Fire and Blood

Chapter 155: The Princess and the Cunny King

King's Landing — Visenya's Hill...

The city was still burning when Princess Aemma Targaryen turned Silverwing west.

Not with the hungry, clean flame of a hearth or forge, nor the bright, brief blaze of a tourney bonfire raised in celebration, but with the savage, sullen burn of riot. King's Landing did not glow that night so much as smolder, like some great heap of refuse left to rot and smoke beneath a blanket of clouds. Fire showed in the alleys and on the hills, in wine sinks and warehouses, in roofs half-fallen and carts overturned, and in windows where frightened faces flickered and vanished as quickly as mice behind rushes. The city's seven gates were shut, the harbor was a forest of masts black against the dark water, and over it all lay a haze of ash and cinders that turned the moon to a copper ghost.

From high above, the streets seemed to twist like black snakes through a furnace.

From high above, too, Aemma could hear the bells.

Not one bell. A score of them. Sept bells and alarm bells, tower bells and ship bells, some pealing with frantic purpose, others struck badly by shaking hands, so that their voices jarred and stumbled over one another. To their clamor was added the howl of men, women, horses, and worse. It was hard to tell, sometimes, which screams belonged to pain and which to zeal. War had a way of making kin of them.

Silverwing flew on. The old dragon's pale scales caught what light there was and returned it in dull glimmers like old silver half buried in soot. She was not so swift as Vaelor had once been, nor so savage in aspect as Vermithor, but age had lent her grave majesty beyond either. Her wings beat slowly and strongly. Her long neck curved beneath Aemma as if the she-dragon felt the weight in her rider's heart and chose, for once, not to resent it.

Aemma leaned low against the warm scales of her mount and tasted ash on the back of her tongue. Her ribs pained her with every breath. Her right shoulder had gone stiff from the jolt she had taken at the Dragonpit earlier in the night, and her left hand was raw where a chain had burned it when she and two Dragonkeepers had wrestled iron links free in smoke and confusion. Her hair smelled of dragonfire and soot. Dried blood had cracked upon one cheek. A bruise was coming dark beneath her jaw where a man in the press outside the pit had flung a stone or hammer or some other blunt bit of madness. She scarcely remembered which. The night had been too full. She remembered the dead more clearly.

Daeron.

Viserys.

Lucerys.

Gwayne, most recently, and therefore most sharply.

Her uncle's face would not leave her. She had seen brave men before and dead men too and had long since learned that there was seldom much overlap between the songs and the truth. Yet Gwayne Hightower had died in harness, blade red, cursing rioters and fate alike, still trying to bring order to a city that no longer wanted it. Whatever else men might say of him, no one would call his end a coward's. Mother will not have even had time to mourn him properly, Aemma thought.

If Alicent had wept, she had done so hidden behind stone and silk. The Red Keep had no leisure for grief. There were gates to hold, ravens to answer, wounded to sort, stores to reckon, children to gather, lords to steady, knights to threaten, and always the greater labor beyond all the rest: the labor of not allowing the realm to see fear. Fear had teeth. Her father had taught her that long ago, before madness had laid its claws in him, before war and prophecy and blood had hollowed him into some harsher thing.

Fear is a beast, Aemma. If you run from it, it hunts. If you feed it, it grows. Best to make it fear you instead. She had been nine when he said it and laughed and told him that he was cheating. Aeonar had smiled then, one of the rare soft smiles that showed the father beneath the prince, the king beneath the dragon. "What do you think crowns are for, firefly?"