He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 11 (Patreon)

Time for another power to kick in.

X I

What the Boy Carries

The farm had no name. It sat on the northern outskirts of Oldtown, a quarter mile from the Honeywine where the river curved lazy and brown through fields gone to seed, the road to the city a pale thread on the horizon. The house was stone and timber, old but sound, its thatched roof patched in three places and its shutters hanging slightly askew.

They had chosen it for the isolation. The nearest neighbor was half a mile down the road, a sour old sheep farmer who kept to himself and asked no questions about the red-robed woman and the dark-haired boy and the young man who came and went at odd hours. The city was close enough to reach in an hour's walk but far enough that if something went wrong-if Kallen's powers surged, the only casualties would be timber and stone and the ancient oaks lining the property.

It was a precaution. After Duskendale, they'd all agreed it was necessary.

Tomlyn stood at the pump in the yard, working the handle with the steady rhythm of a man who had stopped thinking about it months ago. The sky was grey and low, the kind that couldn't decide whether to rain or simply sulk, and the air smelled of wet grass and rotting apples from the orchard behind the barn.

He filled the bucket and carried it inside. The main room was small and cluttered and warm in the way rooms got when people actually lived in them. Two narrow beds flanked the far wall, one neatly made, the other a tangle of blankets suggesting its occupant had fought some private war in the night and lost. The table was covered in parchment.

Novices were not permitted to remove books from the Citadel-every acolyte and archmaester enforced that rule with the fervor of a septon guarding the Seven-Pointed Star-so Kallen copied everything. Pages and pages of notes, passages from scrolls, diagrams of everything. The notes flowed outward from the Citadel every evening and spread across the farmhouse table like a slow, relentless tide that threatened to engulf the entire household.

From outside came the sound of voices-one low and cutting, the other bright and tumbling, the words falling over each other with the enthusiasm of someone who had just discovered something wonderful. Tomlyn moved to the window.

Three boys in grey Citadel robes stood by the well. Kallen was in the middle, his dark hair wind-tousled, his robes muddy at the hem. The boy on his left was lean and quick-eyed, with the look of someone born to argue about things that didn't matter-he was gesticulating now, making his case with the practiced air of a person who had never once considered that he might be wrong.

The boy on Kallen's right was round and freckled, eating an apple with an expression of placid contentment, a man entirely at peace with his place in the world so long as the world kept feeding him.

"-completely wrong about the dating," the lean one was saying. "The Ghiscari didn't adopt that script form until after the Century of Blood, which means the scroll is at least-"

"Rowan," Kallen said, "you've said this four times."

"I say it four times because no one has yet admitted I'm right."

"You're not right," Kallen said. "You're adjacent to right."

"Adjacent-" Rowan sputtered. "There's no such thing as adjacent to right, you're

either-"

"Oswin," Kallen said, "tell him there's such a thing as adjacent to right."

Oswin considered this with the gravity of a man being asked to settle a matter of serious philosophical import.

"There's definitely such a thing," he said. He took another bite of his apple. "I'd say you're both adjacent to right, actually, if it helps."

"It doesn't help," Rowan said.

"No," Oswin agreed cheerfully. "But it's true."

Kallen caught Tomlyn's eye through the window and waved and Tomlyn lifted his cup and stepped away. He had spent his first weeks at the farm trying to understand why Kallen had attached himself so thoroughly to a cast-off Tyrell cousin and a swineherd's son. Then he had stopped trying to understand it and simply watched, and what he saw was this: they treated Kallen like a boy. Eight years old, clever, bad at sitting still. They argued with him. They called him wrong to his face. They expected nothing from him except that he show up and keep the debate going.

The door opened, and Melisandre came in.

Her red robes had been muted to something closer to burgundy, less a banner than a habit. Her hair was pulled back in a simple braid, and the great ruby at her throat was tucked inside her collar, hidden from view. She looked, Tomlyn thought, like a woman trying very hard to be ordinary and failing only because she had never quite learned how.

"Morning," he said.

