He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 10 (Patreon)

Here it is-the aftermath of chapter 9.

Minor edits done on 4/6.

10/6-Rewrote the scene of Caraxes carrying off Daemon

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What the Dragon Saw

The common room of the Old Stone Bridge Inn was nearly empty. The fire had burned down to embers, casting a dull orange glow that barely pushed back the dark. Behind the bar, the innkeeper-a broad man named Mudge who had seen fifty summers and looked like he could still bench-press a mule-snored with the full-throated commitment of a man who had long since stopped caring about the quality of his guest's sleep.

The storm hammered the shutters. Rain drove against the glass in sheets, wind finding every crack in the frames and whistling through like a ghost with a grudge. Thunder rolled in long, grumbling waves, and the building creaked and swayed in a way that suggested it had weathered worse and intended to weather this.

Aldric Flowers sat across from Tomlyn at a table near the cold hearth, a cup of ale untouched between his hands. His face carried the deep, bone-level exhaustion of a man who had been riding hard for days and sleeping badly for none, but his eyes were sharp-fixed on Tomlyn with the steady, unhurried attention of someone who had already made up his mind and was simply waiting for the other man to catch up.

"North," Tomlyn said, for the third time. "The ring is pointing north. That's where we go. Straight up the Kingsroad, through the Riverlands, through the Neck, past the Wall if we have to. Wherever it's leading him, that's where we take him."

"And when we get there?" Aldric leaned back, the chair groaning beneath him. "What do we find? What's waiting for him in whatever direction that ring is pulling? You don't know. I don't know. Kallen doesn't know. And the Lands Beyond the Wall aren't exactly known for their hospitality."

"Neither is the Citadel."

"The Citadel is a library. A very large, very old library full of very learned men who have spent their entire lives studying things that most people don't even know exist." Aldric tapped the table with one finger. "Maesters, Tomlyn. Men who have read every book written about the far north, about the Long Night, about the White Walkers and the Children of the Forest and whatever else might be lurking beyond the Wall. If we want to know what Kallen is walking into, that's where we find out."

Tomlyn's jaw tightened.

"He is the most extraordinary seven-year-old either of us will ever know." Aldric's voice was quiet but firm, carrying the weight of a man who had thought about this long and hard and was not going to be moved.

He leaned forward.

"Imagine what he could do with an education. The Citadel has philosophy, mathematics, history, the natural sciences. And more importantly, it has records-records about the far north, about things that most people think are stories but might be very, very real. Whatever the ring is leading him toward, I'd rather he face it with knowledge than without it."

"And the dangers beyond the Wall," Tomlyn said slowly. "That's what you're really worried about."

"Of course." Aldric ran a hand over his face. " Whatever Kallen's mother left for him, whatever she wants him to find-he'll have to face it eventually."

"Knowledge won't help him if he burns down another city."

"No," Aldric admitted. "But ignorance won't help him either."

Tomlyn was quiet for a moment. He stared at the dregs of his ale, his face tight with the frustration of a man who could see the logic in his opponent's argument but didn't want to admit it.

"It's dangerous," he said. "Taking him to any city. Every year there's something new. First the wall. Then the hearing. The vision. The fire." He counted them on his fingers, each one landing like an indictment. "What if the next ability comes while he's walking through the streets of Oldtown? What if it comes in a crowded market, in a library-"

"I know." Aldric's voice lost its edge of calculation. "I've thought about it every day since Duskendale. And I keep coming back to the same answer: we have to risk it. Because the alternative is hiding in a cave for the rest of his life, and that's not a life-that's waiting to die. Kallen deserves a chance to understand what he is. He can't do that in a hole by the sea."

"He won't like it," Tomlyn said quietly. "After Duskendale, he blames himself. He'll refuse to go anywhere near-"

The scream cut through the storm like a blade.

It came from the stables-not the scream of a man who had been startled, but the sound of genuine agony, raw and primal, the kind that reaches past the ears and grips the spine. It told every primitive instinct in the body that something very wrong was happening nearby.

