[Kill The Boy] Chapter 69: The Fracture of the Web (Patreon)

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and all rights for character, plots and settings belong to GRRM. I have no ownership.

A/N: Idk why but this one felt special. Hope everyone enjoys the chapter and let me know what you thought about he ending :D

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Year 300 AC

Kings Landing, The Crownlands

Arya stayed against him while the noon sun poured through the broken crown of the Dragonpit. Her cheek pressed his chest for a few more breaths, then she drew back enough to look at him again, grey eyes hard and bright under the grime. Boots scraped over flagstone and Aemon's attention shifted.

Thoros of Myr came toward them with his cloak in both hands.

No prayer came with him now. No muttered word for his red god. His robe hung open at the throat, singed and filthy, and the hair under his broken nose had more white in it than red. The man in Winterfell's hall had been wine-flushed and full of fire-talk while violet flame ran from Aemon's skin and half the room reached for steel. Here he only stopped before him and held out the cloak.

It had once been red. A trace of that still lived in the weave where soot and old weather had spared it. The rest had gone to rust, ash, and holes burned through by sparks. Aemon took it as Thoros kept his eyes low.

Aemon drew it around his shoulders and caught it shut at his throat with one hand. It covered enough for decent folk, barely. Arya looked the priest's cloak over, from the blackened edges to the place where one shoulder had nearly burned away, and snorted through her nose.

"That rag has lived through near as much fire as you," she said. "It does a poor job of covering… everything."

A scrape of laughter tried to rise in him and died half-born. "Aye."

Nymeria lay on the warm stone a few yards off, head on her paws, one gold eye open. She and Ghost had run together at Winterfell, and whatever the wolves had settled between them held true even after he came down out of fire. Her tail thumped once against the flagstones, then stilled.

Below the hill, the city lay stifled in the midday sun. Faint commands drifted up from the lower yards, punctuated by the sudden, sharp bang of a nearby shutter.

Arya stood before him with Needle at her hip, and the dream he had carried from Dorne rose sharp and sudden.

He should have let it lie a little longer, with soldiers below and enemies afoot in the Red Keep and a city balanced on rumor and fear. Yet the dream sat on his mind the entire flight to King's Landing.

"I dreamed of you," he said.

Arya arched a brow, silently demanding an explanation.

"An inn, burning. You were kneeling in the mud outside it." He kept his voice low, the tone for ugly facts laid before men who wanted softer words. "Lady Stark stood in the fire. Her eyes were calm, not fighting her… release."

Her fingers closed on Needle. He could see the leather of the grip press into her palm.

"And you were reaching for her," he went on. "A boy with a bull's build had his arms locked around your waist."

Arya's mouth set, her chin lifting a hair.

"She found Baelish," Arya said.

"She cut his throat. Then the fire took her." Arya's eyes stayed on his, flat and grey and young in a way that hurt. "She… chose her own end."

Aemon drew one breath.

He stepped forward and pulled her in.

Aemon felt the tension in Arya’s shoulders the moment he pulled her in. She stayed rigid for a long time, her frame shaped by years of running and the memory of watching her mother die in the mud of the Twins and again in the fire outside a burning inn. That hardness only began to break when she recognized the familiar scent of his furs, her body finally sagging against him as the Faceless mask slipped. He found it impossible to feel any true sadness for the final rest of Lady Stoneheart, for that vengeful ghost had been a nightmare to everyone she touched. The sight of his sister finally allowing herself to be small and vulnerable, however, was a sharp, biting pain that he found far more difficult to endure than any of his own scars.

Jon pulled her closer, burying his face in the dark tangle of her hair as the wind howled through. The need for explanations had long since passed, burned away by the years they had spent apart.

A voice came from behind them, rough and low.

"I tried to get her out."

Aemon turned his head.

The dark-haired young man still stood where he had halted after the climb, broad through chest and shoulder, one cheek purpled, split lip crusted dark. A hammer hung at his hip and sweat had dried white in the cloth of his shirt, though he looked at the stones between Aemon's feet instead of Aemon himself.

"I went back in," he said. "Could see her through the smoke. I caught hold of her arm. She would never come." He pushed the next words out with effort. "She looked at me and I knew what she wanted." His throat worked. "I think… I think she was glad to see 'Arry again."

Thoros shut his eyes. For a moment the priest looked ready to sway clear off his feet. He stayed upright by habit alone.

"She was," Thoros said quietly. "Whatever she had become by the end, when Arya walked through that door, I saw Catelyn Stark's face for the first time since she received the Kiss."