"Good morning." She moved to the hearth and crouched, feeding a branch to the fire, her movements domestic in a way that still surprised him.

She was wearing an apron.

She had sewn it herself-he had watched her do it one evening, her red eyes narrowed, her long fingers working the needle with careful precision. She had pricked her thumb twice and said nothing either time. The apron had come out slightly crooked and entirely functional, and she had worn it every day since.

The Melisandre who had first come to them would not have worn an apron. Tomlyn remembered her clearly: the pre-dawn grey, the rain, Caraxes's wings fading into the storm, and then the woman in red walking out of the mist like something conjured from nightmare and prayer. She had looked at Kallen with those red eyes and sunk to her knees in the mud as if the earth itself had pulled her down. The Prince That Was Promised. Her voice had carried the absolute conviction of someone who had never once been wrong.

She had wanted to carry him to Asshai. To stand him before the flames of R'hllor and begin whatever she believed was meant to begin.

Kallen had looked at her-this woman on her knees in the mud, calling him a prince-and said: "I'm a boy from the Street of Flour. Please stop looking at me like that."

She had argued. Of course she had argued. She spoke of the Long Night, of the war between light and dark waged since the beginning of time. Kallen listened the way he always listened, completely, his blue eyes fixed on her face. When she finished, he said: "Even if I'm what you think I am, I can't do anything about it yet. I'm eight. I need to learn first. So teach me something useful instead."

Tomlyn had expected her to leave. Part of him had wanted her to.

She hadn't left. She had stayed, and slowly-day by day, argument by argument-the woman who had arrived at the Old Stone Bridge Inn had been replaced by someone else. Someone who still wore red but no longer burned things in search of visions. Who had a mind for systems, it turned out, sharp and disciplined; who had designed Kallen's training regimen for the fire vision with the same methodical attention she had once given to the flames. Who had at some point stopped praying, so gradually that Tomlyn couldn't pinpoint the day, and hadn't started again.

He had mentioned it to Kallen once. Kallen had gone quiet in the way he did when something worried him. I'm afraid of what it means, he'd said. She stopped praying. And sometimes she looks at me like I replaced something. I don't want to be anyone's god, Tomlyn.

You can't control how people look at you, Tomlyn had said, because it was true and also because he had nothing better to offer.

Watching her now-crouched at the hearth, feeding wood to an ordinary fire, the crooked apron tied at her waist-he thought Kallen was both right and wrong. She hadn't replaced her god with the boy. She had discovered, perhaps for the first time, that there were things in the world worth caring about simply because they were there. Whether that was better or worse than what she'd had before, he couldn't say. He was a potter's son turned squire turned knight sharing a farmhouse with a red priestess and a boy who had fallen from the stars, and the gap between what he understood and what his life had become could have swallowed the Blackwater.

But she fed the fire instead of reading it. He thought that was probably enough.

The door burst open and Kallen came in with Rowan and Oswin close behind. The room shrank instantly, overwhelmed by three boys who had not yet learned to occupy space quietly. Rowan was talking-when was Rowan not talking?-about some dispute in the Citadel vaults over the dating of a Ghiscari scroll. Oswin was eating an apple, because Oswin was always eating something. Kallen was between them, his grey robes muddy at the hem, his dark hair wind-tousled, his face pink with cold and the uncomplicated pleasure of being young and with friends.

Let him have this, Tomlyn thought. Let him be a boy for a while longer. The world will be heavy soon enough.

"I'm going to be late," Kallen said, grabbing a heel of bread and stuffing half of it into his mouth. "Maester Elys wants us back in the vaults before second bell."

"Chew your food," Melisandre said automatically.

Kallen chewed, swallowed, stuffed in the other half. "'Ish goin'," he said around the mouthful.

"Eloquent," Rowan said. "Truly the Citadel's finest."

"Shut up, Rowan."

They left in a whirlwind of grey robes and laughter, the door banging shut behind them, and the quiet rushed back to fill the space they'd made. Tomlyn looked at Melisandre. Melisandre looked at Tomlyn.

