"We meet in the river to wash the blood from our hands."
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In the riverlands, where ancient bloodlines converge, Lucera Waters walks a treacherous path as a bastard dragon seed of House Targaryen. Her duties intertwine with Lord Benjicot Blackwood...
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Did you know that the Blackwood's were kings of the north? A little mousy-haired girl asks me as she flips through the maesters copy of the book of great houses. Her soft skin is alight with the hearth that burns behind her. Though, I am taken aback when she turns her cheek to reveal a trail of greyscale down her throat. So closely related to the first men that some say magic runs purely in the blood.
She continues, ripping a page out and tossing it to the weathered planks. I prefer the Targaryens, especially prior to the dance of dragons. Visenya the warrior queen, Rhaenyra and her dragon Syrax. Alysanne and Silverwing. Lucera Waters and Vermithor.
I am Lucera Waters, I tell her. My voice is far off and strange, weighed down at the edges with an accent that I don't recognize.
She smiles at me, understanding but hollow, I like to pretend too.
When I turn around I am in a Godswood. Swaths of reddened leaves droop to draw etchings of shadow down my bare arms. The sun is warm, almost too much so. I close my eyes and reopen them, it is night and the tree is felled in neat piles.
They killed our gods, Benjicot says. He is wearing garb that belongs one hundred years in the past. A ravens wing cuff covers his throat and falls in feathers down the arms. Moments ago, I witnessed him in battle, but here he is pristine. Cast forth into a dim light I find the edges of him that I have never properly surveyed. The scar across his nasal bridge, a freckle that draws a star map down his neck. We used to bury the dead here. Men and women who were mortal in life but became Gods at the end of their tenures. They lived and breathed within the leaves. Now, they are gone, like everything else.
The Brackens cut them down?
Of course they did.
I sit with him for a moment, sifting dark clay between my fingers. Moments, before I have the courage to ask, am I dead?
If you are, then I killed you, he sighs. A very regretful accident.
Are you dead as well?
Blackwood draws a sigil in the earth; a circle with small lines that intersect. We are alive in one place, dead in others. Time isn't a line, but an every rounding serpent. We are all who we are now, yet everything that we were and will be.
This is akin sleepwalking, I deduce. Seeing into realms that you do not belong while the body stays.
Or seeing through the eyes of another, he returns in a voice that belongs to Lydia. Over his shoulder Vermithor rises through the bark of the felled tree, where amber eyes should cut against the dank they glow ivory instead. The same tone overtakes his irises.
A dragon is not a slave, I say.
That has never been so clear to me.
I blink, and he is stood above me. His hands bare down on my shoulders, a glint in his gaze as if he is desperately attempting to tell me something but the words will not pour out. He settles on a sigh, you have to forgive me.