Aldric was on his feet before the sound had finished, hand going to his sword. Tomlyn was right behind him, his own blade clearing the scabbard in a single practiced motion.

Behind the bar, Mudge snored on.

They burst through the door into the rain. The storm hit them like a wall of water, driving sideways into their faces, mud sucking at their boots as they sprinted toward the stables. The door stood open-a rectangle of lantern light spilling into the dark-and they plunged through together, swords raised, hearts hammering.

A man lay in the straw between the stalls, body limp, face ashen, eyes closed. He was dressed in traveling clothes-good quality, the kind that spoke of money if not outright nobility-soaked through and mud-spattered, his hood fallen back to reveal silver-gold hair plastered against a pale, sharp-featured face.

Kallen knelt beside him, small hands moving carefully over the man's chest and ribs, checking for injuries with the methodical attention of someone who had learned basic field medicine from a hedge knight and was applying it better than anyone had a right to expect from a seven-year-old.

"Kallen-what happened? Who is-"

Tomlyn stopped.

He looked at the man's face. Then at his right hand-lying at an angle no living hand should achieve, the knuckles depressed and shifted, the fingers splayed like the legs of a crushed spider, the swelling already turning the skin purple and black. Then at the sword on the ground nearby. The hilt with a stub of blade attached, the break clean and sharp. Three feet away in the straw, the other half of what had clearly been a Valyrian steel sword, the dark metal still gleaming with its characteristic ripples in the dim lantern light.

He looked at the broken sword. Then at the silver-gold hair. Then at the face.

His own face went white.

"Seven hells," he breathed. "That's Daemon Targaryen."

"Yes." Kallen continued examining Daemon's injuries without looking up, his voice calm and clinical. "He came into the stable while I was tending the horses. He saw my ring. He recognized the symbol. He demanded I give it to him. I refused." A pause. "He hit me."

Tomlyn made a sound between a laugh and a choke.

"I didn't move," Kallen continued, unhurried, as though describing something that had happened to someone else entirely. "He broke his hand on my face. Then he drew his sword. An overhead chop. He was angry-not thinking clearly. The blade hit my shoulder."

He reached up and touched his shirt, where a thin line marked the fabric. The ghost of a cut that had never been made.

"It broke," Kallen said simply. "And then he passed out. The pain, I think. And the shock."

The silence that followed was broken only by the storm and the steady breathing of the horses. Aldric stared at the broken sword, at Daemon's shattered hand, at the boy kneeling beside the most dangerous man in the Seven Kingdoms as if he were just another injured traveler.

The storm howled. The horses stamped. Then Kallen's head came up sharply-eyes going distant, body going still with the particular stillness that meant he was listening to something none of them could hear.

"He's coming," Kallen said quietly.

"Who?"

"Caraxes. Daemon's dragon. Flying this way, fast." Kallen frowned, concentrating. "He's agitated-frantic. He knows something happened to Daemon. I don't know how, but he knows."

"Gods," Aldric muttered.

Tomlyn looked at the road outside, then at Daemon, then at Aldric. "What do we do?"

Kallen looked down at Daemon's unconscious form. The prince's breathing was shallow and irregular, his face gray with shock, his shattered hand already swelling to twice its size-the skin tight and shiny, the fingers darkening.

"He needs a maester," Kallen said. "His hand is destroyed. Some of those bone fragments may have cut into blood vessels. Without treatment, he could lose the hand. Or worse."

"Let him die," Tomlyn said flatly.

The words fell into the stable like an axe. Kallen looked at him. Aldric looked at him.

"After what he tried to do." Tomlyn's face was hard, his jaw set, his eyes cold with a fury that had been building since Duskendale and had finally found its target. "He came in here and demanded Kallen's ring and when Kallen refused, he struck him. A grown man. A prince. And when that didn't work, he drew Valyrian steel on a child. He would have killed him if he could have. The only reason he didn't is that he can't."

