SEE HOW IT SHINES

XIII.

Green fire. Gold. Black, all-consuming, burning hot and fast and dying out in a roar of screams. White and blue flames swirling together. Seven pyres on seven hills. Oceans of dark blood churning. And dragons, broken and falling.

She wakes on the floor. Her blankets were thrown off at some point in the night, sheets a thick tangle around her legs trailing down from the bed. Her neck hurts. She's at an awkward angle, limbs stiff and fuzzy. Her lower back is slick with sweat. And the blood—

The blood is still fresh as it drips from her nose over her lips.

Viserra lets out a long groan and pushes herself up, wincing at the ache in her muscles. She rolls out her neck, her shoulders, her wrists. (Her wrist. It tingles with a strange vibrancy, where hand meets arm and pulse meets veins.) Blinking rapidly, the last haze of sleep clears from her eyes and the room around her comes to life; it's well after dawn, later than she usually rises.

A few feet away, Sȳndor watches her with wide-eyed concern. She sighs and smiles sheepishly. "I'm alright, sweet boy. Come." She reaches for him, but the dog backs away uneasily. Her heart sinks. He's afraid of me, she realizes. Afraid of my blood, my dreams, my fear.

On sore, guilty feet Viserra stands. She begins to cross to her wash basin, but stops. Something is wrong. She can feel it. Something happened while she slept—something changed. It is too strong, too strange a feeling, a tremble of urgent unrest in the pit of her belly that reminds her, oddly enough, of the sensation of being watched. She feels vulnerable, exposed, more than she ever has before. She looks around again, more frantic this time, searching for...something. Proof that this sudden paranoia is justified. But her chamber is as it always is: no missing instruments, no strewn books, no angled furniture. It seems as though nothing is wrong.

But she knows that it cannot be true. Something, though she cannot see it or name it, is different.

"You're mad," she whispers to herself, squeezing her eyes shut tightly to drive the thoughts away. She only opens them again once she's seen stars behind her eyelids and feels the tide of panic recede. Her dreams are not fragments of the future. Nothing happened while she slept. She is merely tired, and overly excited, and her imagination is playing tricks on her. That is all. She stretches once more, and sighs. Flying will help. It always helps.

As she goes through the motions of washing her face and dressing in riding leathers, still working to convince herself that she's just fine, Viserra notices something move on the balcony outside her windows. A raven, larger than most, has perched itself on the stone rail, iridescent black wings like an ink stain against the clear morning. It's beautiful, if not somewhat ominous.

And if she didn't know better, she would swear that it's staring directly at her.

☀

Viserra spends the day chasing one distraction after another, busying herself to avoid her own thoughts. And it works, for the most part. She flies with Gaelithox and tries to only think about the sun beating new freckles into her nose. She takes Aegon and Maelor to the stables with her mother so the boys can feed the horses, and doesn't allow herself to dwell on the piercing stare of the raven in her window when the memory comes. She passes through the training yard and stops to watch Daemon instruct Joffrey on his footwork, along with what seems to be nearly every other man and boy in the Red Keep all clamoring to see the Rogue Prince in action, and blinks away the image of the dragon she'd seen falling to its death in her dream that looked eerily like Caraxes. She sips lemon water in the gardens with her sisters and a group of court girls—and Mya Cafferen, much to her chagrin—and really does try to listen to their stories, if only to avoid fixating on the pervasive ticklish feeling on her wrist.