Aemon eased Arya free by inches and turned toward him fully.

There he was, the boy from the dream. Bull shoulders, great hands, the same arms that had locked around Arya's waist while fire ate a roof beam by beam. Aemon had marked his weapon, his build, his distance from Arya when he first reached the hill. That had been a commander's tally, quick and gone. Now he took a closer look.

Black hair. Blue eyes. A jaw Aemon knew from a visit to Winterfell.

Robert Baratheon stirred in the shape of him, younger, sober, stripped of crown and fat.

The likeness was jarring, yet this boy had saved Arya from the fire, and gratitude came hard on the heels of old blood debts.

"What is your name?" Aemon asked.

The young man opened his mouth to cleared his throat. "I..."

"Gendry," Arya answered for him.

Aemon's eyes slid to her.

She had moved while his attention was on the smith, settling at his left shoulder with one hand loose at her side.

"He's my smith."

Gendry glanced at her then, fast and guarded, and looked away before Aemon could read whatever sat behind it. Arya said 'my' as if half the realm could object and she would be ready to defend his honor.

Aemon looked back to Gendry.

Blue eyes met his this time and held. Good, fear had its uses; too much of it wasted men. This one had sense enough to stand his ground. Bruised, bloodied, half-starved perhaps, yet planted like an anvil.

"Gendry," Aemon said. "You kept her breathing and for that you have my gratitude. Once things get settled, ask me anything and I shall do my best to see it become a reality."

The smith swallowed. His split lip pulled with it. "Ay—I mean, yes, Your Grace."

Robert's face rose again in scraps. A boy at Winterfell laughing too loudly, a king too drunk, a man Aemon had never met yet had carried all his life. Had the old gods been given to jests, there was one here. Rhaegar's son on a ruined hill, looking at Robert's.

Aemon let the thought pass. Lineage could wait. The dead would never care whose get a man was, and Arya stood alive because of him.

Below them, horns sounded from the city walls. Short calls, hurried, men passing alarm from tower to tower but no rush came up the hill yet. Connington would want words before steel, and so would the spider. And so would the man on the Iron Throne if he held any wit at all. Aemon had given them a dragon on the hill and a man in a cloak. Let them decide which frightened them more.

He turned and started for the broken arch where the old road left the Dragonpit and sloped toward the city. Arya simply fell into step on his left, and behind them came Gendry's heavy tread and the softer drag of Thoros's boots.

Nymeria rose from the flagstones and fell in alongside. Her fur brushed Aemon's hand as she passed, and he rubbed the broad skull between her ears without thinking.

She accepted it, leaning into his palm for half a step before slipping ahead. Then she-wolf ranged down the slope ahead of them, tail level, head low.

They passed through the broken arch. The old stones there still held scorch marks from the riot that had destroyed the Dragonpit long ago. Aemon laid a hand on one as he went by, rough black beneath his palm, and thought of the Wall for half a breath. Everything failed in its time. Stone, ice, men.

Sunlight struck the back of his neck as the city opened below them in roofs, alleys, smoke, and banners. A woman below snatched a child in from a doorway when she saw them. A pair of Golden Company spearmen at the base of the road stood rooted where they had been set, helmets under one arm, the points of their spears wavering by inches. One looked from Aemon's face to Nymeria and back again. The other stared like a man dreaming.

Aemon moved at a brisk, unrelenting march, forcing the men behind him to focus entirely on keeping up.

The road fell away from the Dragonpit in a long curve, and the city opened wider with every step. King's Landing had gone to ground, shutters fast against windows, doors barred and crossbeamed. A woman peered through a crack in warped planks, saw the wolf first, then Aemon covered in only a cloak, then the priest, and drew back so fast the board banged shut.

The onlookers watched the fire devour a monster on the hill, only to wander back down the road like they had just witnessed a simple mummer's farce. Aemon completely understood her creeping dread.

In a yard near the hill's foot, men in Lannister red sat under guard with their spears stacked well away from reach. The Lannister garrison, or part of it. Tyrell men watched them from the shade with bows across their knees and helms beside their boots, one less fire loose in the city.

He kept his pace and read the city. Stores, bodies, lanes, trouble yet to come. Burned houses gaped along the slope, their roofs fallen in, beams black as coal. Three corpses lay in one gutter where the runoff had failed to carry them away, bellies swollen, flies thick upon the faces. Visenya’s Hill remained a blackened wasteland. Pale grass and stunted yellow weeds clawed through the soot, fighting for life in the salted earth where the Great Sept once stood.