He pointed at Daemon's body with his sword.

"That man is a monster. A spoiled, violent monster who has never once been told no without responding with rage. And you want to help him?"

"If he dies," Aldric said slowly, "the dragon will be beyond reason. A dragon whose rider was murdered would hunt whatever it blamed and not stop until they were ash."

He held Tomlyn's gaze.

"We help him."

Tomlyn's mouth opened, then closed. He looked at the broken sword, the shattered hand, the prince who had tried to kill a child and been broken for it. He understood, because Tomlyn was not stupid, that Aldric was right. A dead Daemon Targaryen meant a rampaging Caraxes, and a rampaging Caraxes meant a great deal more than one dead man in a stable.

"Fine," Tomlyn said, through gritted teeth. "But if he tries anything when he wakes-"

"He won't wake for a while yet," Kallen said. "The shock is severe. Hours, maybe longer."

Aldric studied the boy-the small, calm, impossible boy who had just shattered a prince's hand and broken a Valyrian steel sword without flinching, and who was now calmly discussing the man's medical condition.

"You have a plan," Aldric said. It was not quite a question.

"We carry him outside, onto the road. I'll wait with him there and speak to the dragon."

"Speak to the dragon," Tomlyn repeated.

"Yes."

"In what language?"

"High Valyrian. I've been learning it-from listening. I can hear the dragonkeepers at the Dragonpit when they work. I've been practicing for two years." He looked at Tomlyn. "I speak it well enough."

"You taught yourself High Valyrian by eavesdropping on dragonkeepers." Tomlyn ran his hands through his wet hair. "Of course you did."

Aldric was already crouching beside the scattered pieces of Dark Sister, picking up both halves with something close to reverence. Valyrian steel was priceless. Irreplaceable. Two hundred blades left in the known world, and one of them had just broken on a seven-year-old's shoulder.

"We strap these to his horse and send it toward Duskendale," Aldric said. "The royal processions is still near enough. The horse will find its way back."

"And when Daemon wakes and tells them what happened?" Tomlyn said. "When he tells them he shattered a Valyrian blade on a child's skin? When he tells them about the ring, the symbol, the boy with glowing red eyes-"

Aldric looked at him. He almost smiled.

"Do you think they'll believe him? When he says his ancestral blade-a sword that has cut iron and bone and never once been nicked-broke on a boy? They'll think the wine got to him. The maesters will treat his hand and whisper about strong tempers and stronger drink. What he's saying is impossible, Tomlyn. And impossible things don't happen in the world men like them live in."

Tomlyn's face remained tight. "I'm thinking about Ma and Myla. If anyone connects us to this-if they come looking-"

"First sign of trouble, we leave the city. All of us, together." Aldric's voice softened-losing its calculating edge, becoming simply the voice of a man who shared the same fear and was choosing to carry it steadily. "I know people in King's Landing. Gate guards, stable hands, men who sell information for coin. I'll hear it before it reaches us."

Tomlyn held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded.

They worked quickly. Aldric and Tomlyn lifted Daemon's unconscious body-he was heavier than he looked, all lean muscle and bone-and carried him through the rain onto the road. The storm still raged, rain falling in sheets, wind howling across the open ground, but they found a spot where the road curved and the treeline offered some shelter.

Then they retreated to a copse of trees, hidden behind a thick screen of undergrowth but with a clear line of sight to the road and to Kallen, who stood alone in the rain beside the fallen prince.

"Are you sure about this?" Tomlyn whispered.

Aldric watched the boy-small and perfectly still in the middle of the storm, dark hair plastered to his face, blue eyes fixed on the sky.

"No," he said. "But I trust the boy."

They heard it before they saw it.

A roar-vast and terrible and ancient, the beating of wings. Massive, rhythmic, each downstroke a gust of wind that bent the trees and sent spray flying from the road. And through the rain, through the dark-a shape.

