Fire and Blood

Chapter 157: Broken Crown

King's Landing — City square...

King's Landing did not wake.

It was already awake and had been all night. The city had not slept since the first bell began to scream above the smoke, since the first torch was thrust through a shutter, since the first man in a crowd learned that ten men shouting together had more courage than one man alone. Dawn came pale over the Blackwater, not bright and golden like the singers promised, but grey, sickly, reluctant. It crept along roof tiles and broken gables, down walls blackened by soot, over puddles red-brown with blood and dye and wine, across cobbles where the ashes of common men and noble dreams lay mingled without distinction. From the Dragonpit to the Street of Silk, from Cobbler's Square to the Mud Gate, from the shadow of the Red Keep to the reeking alleys of Flea Bottom, the city had become one great open wound.

Yet wounds could be bound.

That was what Jaehaerys told himself as he stood in the city center with smoke in his throat and blood drying under his nails. The square had no proper name that mattered. In better days, fishmongers and chandlers had used it before noon, puppet shows after noon, and whores after dark if the watchmen were bribed or sleeping. A fountain stood dry at its heart, cracked from age and now blackened along one side where someone had burned a cart against it. Around it, five streets met, or six if one counted the crooked lane that slunk toward Flea Bottom like a guilty thing. That made it useful. In war, usefulness was often the first step toward being ruined.

Now it served as a knot for the city's remaining order.

Tully pikes held the northern approach, their ash shafts angled outward in bristling rows. Riverlander shields lined the southern mouth where rioters had twice tried to rush through with knives and hooks before deciding that martyrdom looked sweeter from a distance. Blackwood archers had taken the roofs by the cooper's yard. Gold cloaks stood at the fountain itself, what few still had the discipline to obey and the sobriety to stand. Some wore their cloaks proudly. Some had turned them inside out during the worst of the night and now turned them back again with the shame of men who wished cloth could forget.

Above them all circled two dragons.

Vermithor came first, bronze and vast, his wings pushing the smoke apart with each slow stroke. He had not landed. There was nowhere in the square large enough to take him without crushing three alleys and half a score of houses, and besides, Jaehaerys had learned that a dragon overhead could do more with patience than one on the ground could do with hunger. Vermithor's shadow passed over the square again and again, a moving omen that made even the boldest men look up before speaking too loudly.

Farther west, Silverwing wheeled above Visenya's Hill and the Street of Silk, pale as a ghost in the ash-light. When she turned, her wings caught the first grey of dawn and flashed white-silver, so lovely and so terrible that more than one common woman dropped to her knees and made the sign of the Seven despite having cursed dragons an hour earlier.

"Gods," muttered Oscar Tully, watching Silverwing bank above a smoldering roof. "If that is what old age looks like for dragons, may the Warrior grant me half so handsome a ruin."

His brother Kermit gave him a weary glance. "Try surviving the morning first."

Oscar grinned through soot and a split lip. "I have made no promises."

Kermit Tully set his horse at the fountain's edge, helm tucked under one arm, red hair sweat-plastered to his brow. He had ridden through half the night and looked it. His mail was smoke-dark, his surcoat torn, his eyes bright with the dangerous wakefulness that comes when exhaustion is held at bay by purpose alone. Beside him, Oscar was leaner, quicker to smile, quicker still to anger, with one cheek bruised purple and a sword that had not been clean for hours.