With how the dead bodies were rotting, it had to be Cersei's men. The city was lost peacefully yet it looked as if it had been sacked. The smell met them lower on the hill, rank drains and cook smoke and the sweet rot of dead flesh left too long in summer heat.

Aemon's eyes scoured the city while walking as he spotted a thin girl that sat with her back against a wall and chewed on something that might once have been leather. Arya watched her until the road bent and the child slipped from sight. Gendry's gaze went farther east, toward Flea Bottom, where whole rows of hovels had fallen in on themselves. His big hands balled once and opened again. A hammer served against a helm or a skull or a chain link heated in the forge. It served nothing against hunger.

A sept stood open on the next street over, half its leaded panes gone. A gaunt septon on the steps cried of judgment, dragons, lions, and the Stranger come at last for all their sins. His voice carried up the lane and broke against shuttered houses. A dozen thin faces watched him from doorways, and that was the danger — hungry men listened hard when any fool promised meaning.

As they went deeper, hooves struck stone in a fast clatter. A knot of riders came out from a side lane, green cloaks over mail, Tyrell roses worked in gold on the breast. The one in front reined hard enough to make his courser dance sideways, then swung down before the beast had fully settled. The Tyrell lord crossed the road toward them at once, boots ringing on the stones, one hand still on his sword belt from habit rather than threat.

He saw Arya first.

"Lady Arya," he said, breath still quick from the ride. "The dragon — did it leave the hill? Is it still in the pit?"

He spared Aemon half a glance, the sort a man gives any ragged stranger found near a crisis. Fair enough. A dragon the size of Balerion over a city packed with wildfire jars disappearing would have sharpened any lord.

Arya gave him the flat look she saved for fools, liars, and people who asked the wrong question.

"You're asking the wrong person, Ser Garlan," Arya said.

She tilted her head toward Aemon.

That turned him.

Garlan's eyes traveled over the cloak first, likely because the thing looked fit for a beggar and smelled of smoke and old wine. Bare calves below the hem. Scars the ragged wool failed to hide. Then his face. Aemon saw the moment the lord reached the eyes and stayed there.

Aemon knew his eyes bled red whenever the Valyrian blood ran hot. He was entirely used to the terror it caused, the way ordinary men would pale, step back, and mutter frantic prayers to whatever gods they kept. Garlan did none of those things. The knight simply stood his ground and studied the sudden shift in color with a sharp, steady focus, assessing the strange sight as if inspecting an unfamiliar weapon drawn on a battlefield.

Arya at his side, the Dragonpit behind him, a man half dressed in a burned priest's cloak. Aemon could see the lord fitting one piece against another, and whatever Jaime had told them at the parley was doing its work now.

Aemon spared him the rest of the road.

"Ser Garlan," he said. "Your men kept this city from tearing itself apart. I came to make sure that holds."

Garlan's face changed, not by much; a muscle moved in his jaw.

Aemon went on. "My name is Aemon Targaryen."

The Tyrell lord studied him. "Targaryen," he said. "There is already a Targaryen in the Red Keep."

"Yes," Aemon said. "Targaryens seem to keep sprouting out of thin air now a days in Westeros it seems." He let the lord take that, then: "If you are wondering about the dragon on the hill, you are looking at him."

Garlan's mouth opened. Nothing came for a beat. "How?"

"Not now." Aemon looked past him to the shuttered houses and the bodies in the gutter. "Open your granaries. Bring your wagons inside the walls. Feed these people before sundown."

Garlan blinked once, thrown by the turn. Aemon knew that look from his own bannermen, the way they always balked when he pivoted from dragons and dead men to the exact weight of a grain shipment. Lords loved the glory of war, remaining completely ignorant of the miserable logistics required to keep an army fed.

"The wildfire crews eat from those stores," Garlan said. "Men hauling jars of green death need steady hands, and steady hands need full bellies. If I pull grain for the city before—"

"The city starves." Aemon looked past him to the shuttered houses and the bodies in the gutter. "Your soldiers can chew hard bread for a day. These people have had Cersei for years."

For half a beat Garlan said nothing. Then he turned his head. "Ser Harlan, ride to the King's Gate and the Mud Gate. Every grain wagon comes in at once. Break seal on the stores in the Tyrell camp. Bread first, then oats, then salt fish if any remains. I want bakers roused."

The knight he named wheeled his horse about and spurred off without question. Garlan either knew how bad it was already, or he had eyes enough to learn quickly.