Caraxes descended like a judgment.

Even in the storm, even at distance, the sheer size of him was staggering. Lean and serpentine, his body coiled like a whip, wings spread wide, scales the color of old blood and wet iron. His head was wedge-shaped, his jaw long and full of teeth that gleamed yellow-white in the lightning. His golden eyes found Daemon's body on the road with the unerring accuracy of a creature that could find its rider across half a continent.

He landed.

The impact shook the earth. Mud splashed. Trees bent. The horses in the stable screamed. Caraxes stood on the road, his massive body coiled, head swinging low, golden eyes fixed on the small, dark-haired boy who stood between him and his rider.

Kallen did not move.

The rain poured down on him. The wind pulled at his clothes. The dragon's breath-hot and sulfurous, carrying the smell of char and brimstone-washed over him in waves. And Kallen looked up at Caraxes, and he spoke.

"ñuhor ao rider rȳ morghon kesīr ao gaomagon daor maghagon ziry dombror" he said, his voice cutting through the storm-High Valyrian spoken with careful precision, his accent carrying the faint traces of the dragonkeepers who had been his unwitting teachers.

Your rider will die, if you do not bring him home.

Caraxes bared his teeth.

The sound from the dragon's throat was not a roar-it was deeper, lower, a rumble that vibrated in the chest and made the teeth ache. The great head swung lower, the jaw opening wide. Rows of teeth, yellow and terrible, close enough that Kallen could have reached out and touched them. The dragon's golden eyes burned with fury and the desperate, possessive rage of a creature whose rider lay broken in the mud and something small and strange stood between them.

The heat in the dragon's throat was visible now-a faint orange glow building behind the teeth, the first embers of a flame that could melt stone and reduce a man to ash in a heartbeat.

Kallen's eyes began to change.

It started at the edges-a faint reddish tinge, like sunset bleeding into the blue. Then it spread, filling the irises, replacing the blue with something hotter and brighter and far more dangerous. His eyes glowed red-orange, pulsing, the same color as the beams that had carved through Duskendale, and the rain hissed and steamed where it struck his face as if his skin had become too hot to touch.

"kesīr ao zȳhdaghon nyke nyke rȳ daor hold inkon nyke rȳ mīsagon myself nyke rȳ azandy inkon" Kallen said, and his voice was still calm, still measured, but beneath it was something new-a steel that had not been there before, a willingness to do what needed to be done, even if what needed doing was terrible.

If you attack me, I will not hold back. I will defend myself. I will fight back.

In the copse of trees, Aldric and Tomlyn watched with their hearts in their throats. The boy's eyes were fully red now, the glow bright enough to cast shadows in the rain, a faint shimmer of heat in the air around his face, the rain turning to steam before it touched him. Tomlyn had seen this before-in a cave by the sea, Kallen had learned to control the beams, to aim them, to stop them. But he had never seen him aim them at something living. At something that could think and feel and choose.

From somewhere inside the inn, impossibly, they could still hear the innkeeper snoring.

Caraxes regarded the boy.

The dragon's golden eyes-ancient, knowing, far more intelligent than any beast had a right to be-moved over Kallen's face. Over the glowing red eyes. Over the small, still body that offered help and threatened destruction in the same breath. Caraxes rumbled again-low, deep in the chest. Not aggression, but something more complicated. A creature of fire and blood recognizing something in the boy that was neither prey nor threat but something else entirely. Something the dragon's ancient instincts refused to dismiss.

Something shifted in the dragon's posture. The teeth slowly closed. The orange glow in the throat faded, the fire banking and retreating. The great head lowered-not in submission, but in something that Aldric, watching from the trees, could only describe as respect.

Kallen's eyes faded back to blue.

He stood for a moment, watching the dragon. Then he turned toward the copse of trees and looked directly at them.

"I need your help," he said.

Aldric and Tomlyn looked at each other.

They came out of the trees.