"I worry about that boy's manners," she said.

"I worry about that boy's everything," he said.

They sat in the quiet and let the morning happen around them.

The hearing was useful. Tomlyn hadn't expected it to be, in those early days when Kallen's abilities had seemed like nothing but a burden heaped on a child already burdened enough. But usefulness had a way of emerging from strange places, and the hearing-precise and controlled, reaching across miles with the ease that ordinary ears crossed a room-had become their most reliable thread to the world they'd left behind.

Rosey was well. That was the first thing Kallen reported each evening, the ritual check: Ma is well. Still working at the mill, still keeping the house on the Street of Flour clean and warm. She had neighbors looking in now. She was not alone.

Myla had been promoted to one of Queen Aemma's personal maids-a position of considerable trust given the politics of the Red Keep, but Myla was clever and quiet and had a gift for being present without being noticed, which was the most valuable skill a servant could possess at court. She helped the queen dress in the mornings. She listened. She kept what she heard locked behind her teeth.

Aldric had found a lover.

This had caused the most consternation in the farmhouse-not because anyone objected, since Aldric deserved whatever happiness he could find-but because of how Kallen had discovered it.

He had been working through a Valyrian translation at the table, his attention drifting the way it did when he concentrated-half-present, half-somewhere else entirely. Then his quill stopped moving. His head tilted slightly, the way it did when something distant had caught him. His brow furrowed. Then his face went the color of a beet.

Kallen's face went the color of a beet. His ears went redder than his face, which Tomlyn hadn't previously known was anatomically possible. He sat frozen for a full five seconds, stylus hovering above his parchment, his whole body rigid with the particular horror of a child who has stumbled somewhere he absolutely should not be and cannot find his way back out.

Then his eyes snapped back into focus-he had remembered, apparently, that he could simply stop listening. He set down the stylus. He stared at the table with the blank, scoured expression of someone attempting to unknow something.

Tomlyn had been watching all of this with the keen, delighted attention of a man who had just been handed a gift from the gods.

"Kallen?" he said. "Something wrong?"

"Nothing." Too fast. Two octaves too high. "Everything is completely fine. I was just-I had just -there was-" He pushed back from the table and stood up. "I'm going to bed."

"It's the sixth hour of the evening."

"Yes." He picked up his chair, which he had knocked over standing. "Goodnight."

He knocked the chair over again setting it back down, caught it, overcorrected, and fled to his bed, pulling the blanket over his head with the focused determination of someone who had decided the evening was over.

Tomlyn waited until the blanket stopped moving.

Then he laughed so hard he fell out of his own chair.

The news about Daemon had been less funny.

His hand was amputated. Kallen delivered the information flatly, stripped of feeling, the way he delivered news he found disturbing-as if making the words small and clean might make the reality manageable too. The break had been too severe, the bones too shattered. The maesters had taken the hand at the wrist. Daemon Targaryen, Prince of the Blood, rider of Caraxes, was now a one-handed man.

And then, later: He's in a coma. The shock of the injury, the blood loss, something swelling in his skull that the maesters couldn't resolve. He had been unconscious for weeks. Then months. The court whispered about about what it meant for a prince to linger between life and death.

Tomlyn had heard this and felt something dark and satisfied settle in his chest. He was not proud of it. He wasn't ashamed of it either.

Good, he thought, and not for the first time. Stay asleep.

The morning started like every other morning.

Tomlyn woke at first light. He dressed in the dark, went to the pump, filled the bucket, carried it inside-

And stopped.

Kallen was already up. Not unusual, but the way he was standing was-motionless in the center of the room, both hands raised slightly at his sides, fingers spread, as if he were trying to touch the air without quite touching anything. His face was pale in the grey pre-dawn light, and there was an expression on his face that Tomlyn recognized immediately-he had seen it in a room above an inn in Duskendale, when a seven-year-old boy had felt pressure building behind his eyes and known something terrible was about to come out.

"Tomlyn," Kallen said, and his voice was very small. "Don't come any closer."

Tomlyn stopped. "What's wrong?"