Aemon asked, "What happened here?"

Garlan's mouth went thin. "Bread riots days before the surrender. Goldcloaks killed seventeen in the crush. After that came Lyseni freeriders and sellswords, looser than any kennel. Women went missing. Boys as well. Men found in alleys with their throats opened for boots, rings, scraps of meat. Cersei answered pleas from the street with 'eat rats.'" His eyes moved over the corpses farther down the road. "Most of what you saw from the hill belongs to her. The surrender cost little by comparison."

Aemon stored every word — seventeen dead in bread riots, Lyseni loose in the streets, a queen telling smallfolk to gnaw vermin. Justice could wait a few hours. Hunger could not, and wildfire least of all.

"How much of the green fire is out?" he asked.

"Some of the Red Keep cellars stand empty now," Garlan said. "Others remain packed. Men work with sand, hooks, and wagons. It's slow work. If one jar slips, half a street goes to ash. Ser Jaime gave us more sites than the crown's own servants knew. We still treat every vault in this city like a trap."

"Any fresh sites?"

"None yet. I trust that answer about as far as I can throw a horse."

So did Aemon.

He nodded once. "Keep the work going. Double the teams where you can. Any pyromancer who balks loses his tongue after he speaks his last location."

Garlan studied him again, hearing the North in the words, or something else. "I can see why Ser Jaime crossed half the realm for you."

Aemon let that pass. "I need clothes, boots, and horses. And then take me to the Red Keep."

"Is the fire the rea—nevermind. You shall have them." Garlan glanced at the ruined cloak, then, with the ghost of a soldier's courtesy, chose to look back at Aemon's face. "And food, if you have time for it."

Time. There was the old enemy again.

"Send bread as you send the horses," Aemon said. "For them first."

His chin tipped toward Arya, Gendry, and Thoros.

Arya gave him a sideways look at that, one part annoyance, one part relief. Gendry looked as if he might argue on stubbornness alone. Thoros said nothing. The priest looked tired enough to sleep where he stood.

Garlan turned to his men again and began giving orders in quick clipped phrases. One rider went for mounts. Another for clothing. A third toward the camp for bread. The lane around them had started to stir by inches. A shutter cracked open above a dyer's shop. Two children peered from under a cart, saw Nymeria, and vanished under it again.

Aemon stood in the middle of the road in a borrowed soldier's cloak. The city watched through cracks in wood and cloth while grain wagons began to roll.

"Before we ride," Aemon said, "You should know the fate of your younger brother. Loras lives."

Garlan stopped dead in his tracks. The abrupt rigidity in his posture drew a quick, assessing look from Arya.

Garlan's mouth parted. He had taken the dragon in hand better than most men would have. This struck deeper. "Loras?" he rasped, his voice cracking on the single word. "When did you meet him? Where is he?"

Aemon glanced at the rider bringing clothes. Good wool, plain cut, no silk, no embroidery. Useful. The horse behind him blew through its nose and stamped at Nymeria.

"Euron took him near the seas of Dorne. Chained him, tortured him and kept him on the Silence." Aemon kept his voice low. Men heard ugliness better that way. "Daenerys pulled him free at Sunspear but the scars are still there. Those won't be easy to be rid off."

"But he lives," Aemon said. "For this hour, that matters most." He watched Garlan take that. "Daenerys flies him home to Highgarden. She means to put him in your grandmother's care and bring the Reach into the war before the Wall fails."

The rider reached them and held out the bundle in both hands. Garlan ignored it.

"I must thank… Princess Daenerys?" he asked.

"Queen Daenerys, for now."

That won a sound from Arya that came close to a snort. Gendry's split mouth twitched.

Aemon went on. "He wanted to ride from Sunspear with his burns still fresh. Ser Barristan had to talk him down, and Daenerys gave the last word. If you know your brother, you know the truth of that."

Garlan shut his eyes a moment. When he opened them, grief, relief, and plain old fury had all found a place to stand. "I do know him." His hand came up to scrub across his mouth, then fell away. "What of Euron?"

"Missing. Dead. Not a threat right now."

Garlan turned his face toward the southern road, completely ignoring the children spying on them from the alleyways. His mind was occupied by the brutal reality of what the ironborn did to their prisoners and the miracle that his brother had survived it. All the careful talk of supply lines and military alliances felt entirely hollow next to that simple truth. A debt of life owed for his own kin outweighed any oaths or politics.

"Thank you," Garlan said.

