The Dragon & The Wolf

The Hour of the Wolf

Chapter 10: "Is a Man worth a Throne?"

Chapter 11 : 'In the Eyes of the Seven'

Chapter 12 : 'The Hand of the King'

Chapter 13 : 'The Rulers of the Red Keep'

Chapter 14 : 'The Queen and the Hand'

Chapter 15 : 'The Shadow of Arthur Stark

Chapter 16 : 'The Nastiest Viper'

Chapter 17 : ' A Game of Pain & Passion'

Chapter 18 : 'A Tale of Waters and Snow'

Chapter 19 : 'The Northern Fist'

Chapter 20: 'Double Dual'

are available here =

w w w . p a t r(e)on (slash) MonsieurLAH

Enjoy reading!

Since his first night inside the Red Keep, Arthur hadn't had one good night of sleep, not once. Not because his bed was uncomfortable, for it was the most comfortable he had ever slept in, but because while his body rested, his mind did not. One of the first things he had read about the Red Keep, had been the secret passages of Maegor the Cruel. A maze inside a palace. A trap within home.

So Arthur did what he had to do; he warged inside the mind of the first rat he saw, and send it through the first crack he saw. The first night made Arthur realize how much work he had if he wanted to discover all of Maegor's little secrets. One rat would not be enough, he needed a hundred.

That is when things started to get difficult, Arthur was a powerful warg, a very powerful one according to his Skagosi mentor. But even a powerful warg had limits, warging inside a hundred rats at the same time would be suicide. Arthur needed training as much as he needed rats. So, during the first fifty nights after he had entered Rhaenyra's service, he would leave the Red Keep through the secret passage he had found in his room during his first tour as a rat, and go to a rat-catcher's establishment in order to buy two rats. Many rat-catchers illegally kept the rodents they caught and sold them to bakers and weavers, in order for those to ruin their competitors' business within the capital. But never before had a client bought a hundred rats. Arthur took his time, trained his mind and his rats, kept his rodents within large cages hidden in the secret tunnels for no one to discover. The more he trained, the more rats he bought, and for every rat he failed to control, Shadow gained a snack. After almost two moons of intense training, he was finally able to control his hundred rats at the same time. It took him a week of nocturnal explorations to discover all of the secret passages within the Red Keep, three more days, and he had discovered the ones within Maegor's Holdfast. Two more weeks, and he knew the entire maze like the back of his hand. After many months spent in the capital, Arthur could now command all of his rats in his sleep without losing control of even one of the rodents.

His ability allowed him to spy on everyone inside the castle, two hundred eyes to watch more than four thousand residents. Every night, he learnt something new, every week, something meaningful.

But tonight, he did not see anything, instead, one of his rats caught a scent he knew all too well, for Shadow was now as familiar with it as he was with his.

The rodent hurried down the stairs to catch the visitor, who yelped when she saw it.

"Damn rat!" Rhaenyra growled, wearing rags that made her look like a young boy.