"I can't-" His voice cracked. "I can't control it. My hands. Everything I touch-"

He looked down. Tomlyn followed his gaze.

The floorboard beneath Kallen's left foot was cracked clean through, split along the grain as though something enormous had been dropped on it. Near the hearth, the wooden chair where Kallen usually ate breakfast was crushed.

"I woke up and it was just there," Kallen said. His hands trembled, and even that was dangerous-every time his fingers curled, the air around them seemed to shimmer, as if the pressure of his grip was warping the world itself. "The same way the fire came. The same way the vision came. I didn't ask for it. I reached for a cup and it exploded. I stepped on the floor and it cracked. I can't make it stop-it's like the fire, it's building and I can't-"

The blanket on his bed, bunched at the foot where he'd pushed it aside, was torn cleanly in two, as if it had been made of wet parchment rather than wool.

"I can't make it stop," he whispered. "It's everywhere."

"Stop," Melisandre said.

She was on her feet, moving toward him, her red eyes fixed on his face, her voice low and steady.

"Stop moving. Stop trying to do things. Just stand still."

"I can't-" His hands were clenching and unclenching, and every time they closed, Tomlyn heard the faint creak of the air seeming to compress around his fingers. "I can't make it stop. My hands, my feet, every time I touch something it just-"

"You can." She was in front of him now, close but not touching. "You've done this before. You controlled the hearing. You controlled the vision. You controlled the fire. This is the same."

"This is not the same!" His voice was ragged. "The fire came out of me but I could aim it, I could push it away from people. This is everywhere-my hands, my feet-every time I touch something it just-"

He was crying now. Even his trembling was dangerous-every shudder sending small vibrations through the floorboards that made the table's remaining cups tremble.

Melisandre did something Tomlyn had never seen her do before. She knelt, so that her eyes were level with his, and placed her hands on her own knees, palms up, in the posture of someone offering peace.

"Listen to my voice," she said, in the same tone she used when walking him through a problem in logic or mathematics. "Not to anything else. Just my voice. You know how to do this."

"I can't-"

"You can. The hearing came first. You were four years old, and the whole world was screaming in your head, and you couldn't make it stop. Your mother taught you to focus on one sound. One voice. Let the rest fade. That's what you need to do now."

"It's not sound-"

"The principle is the same. Your mind is receiving more than it can process, and it's overwhelming you. So narrow it. Not your hands. Not the pressure. Not the fear. My voice. Right here. Right now."

It took a long time. Tomlyn stood frozen by the door, hands clenched at his sides, watching the boy he had raised do what he had always done: endure, adapt, hold on.

Kallen stood in the middle of the farmhouse, hands open at his sides, breathing slow and deliberate. The floorboards had stopped creaking. The air around his hands had stopped shimmering. The pressure that had been building in his small body was, for now, contained.

"I can feel it," he said quietly. "It's like the fire. It's still there-it's always going to be there. But I can hold it. Like holding a cup of water. As long as I'm paying attention, I can keep it from spilling."

"Good," Melisandre said, and her voice was steady, though Tomlyn could see the tension in her shoulders and the faint tremor in her hands. "That's enough for now."

"Is it, though?" Kallen looked at the damage around him. His face was very still.

"You're not going to the Citadel," Tomlyn said.

"Obviously," Kallen said, with the withering tone of someone explaining something simple to someone slow. "I can't exactly walk into the Citadel and start crushing things. I need to practice first."

It took three days.

The first was the worst. Everything he touched broke. The pump handle bent under his grip. The well bucket crumpled like parchment. A stone he picked up from the ground turned to sand and dust between his fingers.

Melisandre hovered. She was always a few feet away, watching, ready, her red eyes tracking every movement of his hands. She brought him water in vessels she'd tested first-ceramic, then wood, then metal-gauging which could withstand his grip. She held his notes open for him, turning pages while he stood at a safe distance. She cooked meals he could eat without utensils.

By the second day, he was learning.

