The King of Winters

Chapter-125

Rhaegar

The sky was a gloom of blood red clouds, and the city below Aegon's high hill was awash with bells in the red morning gloom. The cool autumn breeze grabbed at the King's hair as he stood by the window, and looked down upon his city. He had seen it in his dragon dreams earlier, as the city crashed below him, with the red ruin flying overhead as it ascended the sky. Maybe he was the red ruin, he thought. And this gloom is of his own doing. Rhaegar looked down at his right palm, smoking like dragon flesh. It had been burning in his dreams as he fought with the great other, the cursed being made of snow that curdled his blood underneath his black armour. He had seen him coming, with his great blue blade in hand and icy eyes and the King burned him. Snow melted away revealing the flesh and blood beneath but he didn't die. The King had burned him once more, melting away the evil one with eyes as grey as death and the freezing blizzard that followed him. When the snow melted it froze the ground where it fell. Every stride only brought the Dead closer and the snowfall only increased.

Rhaegar tried to burn him once more and then something touched him and the King whirled, reaching for the man who had woke him up, knocking him back. Ser Lewyn stood behind him, but managed to move away from his smoking hand. “What?” Rhaegar had asked. “What do you want?”

“Your grace,” said the steward, “the Red Priest is here to see you.” He had known the reason for that right away.

He glanced outside the window, where the first vague light of dawn was just brushing the towers of the Dragonpit in the Hill of Rhaenys.

The fire in his wife's chambers had burned down to embers. “I was quite  clear to the steward that you did not want for anything here,” Rhaegar said gazing into the red and purple sky. “You look as if that might have been a lie.” He had seen Lyanna in her best and her worst but never like this. The queen was disheveled and soaked with sweat, her hair unkempt and dry with a hint of grey in between strands of chestnut brown that had lost their once beautiful colour. And she looked shriveled and small... with nothing left of the spirit or confidence that he had once seen in her. Rhaegar could not help but remember the last time he had seen Ashara Dayne in all her splendor even though she'd been had condemned to a lifetime in the eternal darkness. Maegor's dungeons had done little to mar her beauty or her grace or her spirit. A true Queen indeed and couldn't be more different than Lyanna Stark of Winterfell.

“Can you close the shutters?” she said. “I am cold.” He could feel the chill in the bedchamber but it hardly bothered the King. The heat in him rose from within and the cold kept away.

“You should have a bath,” Rhaegar said. “A hot one to keep the cold away.”

“Why would the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms care about it?” Her wide mouth twisted in an angry scoff.

 Rhaegar looked over his shoulder at her. “You would do well to remember that you are still my wife and the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms”

A lock of dull brown hair fell across her eyes as she laughed. “More like the Queen of three kingdoms?”

Rhaegar turned around to face her. And she shrugged. “What else would you call it? You've lost parts of your Kingdom in a night and half of your sons in a fortnight. You will need a thousand and a moon’s turn to take them all back.”

“And I shall take them all back,” Rhaegar informed her. “Even if it takes a thousand days and nights altogether.”

“Well, I’m no great warrior like you, your grace, nor am wise enough to give you good counsel. Why do you even bother visiting me here in my forsaken tower?”

Rhaegar could feel the blood boiling beneath his skin. He took no joy from her imprisonment, no more than he had in learning about the death of his son and the exile of another.