The dragon's head swung toward them the moment they stepped onto the road. The golden eyes tracked them across the mud, the rumble in the chest rising, and Aldric kept his hands visible and his pace steady because stopping felt more dangerous than continuing and running felt like dying. Kallen spoke without looking at them and the rumble did not rise further. 

They reached the body. Daemon lay on his back in the mud between Kallen and the dragon's lowered head, close enough to Caraxes that the heat of the dragon's breath was visible in the rain above him. His shattered hand lay across his chest where Kallen had placed it. His face was grey and still.

"Shoulders," Aldric said quietly to Tomlyn. Then, to Kallen: "Tell him we need to move along the neck. Tell him to lift his head."

Kallen spoke. Caraxes raised his head. Slowly, the long neck drawing upward, the massive body shifting its weight to accommodate-not willingly, but not fighting it either. A concession extracted by something the dragon did not entirely understand and was not entirely comfortable with.

Aldric crouched and got his hands under Daemon's shoulders. Tomlyn took the legs, careful of the boots, careful of the mud. They lifted together and began to move along the flank of the dragon toward the neck and the saddle above.

It was the longest walk Aldric could remember taking.

Caraxes tracked them the entire way. The great head hung above, following their progress with the fixed, unblinking attention of a creature watching something handle what was most precious to it in the world. The golden eyes never blinked. The rumble never stopped. Aldric felt it in his back teeth and in the base of his spine and did not look up.

Kallen walked beside them, between them and the dragon's head, talking the entire way.

They reached the base of the neck. Above them the saddle sat high on the forward section-the deep bucket of aged red leather, the metal rods catching what little light there was. Getting Daemon up there was going to be ugly.

"I'll climb," Aldric said. "You hold him up as high as you can."

He found handholds on the metal hardware and pulled himself up, the scales warm and smooth beneath his boots, the neck shifting slightly with each of Caraxes' breaths. The saddle was higher than it had looked from the ground. He got one leg over the neck, steadied himself, and reached down.

"Now."

Tomlyn heaved Daemon's upper body upward-straining, boots slipping in the mud-and Aldric caught him under the arms and pulled, and for a long moment it was simply two men and gravity and the dead weight of a prince between them, none of it going well. Then something gave and Daemon came up in a rush and Aldric had him, barely, folded over the neck in front of the saddle with his legs still dangling.

The shattered hand swung free.

Caraxes made a sound that was high and sharp and wrong and the head came around.

"lykirī ."

Kallen's voice from below. 

Caraxes went still.

The great head hung in the air where it had stopped, jaw half open, the golden eyes fixed on Kallen. Tomlyn had not moved. He was still standing in the mud with his arms raised and nothing left to hold.

Kallen held the dragon's gaze and said nothing further.

After a moment Caraxes turned his head back to the middle distance and fixed it there with the rigid deliberateness of a creature making a conscious choice. The jaw closed. The rumble dropped back to something low and unhappy but contained.

Aldric let out a breath he had been holding since the sound started. He got Daemon properly into the seat-carefully, slowly, the shattered hand settled across the lap where it would not hang free again. Then he reached for his belt.

"Give me yours," he said to Tomlyn, below.

Tomlyn unbuckled it without question and tossed it up.

He lashed Daemon upright against the high leather back-across the chest, under the arms- until Daemon was bound to the seat rather than simply sitting in it. It was ugly work. It would hold. He kept his hands on the metal and off the scales, and Caraxes kept his gaze on the middle distance, and neither of them acknowledged the other, and that was how they got through it.

Aldric climbed down. His legs nearly went out from under him when he hit the ground.

Caraxes rose.

The wings spread. The downstroke sent mud and rain flying, flattening the grass, nearly knocking them off their feet. And the Blood Wyrm climbed into the storm, his rider secured in the saddle above, and the roar that followed was not one of rage but of purpose-a sound that said mine and going home and do not follow.

The dragon banked east. Toward Dragonstone. Toward maesters and healers and a bed where a prince with a shattered hand could wake and try to explain the impossible.