Aemon gave a nod and let that rest. A man could only take so many blows in a street before his guard failed him. Garlan had work still.

The rider cleared his throat and lifted the bundle again. "My lord?"

Garlan blinked back to the lane. "Aye. Give them here."

The shirt was plain linen, clean and too broad in the shoulders. The breeches were an officer's, dark wool, serviceable. Aemon took them without comment. The boots fit well enough, though the left one pinched at the heel.

He handed the priest's cloak back to Thoros.

Arya turned her back while Aemon pulled on the breeches and shirt in the shelter of two Tyrell horses. He shoved his feet into the boots, stamped once to settle them, and took the plain dark cloak Garlan offered last.

"No crown?" Arya said.

Aemon fastened the clasp. "I left it in my other breeches."

That earned him the ghost of a smile. Small, quick, gone.

Garlan's men had brought four horses. Garlan mounted and wheeled his courser toward the Red Keep. "Ride close, Your Grace. My men will clear the road."

Aemon turned his gelding uphill for a beat, looked back at the Dragonpit, then faced the city and put heels to the horse.

Ash still greyed the earth there, though grass and little yellow flowers had pushed up through it, poor soil making poor blossoms.

Golden Company men stepped aside as Garlan's green cloaks came on. The streets were unnervingly quiet. Aemon saw no looted cellars and heard no screams from the alleyways, a stark proof that Connington kept his vanguard on a brutal leash. Keeping bored soldiers from tearing a city apart took real authority, proving this invading prince brought more with him than just a famous name.

Near Cobbler's Square, two bound gold cloaks sat under guard with dried blood at their mouths and swelling around one eye. Cersei's men, paying for Cersei's orders.

The Red Keep rose ahead, red walls over the city like dried blood on old snow, its gates standing open and men formed in ranks before them. Too many helms to count in a glance, spears upright, black and gold and the three-headed dragon of another line than his own.

So they had chosen ceremony.

Aemon slowed his horse as they came into the yard. A older boy in black plate stood before the gatehouse, silver-gold hair bright under the sun, a sword at his hip and men at every shoulder. An older lord flanked him on the right with one gloved hand resting on his pommel. On the left stood a soft round man in pale silk, plump hands tucked in sleeves, face smooth as a pudding. The Spider, if Jaime's reports had the right of it. Jaime stood a little ahead of them all, where he could be seen. Behind him a knight in Lannister colors held a sword across both palms.

A lean man with a sellsword's walk lingered near a wagon piled with sand and hooks and heavy gloves, cut over one eye gone dark with old bruising. Wildfire crews; the work had kept moving.

Aemon swung down from the saddle and let a Tyrell man take the reins. Arya hit the ground a heartbeat later, light on her feet. Gendry and Thoros came behind. Nymeria padded at Aemon's left knee and bared teeth at the nearest spear line until three men remembered to breathe.

The boy in black plate opened his mouth.

Aemon walked past him.

"Ser Jaime."

That landed where he wanted it to. He heard steel shift in scabbards, heard the older lord's boot scrape stone. He kept his eyes on Lannister.

Jaime looked thinner than he had at Winterfell, more lined about the eyes, dirt at the hem of his tunic, beard gone rough. He met Aemon's eyes and went to one knee at once. The movement came clumsy, one good hand bracing on stone while the golden one hovered useless, but he made it clean enough.

"Your Grace."

The knight behind Jaime stepped forward and held out a sword across both palms.

"Widow's Wail," Jaime said from one knee. "The other half of Ice. I return it House Stark."

Aemon took it in both hands. The steel was lighter than it looked, and warm, as Valyrian steel always was. Red ran through the dark ripples where Ned Stark's greatsword still lived in the metal, broken and remade but not gone.

Aemon studied him. Jaime had carried out his grim orders inside the city, and the brutal weight of that task was carved directly into his haggard features.

"You carried a heavier burden than this sword," Aemon said quietly. "But that does not absolve you of all your sins."

Jaime held his gaze for a moment, then lowered his head, a man settling under a weight he had already chosen to carry, "I understand, Your Grace."

Aemon turned to Arya and held out the blade, hilt first.

Arya stared at it, confusion written on her face.

"That is Valyrian steel," she exclaimed. "Jon... are you sure?"

"It's home now," Aemon said. "Half of Father's sword. Needle will serve you against any man alive. It will do nothing against what is coming from the north. This will."

Her fingers tightened on Needle's grip. For a breath he thought she might refuse. Then her hand came up and closed around the hilt of Widow's Wail.

