Chapter 149: Six Months of Peace
ULF
Frost lay across the lower yard, and Jaehaerys was in it before him, which was new.
The boy had come down without a cloak again. He was walking the chalk line Ulf had drawn on the flagstones a month ago, heel to toe, arms out, wobbling at the third step and going back to the beginning rather than cheat it. Eight in the spring. Half a head taller than he'd been the day the Riverlanders knelt, and the practice sword didn't drag its point along the stones anymore.
"You're early," Ulf said.
"You said footing comes before breath." Jaehaerys didn't look up from his feet. "I have the breath now."
Six months of mornings after breakfast. Ulf had expected the boy to lose interest by the second week. Children begged for a sword and then found a colder morning they liked better. Instead he'd had to invent reasons to send him in at midday. He took the long practice blade off the rack. The wood was cold enough to sting.
"Same as yesterday. I come forward. You don't go back, you go off the line, and you put wood on my forearm before I finish the step."
They ran it eleven times. Eleven times the boy went a half-beat late and Ulf's blade tapped his ribs, and eleven times Jaehaerys reset without a word, mouth shut, breath going in and out through his nose, jaw set. On the sixth pass Ulf slowed by a fraction, and the boy stopped dead in the middle of the yard.
"You went slow."
"I did."
"Don't." The high voice cracked on it and he didn't flinch from that either. "If you go slow I don't learn it, I just learn that you went slow. Everyone else does that. The masters-at-arms bow before they hit me."
Frost water was soaking through the knees of his hose. The four men in the flooded corridor came back to him, and the grate he'd broken outward with his shoulder, and he decided the boy was right.
"Watch my front foot," he said. "Not my eyes. My eyes lie. My foot can't."
Twelfth pass. Ulf came in at proper speed and Jaehaerys wasn't there, he was inside and to the left with his weight already moving, and the wooden edge cracked across Ulf's wrist hard enough that the long blade jumped out of his hand and clattered away over the stones.
Nobody said anything. A groom in the far arch stopped raking.
"Did you let me?"
"No." Ulf flexed his fingers. There'd be a bruise there by supper, a real one, and a foolish, enormous satisfaction sat under his ribs about it. "You moved on my foot. That was the whole of it. Pick it up."
Jaehaerys retrieved the fallen sword and handed it across with both hands, formal as a squire, ruining it entirely by grinning. "How old were you when you learned that?"
Ulf took the blade and set it back on the rack, and let the question go by, and the boy let him. That was the other thing six months had built.
Petitions were heard in the afternoons now, twice a week, in the long hall below the rookery where the debt clerks worked. Helaena had refused to hear them from the Iron Throne. She sat in a plain chair on the floor of the hall with the rolls open on a table beside her and Grand Maester Orwyle standing at her shoulder, and the doors stayed open, and any man or woman who'd waited since dawn got their turn.
Ulf stood at the wall with his arms folded. He'd counted the exits when he came in, because he always counted the exits, and there were four, and the nearest was nine paces behind Helaena's right hand. He caught himself doing it and made himself stop.
The third petitioner was a cooper's widow off the Hook named Ardys, who'd walked up from the river with a linen bundle under her arm and two grandchildren attached to her skirts. She put the bundle on the table before she said a word. Three combs of honey, wrapped in cloth, still smelling of smoke from the hives.
"I don't want anything," she said.
Orwyle's quill hovered. "Goodwife, the crown hears petitions. If you have no petition—"
"I have a petition. It's not a want." She turned back to Helaena. "The grain gate at the Mud Gate opens at first light and shuts at noon. Come winter they'll want to shut it at all, because there's always some clerk who's counting. I've buried a husband and a son and I've got these two. I'm asking you to keep it open. That's all. And I'm asking it of you and not of them, because they'll say yes and mean no."
Somewhere behind her a man said, "The Good Queen would never shut it." He wasn't shouting. He might have been remarking on the frost. Three or four heads nodded, and the phrase went along the queue and settled there, and nobody in the hall found it remarkable.
Helaena didn't smile. She read a line off the roll instead. "The Riverlands owed the crown eleven thousand dragons in war debt this time last year. The whole of that is struck. The Reach has paid its levy twice running without a lord raising his voice about it, which hasn't happened since my grandfather's day." She looked up. "Which means the treasury can keep a gate open. It stays open, goodwife. Through winter. Orwyle will write it, and it will have my seal on it before you leave the hall."
"Then I'll take the honey back," Ardys said, "since it wasn't a bribe," and picked up the bundle, and then set it down again, and left it, and went out with her grandchildren without waiting to be dismissed.
Ulf watched the whole queue after that and found nothing in it. No hand kept out of sight, no man standing too still. Only people who'd come to ask a woman they trusted for something they needed. He unfolded his arms and let them hang, and it took him most of an hour to be comfortable that way.
The candles in their quarters had burned down to stubs before either of them said anything about the day.
She'd asked for one condition when he came up: no council, no Fossoway, no Oldtown. So they talked about the village instead, and Dalla's pot always on the fire, and the boots two sizes too large that would be too small by spring, and whether a boy of fifteen months could be said to remember a face or only a smell. They talked about the clearing. The wet grass and Silverwing folded shaking in it, Maelor crying into her shoulder, Jaehaera not crying at all. Two days of food. Ulf sitting against a tree not knowing whether she'd let him stay past sunrise.
"I thought you'd go," Helaena said. "That first night. I'd worked out what I'd say to the children when you did."
"I couldn't have gone. I hadn't anywhere to be."
"You're a poor liar for a man who does it so much."
He laughed at that, which he did perhaps four times a year, and she put her head against his shoulder and left it there while the last candle guttered and the room went orange and small.
"Six months of peace," she said. "I never thought we'd see it."
"We didn't just see it. We built it." He pressed a kiss to her hair. "And we're going to keep building it. For as long as it takes. The patron is still out there. The opposition is still growing. But the realm is stronger than it was. And we're still here."
She was quiet long enough that he heard the fault in it himself. Somewhere below them, locked in the strongbox under the window seat, Cole's report had been sitting untouched since spring, and he'd just carried it into a room she'd asked him to leave it out of.
"That was council," she said.
"It was."
"What do you want, then? Not for them. You've done nearly everything you said you'd do when we had nothing. So what's left that you want."
He turned it over honestly, and what came back wasn't a plan. It was this. Cold flagstones and a bruised wrist and honey left on a table, and a candle going out, and Helaena's weight against his arm.
"More nights like this one," he said. "That's the whole list."
Hooves came up the outer yard then, hard, a single rider taking the cobbles faster than any man rode them after the gates were barred. The sound reached the window and Helaena lifted her head, and Ulf was already reaching for his boots.
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