Fire and Blood

Chapter 154: The Shepherd and the Dragon

King's Landing — Cobbler's Square...

The square had become a throat that screamed.

Bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder beneath the haggard lamps and guttering torches, a sea of faces glittering with sweat, soot, and zeal. The Shepherd stood above them on a toppled wine cart, one sleeve pinned at the shoulder where a hand had once been, the other lifted like a standard. He was lean as a river reed, voice raw and relentless. "Demons on high!" he cried, and the mob roared the words back at him until the sound rebounded from shuttered windows and broken tiles. "False kings on dragonback! The Stranger tolls the hour—cleanse the city, cleanse the sin!"

Pitch smoked in braziers; stones knocked like dice along the cobbles. Somewhere, a looted bell kept striking, uneven and hysterical—the smell of char and old fish from the stalls mixed with the iron reek of blood.

Jaehaerys came up from the wynd to the east, hood thrown back, ash in the white of his hair. He walked with ten gold cloaks, their cloaks weighed down over their shoulders, hanging like shadows. They moved as if they did not so much part the crowd as persuade it to lean aside for a breath. The prince's chain-dagger lay coiled against his left wrist, sleeping. His sword rode bare at his hip, but the leather thong kept it in the scabbard. He let the sound wash him, found its pulse, and entered on the off-beat. "Enough," he said at first, a single word that could not be heard three paces away. Then he stepped into the thin patch of lamplight below the cart, turned, and gave the square his face.

The noise faltered.

Jaehaerys had the Targaryen look the smallfolk whispered about: the cut of cheek and jaw, the violet eyes that gathered torchlight and gave it back colder. But there was smoke at the corners of those eyes and new years graven at the mouth. Blood had dried like a brown thumbprint at his collar.

A Shepherd's lamb lunged. He came from Jaehaerys's right side—young, wild-eyed, both hands white-knuckled on a butcher's knife. The blade flashed up toward the prince's ribs, crude and quick and killing enough. Jaehaerys pivoted half a pace, stepped inside the arc, and chopped the edge of his hand into the side of the man's neck where muscle met nerve. The blow landed with a flat, efficient sound. The knife fell first; the lamb's knees followed. Jaehaerys caught him under the armpit and lowered him so his skull would not split on stone. "Rest," he murmured, a benediction for an enemy who might be a boy.

The square did not breathe.

A hiss ran through the front ranks—surprise, anger, something like shame. A few made to surge; a dozen City Watch appeared as if they had been there always. The absence of sudden killing shocked the mob more thoroughly than steel would have done.

"Let him speak!" an older woman shrilled from a doorway, voice cracked with smoke.

The Shepherd's mouth pulled into a smile that showed no teeth. He lifted his arm again, quieting his flock with a preacher's touch, and leaned forward. "Behold!" he cried, to cheers and to silence both. "The Deceiver's spawn! The silver demon comes to charm you, to put your wives and little ones to sleep while his beasts—"

Jaehaerys did not look up at the one-handed prophet. He looked at the people. He found eyes: a mason with mortar still under his nails, a seamstress with soot on her hem, a boy with a broken sling dangling from his wrist. Faces furious, faces afraid. Faces tired. "Good folk. You know who I am," he said, not loudly, but into the silence he'd carved.

A murmur ran through the crowd. On the hill behind them, the Dragonpit groaned like an old ship. The wind shifted and brought a breath of scorched oil from the steps where Aegon and the Watch held. A far-off wingbeat rolled the smoke like surf. He let these things be the drum to his words.