"It's lighter than Needle," she said, turning it once.

"And sharper too, so be careful. Remember to always—"

"Stick them with the pointy end."

His hand came up before he thought about it and mussed her hair the way he had the day he gave her Needle. Arya went still under his palm for half a breath, then swatted his hand away.

"I'm not nine anymore," she said. Her voice had gone rough at the edges.

"No," Aemon said. "You are not."

She drew the blade free and held it up, and the red folds caught the sun. Her lips flattened into a hard line. It was her usual defense whenever a truth managed to slip past her armor.

She sheathed it without ceremony and rested her hand on the pommel as she rested it on Needle.

Jaime watched from one knee. Whatever moved in Jaime's face was not for him to read.

"Ser Addam Marbrand held the garrison in my name," Jaime said, and his voice had steadied. "And this is Bronn of the Blackwater, who kept the wildfire work moving when better men found reasons not to."

Bronn spat into the dust. "There's gratitude for you. I was startin' to think the world had forgot the trick."

"The wildfire work keeps this city standing," Aemon said. "That will be remembered."

Bronn looked at him as if checking whether the words had coin behind them. Whatever he found was enough to shut his mouth, which was likely a rare thing.

Aemon turned at last to the youth in black plate.

So this was Aegon.

Silver-gold hair, purple eyes, a prince's armor, a prince's schooling. The coloring was right. The rest missed the mark. Aemon knew his own face well enough so he scrutinized the heavy jaw and the wide set of the boy’s eyes, seeking some flicker of recolonization. He found only the cold features of a stranger.

Aegon maintained a rigid, unyielding front. It was a necessary display of strength that kept the streets from burning.

Bran had named a Lord Connington at the boy's right hand, a man who had loved Rhaegar and followed his memory across the Narrow Sea. Everything the boy's face was not sat written in Aemon's own, and Connington knew it.

Connington's eyes moved past him, past Arya, and settled on Gendry. His gloved hand tightened on the pommel once, then let go.

Aegon's chin came up. "What do you want of me?"

He respected the total lack of courtly venom. Aemon studied him in a heavy quiet, assessing the boy's next move like an enemy across a battlefield.

"Tell me something first," Aemon said. "What do you remember of King's Landing?"

The yard shifted. Aegon blinked once.

"I was an infant when we fled," the boy said. "I have no memories of King's Landing. Lord Connington and my tutors raised me in Pentos, under Magister Illyrio's protection."

"Illyrio's protection," Aemon repeated. He let the name sway. "And what did Varys tell you of the night you were taken from the Red Keep?"

Aegon's chin lifted a fraction. "That a loyal man swapped me for another babe before the Sack. That Ser Amory Lorch and Gregor Clegane killed the other child in my place, and my mother, and my sister." His voice held steady through all of it, though his hands had closed at his sides by the end.

Aemon watched his eyes through every word. The anger when he spoke of Elia and Rhaenys sat in the muscles of his face, in the tendons of his neck, places a man could not govern on command. Either the man before him was the finest mummer Varys had ever trained, or he believed every word he had been fed.

Aemon turned to the soft man in pale silk.

He had never seen the Spider, but half the realm's whispers described the same creature: round, smooth, perfumed, hands always hidden. The man before him fit the description.

"You must be Lord Varys," Aemon said.

The soft man unfolded his hands from his sleeves and offered a bow that managed to be deep without bending far. "Your Grace honors me. I have served the realm from the shadows for many years, and it is a profound relief to welcome a true dragon back to these walls. If I may say, your father would have—"

"You claim you saved my brother Aegon from the Sack."

Varys's mouth closed. The courtesy settled back behind his teeth like a snake drawing into its hole.

Every ear in the yard bent toward him.

"You say you took him across the Narrow Sea while another child died in his place. Tell me, Lord Varys. My sister Rhaenys lived in the same keep, behind the same walls, under the same guard. Why did you leave her there?"

Varys answered the question with silence.

Arya shifted her weight, locking onto the eunuch with the silent focus of a hunting wolf. Gendry backed her up with his hands ready, while Thoros watched Varys behind a hard, unreadable mask.

Varys bowed his head a fraction. "Your Grace, had I possessed the power to save both children, I would have done so."

Aemon kept his eyes on him. "You possessed power enough for a babe swap. Power enough for ships, false names, wet nurses, hidden rooms, and years of lies."

Varys spread his hands. "Princess Rhaenys was older. She knew faces, names, chambers. Her absence would have been marked at once. The prince was an infant. He could be carried in blankets."

