after the council had retired. The guards at her door were ordered to admit him without question. Anyone who asked too many questions... disappeared. Three that I know of. Two guards. One chamber servant."
"Names," Orwyle said. "Dates, if you have them."
"Rolly Cave and a Flowers, first name gone from me, both off the night watch in the tenth moon. The servant was a girl who did the Queen's hearths. She was there in the morning and she wasn't there by supper, and nobody was fool enough to ask after her twice."
Orwyle wrote it down without looking up. "What did you see?"
"A shape. A hood. A hand, once, when he reached for the door. He wore a ring. Valyrian steel, I think. But the sigil had been filed off. Ground down to bare metal." Waters shook his head slowly. "I remember thinking: what kind of man files the sigil off a Valyrian steel ring? That's a lordship's ransom in metal alone."
"Someone who doesn't want to be recognized," Ulf said.
"He came alone, and she saw him alone. No maester, no Kingsguard, no scribe. She'd send everyone out, including her own sworn shields, and shut the door herself." Waters looked at the floor between his boots. "The Queen changed after he started visiting. Before, she was hard but rational. After the hooded man came, she made decisions that made no sense. She trusted no one. She signed execution orders for men who'd been loyal to her for years." He paused. "She was afraid of him. I could see it. But she couldn't stop listening."
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"The night before the city fell. He passed within arm's reach of me, close enough to smell him. Smoke. Old leather. And something else. Something like the sea. Salt and rot. As if he'd been somewhere dark and wet for a very long time."
The cold in the room crept a layer deeper into Ulf. The God's Eye. That lake, black and cold and deeper than anyone had ever sounded it, where Daemon Targaryen had supposedly died and where no body had ever been dragged up.
Orwyle set his quill down. "You have given me a shape and a smell, ser. Give me a date. When did the visits begin?"
Waters let the silence stretch before he answered. When he did, his voice came out lower than it had all night, as though the walls might carry it somewhere he couldn't follow.
"After the dragon," he said. "After Syrax. Not before. I'd swear it on whatever's left of my name. The Queen took the loss of that beast harder than she took the loss of her sons, and she stopped eating, and she stopped sleeping, and she'd sit in the dark with the shutters open. That was when he started coming." He looked up. "Grief opened a door in her. Something walked through it."
"Thank you," Ulf said, and stood.
They climbed the stairs in silence, Orwyle's chain clinking against the rail. The corridor above was warmer by a few degrees, lit by two torches and smelling of tallow instead of wet stone.
"The ring," the Grand Maester said quietly. "Daemon's signet was Valyrian steel. The Targaryen dragon, inlaid with ruby. I saw it a hundred times. I saw him drum it on the council table when he was bored, which was most days."
"And if he wanted to disappear—to become a ghost—the first thing he'd do is destroy the proof of who he was." Ulf stopped under the nearer torch. "File off the sigil. Use his death as a weapon. And spend two years building something worse than any war."
Orwyle said nothing. Neither of them said the name, and both of them were holding it.
"He waited for the dragon," Ulf said. He was already moving toward the stair to the yard. "Not the battles turning. Not the city. He waited until Syrax was dead and Rhaenyra had nothing left to hide behind, and then he knocked."