Chapter 150: The Turning of the Year
ULF
He went for the boy himself.
Helaena had offered him four of the Queensguard and a covered wagon, and he'd said no to all of it. Four men and a wagon is a thing a village talks about for a month. One man in rough-spun with a grain sack across his saddle is nothing. He left the capital before the gates were properly open, slept a night in a cow byre outside Duskendale, and came down into the smell of tar and drying fish by the middle of the second afternoon.
Dalla had Aegon dressed and waiting, and she wasn't pleased about any of it.
"Longest night of the year," she said. "Coldest road there is."
"That's why it's tonight. Nobody rides it. Nobody watches it."
"And nobody's awake to hear a child scream when the wind gets in his ears." She dragged the wrap tighter under Aegon's chin. "I'm coming with you."
"Dalla—"
"You'll have him howling by Rosby and you'll not know the cause, and then you'll do something clever about it." Her own bundle was already sitting by the door, which meant she'd settled the argument days ago, probably with Corwen, probably over the last barrel of salt fish the courier had come for. "I'll sit in a kitchen with the door shut and I'll see no one. But I'm coming."
He'd faced down lords and won. He put her bundle on the horse.
They came up through the postern under the kitchens an hour after full dark, and nobody challenged them, because Helaena had spent a week arranging that nobody would. The nursery maids had been given leave for the feast. Ser Criston had the stair and had been told the Lord Commander was bringing a woman and a child of no importance up from the city, and Criston had looked at him for two seconds and asked nothing.
The solar was warm. She'd laid the fire herself and it showed, too much wood and not enough draw, the smoke going sideways before it found the flue.
Aegon came through the door on his own legs.
He'd walked at eleven months and he was fifteen now, and the walking had got confident without getting good. He crossed the rushes with one arm out for balance, silver-blond hair standing up from the wind under the door, violet eyes going around the room, over the fire, over the three children standing shoulder to shoulder by the window seat because their mother had told them to wait there and not to rush him.
Then he found Helaena.
He stopped, looking at her, his whole small face working.
"Mama," he said. Clear. Certain. Not a guess.
She crossed the room. She didn't run and she didn't hurry, she simply got there, and she went down on her knees in the rushes and gathered him up against her shoulder, and her mouth folded in on itself, her eyes shut hard, and the tears came anyway, falling into the boy's hair while he patted her collarbone with an open hand.
It was Jaehaerys who moved first. Eight years old, and he crossed the room slow and unhurried, giving them space, and stood at his mother's shoulder with his hands behind his back.
"He's bigger than the last time," he said. "At the cottage he couldn't hold his own head straight."
"He can hold everything now," Dalla said from the doorway. "That's the trouble with him."
"Is he going to stay?"
"No," Helaena said, into the boy's hair. She didn't dress it up for him. She never had. "Not yet."
Jaehaerys took that. He didn't ask twice. He put one finger out and Aegon caught it in a fist and pulled, hard, and Jaehaerys let his whole arm go with it rather than break the grip.
Jaehaera came and sat down on the floor beside them without being invited, which was how she went anywhere. She had gold paint still under two fingernails. She reached out and touched the backs of Aegon's fingers, one after another, the smallest first.
"He has warm hands," she said.
"Most babies do, sweetling."
"Not like this." She kept counting. "He's the only quiet one. Everybody else in this room is loud all the time and none of you know it."
Nobody had an answer for that, which Ulf had learned was usually the correct response to his daughter. She went back to the fingers. Aegon watched her with grave attention, then lost interest entirely and tried to eat his own wrap.
Maelor had not moved from the window seat.
He was four and he had been talking about this for two days and now that it was in front of him he stood with his back against the stone and his fists in his tunic, and Ulf let him alone. Some of it he could guess. Three of them were on the floor in a knot and he wasn't in it, and he'd never once been the one on the outside of anything.
It took him the better part of a hundred breaths.
Then he came over, all at once, and stood square in front of the baby with his chin up.
"I have a dragon," he announced.
He dug it out of his pocket. It was pine, badly carved, one wing shorter than the other because Ulf had cut it himself in a bad month and Maelor had never once let anyone improve it. He held it out at arm's length like a man paying a toll.
Aegon looked at it. Looked at him. Took it.
And laughed, wide and delighted, a sound out of something that had never yet been given a reason not to.
The whole room let its breath go at once. Helaena made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh, and Jaehaerys grinned for the first time in a season, and Maelor sat down hard on the rushes and said, "He likes it. He likes it. Can I hold him? I can hold him, I'm strong," and Dalla said from the door, "Sit still and put your arms so, and don't stand up with him, and if he pulls your hair you'll let him."
They got Maelor arranged. Aegon sat in the crook of his brother's arm chewing the pine dragon's tail with his eyes half shut, and Maelor sat rigid as a stone saint, breathing carefully.
Ulf found Helaena by the window some while after.
She stood with her palm against the cold glass, watching them in the reflection rather than turning around, because turning around meant her face went where the children could read it.
"I kept telling myself it was a kindness," she said. "Keeping him out there. Safe. Away from the men who'd want him dead the hour they learned he existed." Her fingers spread on the glass. "I made it sound like a virtue. It was just a thing I couldn't fix, and I gave it a better name."
"I did the same." He watched Jaehaera lean over and correct Maelor's grip without being asked. "Every ride out I told myself I was buying him a life. I wasn't wrong. I just never thought he could have both at once."
"He can't. Not past dawn."
"He has it now."
She turned around then. Her eyes were still wet and she didn't do anything about them.
"Say the hour to me," she said. "I want to hear you say it, so I stop bargaining."
"An hour before first light. He goes out the way he came in."
"Good." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, once, briskly, and went back to the floor to sit with her children, all four of them, in one room, for the first time since the youngest had drawn breath.
It ran nearly the whole of the longest night in the world. Nobody came. Nobody knocked. Jaehaerys fell asleep first, sitting up, and Jaehaera painted three of them badly by lamplight and would not show it. The fire smoked. Ulf sat with his back to the door out of habit and forgot for whole stretches to listen for the corridor.
An hour before first light he carried the boy down the postern stair with Dalla behind him, and the cold on the steps was a physical thing, and Aegon slept through all of it with the pine dragon still shut in his fist.
The rider was waiting in the lower yard with the frost coming up white on his cloak. Not Criston's man. One of the ones who came in with the salt boats.
Ulf handed the boy up to Dalla in the cart, saw the wrap tucked, felt the small heart going fast and steady under his palm one last time. Then he broke the seal on the scrap of paper the man gave him and read it twice by the stable lantern.
*The moon turns. Prepare the ground.*
Six words, no hand he knew, no seal worth anything. He'd been waiting most of a year for the patron to do something and here it was, done already, while his family sat on a floor and laughed at a wooden dragon.
Helaena had come down after him. She was standing four steps up in her shift and a cloak, and she was not looking at the cart.
She was looking at his face.
"Take him," Ulf said to the driver, without turning his head. "Now. Go."