Fire and Blood

Chapter 156: Targaryen and Truefyre

King's Landing — Aegon's High Hill...

Dawn was still only a rumor over King's Landing when Aegon went hunting for a self-proclaimed king. Not a true king, not one crowned by septon or sworn by lord, not one with ancient steel across his knees and the burden of old blood sitting hard upon his brow. This king had been made in gutters and winesinks, by thieves and ragged hedge knights and half-drunk gold cloaks who had mistaken riot for destiny. Yet false crowns could cut as deep as true ones if enough fools were willing to bleed for them. The city had learned that lesson all night. It smoked from a hundred wounds. The alleys below Aegon's High Hill stank of soot, blood, lamp oil, and shit. Every lane seemed to have birthed some fresh ugliness before midnight—shops broken open, bodies stripped of boots and belts, doors hacked down for firewood, dead horses lying swollen in the muck, and here and there the chalk-white face of some man or woman who had gone to bed in one age and woken in another, only to find both had no place for them. Crows had begun to gather on roofs, though the sun had yet to rise. Crows knew cities. They knew when to wait.

Aegon rode down from the Red Keep on a dark gelding slick with sweat, with twelve men at his back and murder in his heart. He wore no silk, no prince's ornaments, no cloth-of-gold to remind the city what house he came from. His black brigandine had taken two cuts already and bore one fresh dent at the shoulder where some zealot's mace had glanced off. Over it, he wore a plain dark cloak scorched at one hem. His hair, silver as old Valyria, had come loose from its thong and hung damp about his face. The horse beneath him smelled his temper and disliked it.

Most horses did.

"River Row says he's holed up in the old dyers' hall, my prince," said the man riding nearest him. The speaker was Ser Hobber of Hayford, a hard-jawed knight with broken veins in his nose and an old scar through one eyebrow. He had been a middling man in easier years—brave enough in tourney melees, competent enough with sword and horse, forgettable enough beside brighter blades. War had improved him. War had a way of doing that to some men and ruining the rest.

"Hmm," Aegon said without looking at him.

The knight nodded once. He had learned, as the others had learned, that Aegon no longer cared to be soothed with names, not since Viserys. Aegon's hand tightened on the reins until leather creaked. He felt the old familiar pain again then, not in flesh but in memory: his twin's laugh, his twin's face, his twin beside him at the table, in the yard, in the saddle, in the halls of the Red Keep where they had once raced each other barefoot under nursemaids' shrieks. There had never been an Aegon without a Viserys in the world, not truly. Not until men and dragons and treason had taken that from him. Since then, the world had seemed built slightly wrong. Voices grated more harshly. Hands felt heavier. Mercy costs more than it used to. And anger—anger came so quickly now that it sometimes frightened even him. He had ceased speaking of it weeks ago. Others spoke enough in his place. They said he had hardened. They said the boy had become iron. They said Viserys's death had carved the softness out of him with a butcher's knife.

All true.

None sufficient.

The gelding shied at a body in the road. Aegon wrenched the beast straight with a vicious jerk that made it snort and toss foam.

"Easy, my prince," said another man behind him. "You'll lame the horse before the bastard pretender gets the chance." The speaker this time was Captain Rusk, once of the City Watch, still wearing a gold cloak, though half of it was black with smoke and the other half stained with someone else's blood. He was thick-necked, thick-wristed, and had the look of a man who had lived too long in armor and taverns to fear either. His loyalty had not been certain two days before. It had become so only after he had watched Perkin the Flea's gutter knights string three serjeants from the River Gate and call it justice.