A week had passed.
And with it came routine.
Every morning without fault, Maester Edwyn arrived with his pile of books and his chain and his precise voice, sitting opposite Arrax and building the old tongue between them brick by brick.
Every breakfast and dinner, the Targaryens sat together at the long table, Aerys at its head, Rhaella beside him, Rhaegar sulking in his chair with a book, and Arrax sitting opposite his father, playing the quiet and curious four-year-old with the patience of a man who had been something else entirely not long ago.
And every other morning, Ser Oswell Whent stood at the edge of the training yard with his arms folded and his sardonic mouth half-open as Arrax and Rhaegar knocked splinters off wooden swords and each other.
It had become something close to normal.
Arrax wasn't sure how he felt about that.
The candle had burned low by the time Arrax turned another page.
He sat cross-legged on the centre of his bed, the book spread open across his knees, its pages thick and slightly yellowed at the edges with the particular smell of something that had been written in a different century and hadn't entirely forgiven the world for moving on.
The illustrations were familiar now. Dragons. Dragonlords. The smoking towers of old Valyria above a silver sea.
Arrax read the text beneath one without effort.
"Se zaldrīzes iksis se āeksio hen ñuha perzys. Nyke mazverdagon perzys hen ñuha own udir"
He said it quietly to himself, lips barely moving.
The dragon is the master of my fire. I make flame from my own word.
He turned the page.
"Issa daor ñuha lēkia. Yn power nyke iēdrosa mazverdagon."
He is not my brother. But power I still make.
The corner of his mouth moved.
He wasn't sure if that was the grammar talking or himself.
Arrax closed the book over one finger and looked at the candle for a moment as the flame bent sideways and straightened.
Then something reached him.
Footsteps.
Not loud. Not hurried. Just the particular rhythm of boots on stone that Arrax's ears had, over seven days, quietly catalogued without meaning to. Weight distribution. Pace. The faint clink of armour.
Two sets.
He looked toward the window.
King's Landing had come alive below him.
Flea Bottom, especially, its tangle of rooftops and narrow alleys lit in patches by torches and cook fires, the sounds of it rising even at this hour, voices, something breaking, laughter from somewhere too close to be pleasant. The smell rose with it too, the particular smell of ten thousand people living pressed together without adequate drainage.
Arrax had stopped registering it after the third day.
His vampiric senses had decided that particular detail wasn't worth the attention and he had agreed with them entirely.
He set the book aside.
'Two sets of footsteps. One is Barristan. The other is...'
He slid from the bed.
The corridor outside his room was lit by a single torch set in the wall sconce to the left of his door.
Arrax stepped out to find exactly what his ears had told him to expect.
Ser Barristan Selmy stood in his white cloak and armour, and beside him stood another Kingsguard, a broader man with a flat nose and a greying beard, whose name Arrax had learned was Ser Harlan.
The two appeared to be in the middle of a swap.
"Ser Barristan."
Both knights turned.
Barristan's expression did the thing it always did when Arrax appeared unexpectedly, a brief rearrangement that settled into composure before it could become anything readable.
"My prince. You should be sleeping."
"Where are you going?"
"To relieve Ser Jonothar at Prince Rhaegar's door, my prince. It is my turn to watch over your brother."
Arrax looked at him.
Barristan looked back.
There was something in the set of the man's jaw that wasn't quite right.
'That's not it.'
Arrax stepped forward.
"I'll come."
Barristan opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
"My prince, it is late and..."
"I'll come, Barristan."
The knight looked at Ser Harlan, who had the good sense to be looking somewhere else entirely.
"...Very well, my prince."
Rhaegar's chambers were three corridors and one staircase away.
Barristan knocked with his gauntleted hand.
"Prince Rhaegar. It is Ser Barristan, and I have Prince Arrax with me."
A pause.
"Enter."
Barristan pushed the door open and Arrax stepped inside.
The room was larger than Arrax's. Its shelves were full in a way that suggested genuine reading rather than decoration, books stacked without particular care for their spines, some lying flat, some propped open, some with scraps of parchment wedged between pages. A harp stood in the corner.
And Rhaegar stood at the window.
He was seven, and yet he didn't look it. He was tall for his age with the same near-translucent Targaryen skin that made him look as if he'd been pressed from moonlight and given breath. His hair fell silver-white past his ears, and his purple eyes, holding the torchlight from below, were dark and restless and too old for the face around them. High cheekbones, a sharp jaw just beginning to suggest the shape it would grow into, and a quality of stillness when he wasn't moving that made rooms feel like they were arranged around him rather than the other way round.
He looked at his younger brother.
Then at Barristan.
Barristan blinked.
Rhaegar looked at him with the particular blankness of someone communicating helplessness through eye contact alone.
The door closed behind them.
Rhaegar moved from the window without a word and crossed to a chest sitting against the wall beside the wardrobe. He held out his hand, palm up, without looking at Barristan.
Barristan produced a key from somewhere inside his gauntlet.
Arrax watched his brother's hand receive it with the ease of repetition.
Rhaegar opened the chest.
Inside was clothing. Common clothing. Roughspun wool, plain dark cloth, the kind of thing a merchant's son might wear or a dockworker's apprentice. Nothing with a sigil. Nothing with a colour that meant anything.
Rhaegar pulled a set out for himself and then, without particular ceremony, threw a second bundle directly at Arrax.
"Swap."
Arrax caught it.
"Why?"
"Because you can't walk through Flea Bottom dressed like a prince." Rhaegar was already pulling his sleeping shirt over his head. "Unless you'd like to be robbed or worse."
Arrax looked at the bundle in his hands. Then, at Barristan, who was already reaching into the chest for his own set of plain clothes with the weary efficiency of a man repeating a known sequence.
"Is this a regular thing?"
Barristan looked at the ceiling.
Rhaegar pulled a rough tunic over his head and turned.
"If you're too chicken," he said pleasantly, "you can stay."
Arrax looked between them both for one more second.
Then he began pulling the roughspun on over his nightclothes.
"I'm going."
Rhaegar's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile but a smirk nonetheless.
They waited until the sound of the corridor outside had gone fully quiet.
Then Rhaegar crossed to the wall.
It looked like every other wall in the Red Keep, stone blocks fitted close and smooth, with a single torch bracket set near the centre. Rhaegar placed two fingers against one particular brick slightly to the left of the bracket and pressed.
Something within the wall moved.
A low sound, deep and grinding, as the section of wall swung inward on a hidden seam, smooth despite its weight, showing a dark passage beyond that swallowed the torchlight at its edges.
Arrax stared at it.
Barristan stepped forward first into the black, his footsteps disappearing for a moment before the scrape and hiss of flint echoed back and a flame bloomed. He returned with a lit torch held high and motioned for both princes to follow.
Rhaegar went first without hesitation.
Arrax stepped in after him.
The wall swung shut behind them with a quiet and final thud, sealing the corridor into darkness save for the single torch, and ahead of them, the passage stretched long and low into the belly of the Red Keep.