Then he was gone. Swallowed by the storm, the sound of his wings fading into the thunder, the heat of his passage cooling in the rain.

"I think I shat myself," Tomlyn said.

"You and me both," Aldric said, and Tomlyn let out a bark of laughter that was half genuine and half pure hysteria-the sound a man makes when his body doesn't know how else to process the last five minutes.

They approached Kallen. The boy stood looking east, watching the direction Caraxes had gone. His face was thoughtful, not triumphant-the expression of someone trying to understand what something meant, not celebrate that it had worked.

"I don't know why." Kallen said, before either of them could speak. There was genuine wonder in his voice, quiet and unguarded, the kind rare enough in him that it always caught Aldric off guard. "But something shifted-when he looked at me, he saw something. I don't know what it was."

"What did you tell the dragon?" Aldric asked.

"I told him I’d fight back." Kallen met his eyes, and for a moment the weight of what he was-what he could do-was visible on his face, plain and undefended. "If he'd attacked, I would have loosed. I could have killed him." He stopped. Swallowed. "I won't let anyone hurt the people I love."

There was nothing to say to that. It was the truth, and the truth didn't need embellishment.

They turned back toward the inn. The storm was easing-the rain lighter, the thunder distant, the wind dying down. Along the eastern horizon, a faint brightness promised dawn.

They were halfway across the yard when Kallen's head came up again. That distant focus-not the red glow of the heat vision, but the faraway attention of the hearing. Listening to something.

"Someone's coming," he said.

Hands went to swords. They turned toward the road, scanning the pre-dawn grey, the treeline where the road curved and-

A rider.

Coming from the south, moving at a walk that told of a horse pushed hard and long and now conserving its last strength. The rider was hooded, wrapped in a cloak of deep red that looked almost black in the dim light, sitting the horse with the straight spine of a lifetime in the saddle.

She reached the inn and dismounted. The horse was lathered, blowing hard, its ribs visible-the mark of an animal ridden beyond what any sensible rider would allow. The woman ignored the horse and turned toward them.

Toward Kallen.

She pushed back her hood. In the pre-dawn light, her face was one neither Aldric nor Tomlyn had ever seen before. She was beautiful. Not the beauty of any woman they knew-practical, human, marked by time and labor-but something else. Something carved too perfectly to be entirely comfortable, like a statue made with too much care. Her skin was pale the way marble was pale, without the warmth of blood beneath it. Her hair was the deep, true red of arterial blood, falling past her shoulders in a thick cascade that seemed to move in the still air as if it had a life of its own. Her eyes were red-not the red of Kallen's heat vision, not fire and fury, but something older. The red of wine left too long in the cup. The red of a sunset that promises storms.

At her throat, set in gold against pale skin, a ruby the size of a quail's egg glowed with a light of its own.

She walked toward Kallen.Her red eyes were fixed on him with an intensity that made Aldric's skin crawl-a gaze that held recognition and certainty and something that looked almost like worship.

Aldric and Tomlyn moved without a word between them, placing themselves in her path with the automatic protectiveness of men who had spent five years guarding a secret.

"Stop," Aldric said. "Who are you?"

She walked past him as if he were furniture. Past Tomlyn the same. She stopped three feet from Kallen, and looked down at him, and her face was radiant with a joy so absolute it seemed to light the air around her.

"I found you," she whispered. And then, softer still, trembling with something that might have been awe:

"The Prince That Was Promised."

Melisandre of Asshai, priestess of R'hllor, two hundred years old and half a world from home, sank to her knees in the mud before a seven-year-old boy with blue eyes and a ring on his finger and fire in his blood, and bowed her head in reverence.

The first rays of sunlight crested the horizon, painting the world in shades of grey and gold. They struck the red woman's hair and turned it to flame.

Kallen looked down at the kneeling woman. His face held an expression that was, for once, entirely, perfectly confused.