"So you made the decision."

"I chose what I could preserve."

"As I recall from the stories, the children were in the same wing that day. You saved one and left the other for Lorch."

Varys drew a careful breath. "The Sack was chaos, Your Grace. Choices were made in seconds, not hours. I saved the child I could reach."

Aemon caught Aegon glancing toward Varys. The boy studied the eunuch with a sudden, creeping caution, looking at his oldest counselor as if he had just realized the man was holding a blade.

"A girl child mattered less to you," Aemon said.

"To the realm," Varys said. "A daughter, however precious, could rally fewer swords than a son."

"Fewer swords." Aemon's voice had not risen. "So because a girl of three could rally fewer swords, Ser Amory Lorch was free to drag her from under her father's bed and put his blade through her half a hundred times." He watched Varys's face. "Was that calculation yours alone, or did Illyrio help you with the sums?"

A tell moved behind Varys's eyes, small and quickly gone.

"When you look at that boy," Aemon said, "do you see a prince you saved? Or a piece you placed?"

Varys folded his hands. The smoothness resettled on his face, and when he spoke his voice carried a sorrow too practiced to trust.

"War forces griefs upon us all, Your Grace. Children die, cities burn, and men of duty seize what little good they may from ruin. I spared one life. That is my answer. I grieve for Princess Rhaenys. Her death was monstrous. Yet grief alters nothing."

"You spared one life," Aemon said. His voice stayed level, almost quiet. "Tell me how. You say the Sack was chaos, that choices were made in seconds. Yet that one life you spared was raised in Illyrio's manse with tutors, guards, and a lord commander to train him. Ships were arranged. Names were forged. A whole life built from nothing, across the sea, for eighteen years." He let the yard hear every word. "That is not a babe carried through chaos in a blanket, Lord Varys. That is years of preparation. How does a man build all of that in seconds?"

"Enough." Connington's voice cut across the yard. He had stepped forward, gloved hand tight on his pommel, and for the first time the old lord spoke directly to Aemon. "A prudent servant prepares for the worst. That is what spymasters do. I raised that boy myself, and I did it because I looked into his face and saw Rhaegar's son."

"You looked into his face and saw what you wanted to see," Aemon said. "Varys knew of your love for my sire. He counted on it."

Connington’s jaw locked. "I gave twenty years of my life to that boy," he said. "My name. My lands. My health." He raised the gloved hand, the one that hid the greyscale beneath. "I did not do it because a eunuch told me to. I did it because I loved your father, and I believed I was keeping his son alive."

Connington's voice had cracked on the last word.

"Then Varys used the best of you," Aemon said. "And that is worse than if he had used the worst."

Connington's mouth pressed to a line. The gloved hand trembled once on the pommel before going still.

The realization rippled through the men. You did not buy off Pentoshi magisters and secure hidden manses on a whim. The Spider had been weaving this treason right under Aerys Targaryen’s nose, years before the rebellion even started.

Varys spread his hands one last time. When he spoke, his voice had found its footing again, smooth and measured.

"Your Grace, I understand your grief. I share it. But the realm needed a prince, and I delivered—"

"LIAR."

The word tore out of him with the dragon in it, and in the same breath his boot drove into Varys's knee from the side. Bone cracked like a dry branch. The eunuch folded before the sound of the voice had finished shaking the stones, silk and courtesy and twenty years of whispers collapsing into a man screaming on the flagstones with one leg bent wrong beneath him.

The yard caught up a heartbeat later. Horses jerked against their reins. Golden Company spears dipped as men flinched. Aegon's hand flew to his sword. Red washed across Aemon's sight for a breath, and violet burned at the edges.

Silence followed.

Aemon stood over him, breathing through the heat in his ribs. The red had begun to drain from his sight. Varys writhed once, face grey, mouth open around pain too large for words.

Aemon turned his head toward Jaime.

"Take him," he said. "Put him in the cells."

Jaime rose at once without looking toward Aegon for leave.

"As you command."

Bronn moved with him, quicker than any lord. Between them they hauled Varys up by the arms. The broken leg dragged useless behind, boot scraping over stone.

Aemon watched Connington. His gaze followed Varys toward the gate, then returned to Aemon and held. His sword had stayed sheathed, and no word had left his mouth in the spider's defense. Twenty years of old grudges sat in that silence, and Connington let them stay.

Aegon stepped forward.

"You cannot do this," he said, and even now he kept his chin high. "He is my counselor."