Kallen practiced on trees. He would stand before one of the farm's oaks and press his palm to the bark, feeling the strength thrumming through his arm, holding it the way he held the fire-contained behind the wall of his will. By the end of the second day, he could touch a tree without crushing it. By the middle of the third, he could lean against one without cracking the trunk.

By the end of the third day, he was ready to show Tomlyn.

The demonstration took place on the fourth day in the orchard behind the barn, under a sky that had finally decided to be blue. Tomlyn stood with his arms crossed and watched as Kallen approached the largest oak on the property-a gnarled, ancient thing, its trunk as wide as two men standing abreast, its branches spreading like the arms of a giant.Kallen stood before it.

He placed his hand flat against the bark.

Nothing happened. His palm rested there, fingers spread, and the tree did not move, did not creak, did not show any sign of distress.

Tomlyn let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

Then Kallen pulled his hand back and punched the tree.

Not hard, a light punch-the kind thrown when you're testing something, a tap, the sort that should have hurt his knuckles more than the wood.

The base of the trunk exploded.

A shockwave of force radiated outward from the point of Kallen's fist and pulverized the heartwood, blasting splinters and chunks of oak in every direction, the sound a deep, resonant boom that echoed off the farmhouse walls and sent birds erupting from every nearby tree in a panic of wings.

The oak stood for one impossible moment, balanced on nothing, its roots exposed. Then gravity remembered its duty and the great tree tilted and fell with a crash that shook the earth and sent Tomlyn staggering.

Dust settled. Birds resettled. The world went quiet except for the creak of the fallen giant settling into its rest.

Kallen stood with his fist still extended. Then he lowered his hand, walked to the fallen tree, bent down, and lifted it.

The oak-three centuries of growth, wider than two men, heavier than anything a human being had any business touching-came up off the ground as if it weighed nothing at all. Kallen held it one-handed, his small body somehow supporting several tons of wood without the slightest sign of strain. His feet did not sink into the earth. His arms did not tremble. His face was calm, focused, almost curious, as if he were observing the results of an experiment.

Tomlyn stared. His mind tried to make sense of it and failed, because there was no sense to make, only the brute, undeniable fact of it.

He thought of Duskendale. Beams of fire carving through stone. A two-year-old's sneeze shaking a wall. Valyrian steel shattering on an unyielding shoulder. One impossible thing, and then another, and then another.

What else? What else can he do? What else is still coming?

And he thought, with a fervor that surprised him-a prayer rising from somewhere deep in his chest where the boy from the Street of Flour still believed in the Seven with the uncomplicated faith of a child:

Please. Please let this be the last one.

Kallen set the tree down. The impact shook the ground. He turned to Tomlyn, and his face was not triumphant or proud or even relieved. It was simply tired-the quiet, bone-deep tiredness of someone who has been handed another burden and is already calculating how to carry it without falling over.

"So," Kallen said.

Tomlyn opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"Please," he said "Tell me that's the last one."

Kallen looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked down at his hands-small, ordinary, the hands of a child that could now crush oak and shatter Valyrian steel.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't know what else is in there. I don't know what my mother put inside me, or how much of it there is. I only know that I will learn to control it, whatever it is. And I will use it to protect the people I love. And I will not let it turn me into something that hurts people instead of helping them."

He met Tomlyn's eyes, and the blue of his gaze was steady and clear and absolutely determined.

"That's all I can promise."

Tomlyn looked at this boy he had carried on his shoulders and argued with over breakfast and watched become, incrementally and against all odds, someone worth following. He thought of all the things he had believed in before this-the Seven, the Iron Throne, the ordered world where a potter's son became a knight and the story ended there. He had believed in all of it with the uncomplicated faith of a man who had not yet been shown what the world was actually made of.

He could not believe in that anymore. But he believed in this.

"Right," he said. "Then let's go eat something. You've earned it."

Kallen blinked. Then, slowly, he smiled. He fell into step beside Tomlyn, and they walked back toward the farmhouse together, the oak lay where it had fallen, the birds returned to the trees, and the sky above Oldtown was very blue.