To Love A King || Maegor Targaryen

13 • THE FACE OF DEATH

Five days away from the Kings Landing, Maegor could only think of Mellario's welfare. The Queen was on his mind 24/7, he hoped she is taken care of and attended to and their baby too, healthy and kicking, he wished to have a son or a daughter, a child to propagate his line and birth a new family with his wife.

Still in the South of Harrenhal. The King looked out of the palace window for the last time. Dusk was falling rapidly. Beyond the lake the distant lights of Castellan twinkled.

There was a wilderness around the old palace, a strip of no-man's land with which, over seven years, the town had cut itself off from this dangerous place, leaving nothing but a few ruins, rotten beams and the remains of a gap-toothed palisade which had obviously not been worth dismantling and moving.

As far away as possible at the opposite end of the settlement, Lord Foltest had built his new residence. The stout tower of his new palace loomed black in the distance, against the darkening blue of the sky. In one of the empty, plundered chambers, Maegor returned to the dusty table at which he was preparing, calmly and meticulously.

He knew he had plenty of time. The striga would not leave her crypt before midnight. On the table in front of him he had a small chest with metal fittings. He opened it. Inside, packed tightly in compartments lined with dried grass, stood small vials of dark glass. The King removed three.

From the floor, he picked up an oblong packet thickly wrapped in sheep's skins and fastened with a leather strap. He unwrapped it and pulled out a valyrian steel: Blackfyre, with an elaborate hilt, in a black, shiny scabbard covered with rows of runic signs and symbols of three headed dragon.

Maegor drew the blade, which lit up with a pure shine of mirror-like brightness. It was pure silver. He whispered an incantation of High Valyria and drank, one after the other, the contents of two vials, placing his left hand on the blade of the sword after each sip.

Then, wrapping himself tightly in his black coat, he sat down on the floor. There were no chairs in the chamber, or in the rest of the palace. He sat motionless, his eyes closed.

His breathing, at first even, suddenly quickened, became rasping and tense. And then stopped completely. The mixture which helped the King gain full control of his body was chiefly made up of veratrum, stramonium, hawthorn and spurge.

The other ingredients had no name in any human language. For anyone who was not, like Maegor, inured to it from childhood, it would have been lethal poison.

The King turned his head abruptly. In the silence his hearing, sharpened beyond measure, easily picked out a rustle of footsteps through the courtyard overgrown with stinging nettles.

It could not be the striga. The steps were too light. Maegor threw his sword across his back, hid his bundle in the hearth of the ruined chimney-place and, silent as a bat, ran downstairs.

It was still light enough in the courtyard for the approaching man to see the King's' face. The man, Lord Ostrit, backed away abruptly; an involuntary grimace of terror and repulsion contorted his lips.

The King smiled wryly he knew what he looked like. After drinking a mixture of banewart, monk's hood and eyebright the face takes on the color of chalk, and the pupils fill the entire iris.

But the mixture enables one to see in the deepest darkness, and this is what Maegor wanted. Ostrit quickly regained control.

"Yo-your Grace." Foltest stuttered.

"You look as if you've already seen a corpse,” Maegor said.

Ostrit swallowed the bile in his throat then.
"There's no need to go this far Your Grace. I bring you reprieve.”