Aemon looked at him. The yard had shifted with that single act of violence, and the man felt it. Men who had stood easy a moment ago now watched Aemon instead, weighing whose leave mattered here.

"Your counselor lied to you," Aemon said. "He built your life on a dead child's name."

Aegon's expression stiffened. He looked toward Varys, who had reached the gatehouse now, half carried and half dragged, then back to Aemon.

"You have no proof of that."

"The man who swears you are Rhaegar's son could not answer how minutes of chaos built eighteen years of preparation. Illyrio's gold raised you. Varys's lie named you. The only witness to your birth is being carried to a cell with a broken leg." He held the boy's eyes. "I am asking you to look at what you just heard, and decide whether it was the truth."

Aegon's hand had left his sword hilt and hung at his side, empty. For a moment, Aemon thought the boy might fold. Instead he straightened.

"I have more than Varys's word," Aegon said. "Every lord here watched me take this city without putting it to the torch. I fed the people Cersei starved. I kept the peace when lesser men would have loosed their swords. That is what I have done. You arrived an hour ago and broke a man's bones in my courtyard. Tell me which of us has earned the benefit of doubt."

A murmur rippled through the watching men. Aegon was backed into a corner, but he dug his heels into the dirt and met the challenge with absolute conviction.

"You have done well here," Aemon said. "I mean that. But where is your proof of blood, now that the man who provided it cannot speak without screaming? Me on the other hand…" The harmonic edge crept back into his voice. "I DO NOT NEED PROOF."

The silence that followed was worse than any argument Aegon could have made. His eyes went back to the gatehouse where the spider had vanished, and Aemon saw the moment the ground shifted under him. The first fracture, the hairline crack that would widen in the dark of whatever room he slept in tonight when every word Varys had ever spoken came back under new light.

Aegon looked truly shattered. Whatever long game the eunuch was playing, the boy had been an unwitting piece on the board. He had sailed across the world and risked his neck in a foreign capital to reclaim a fabricated name. Grooming a child to die for a lie felt like an entirely new, miserable kind of butchery.

"I do not think you knew," Aemon said quietly. "And for that I am sorry."

Aegon stared at him. "You pity me."

"I was raised under a false name too," Aemon said. "I know what it costs when the truth comes."

The boy's face lost its hold for a beat, something childlike surfacing beneath the armor and the training, a look Aemon recognized from his own worst nights at Winterfell when the word bastard had sat on him like a stone he could not shift.

"Careful, lad," Connington said, barely above a breath.

Aegon ignored it.

"I came west for my father's seat," Aegon said. "I came home. I did what I was raised to do. If everything I was told is a lie, then I am owed an answer, and I will not take yours alone."

The grand illusion was gone. Aegon simply braced himself, facing the disaster with quiet steel. Aemon finally understood Connington’s two-decade crusade.

"You will have your answer," Aemon said. "Come to Harrenhal. The lords of Westeros will gather there, and everything Varys built will be laid open before them. You will hear the truth alongside every lord in the realm, and you can judge it for yourself."

Aegon watched him for a long breath. Whatever he searched for in Aemon's face, he found enough to give one short nod.

"Very well."

Aemon turned and walked for the gate.

Connington stood in his path. Aemon half expected him to speak, or bar the way, or draw steel for the boy he had raised. Instead he moved aside.

Aemon noted the rigid line of his jaw and the white-knuckled grip on his sword hilt. He stalked past Aemon, leaving only a tense silence in his wake.

Arya fell into step at once, close on his left. Nymeria padded through the gate beside them. Behind her, from the outer streets, grey shapes slipped through shadow and sun alike.

No one barred them.

The Red Keep closed around them in corridors of red stone and torchlight. A steward saw Nymeria first and dropped a stack of linens where he stood. Two Tyrell guards at a crossing pressed their backs to the wall. A serving girl ducked through a side door and pulled it shut behind her.

The doors stood open at the end of a long corridor, and the hall beyond them stretched vast and dim into dust and grey light. The Iron Throne sat at the far end, black and jagged against the wall, a thousand swords fused into something no sane man would choose to sit on.

Aemon crossed the hall. His boots echoed on stone that Aerys had walked, and Robert after him, and a boy with silver hair that same morning. Arya stayed at the doors with Nymeria at her side. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," Aemon replied. "Yes, I am."

He climbed the steps. The swords fanned out above him, their edges dulled by centuries but their points still keen.

Aemon turned and sat on the Iron Throne. The blades pressed against him and found nothing they could break.