He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 13 (Patreon)

I haven't looked into the layout of Old Town too much-so some creative liberties have been taken.

XIII

Let Me Be the Knight

Oldtown smelled of flowers and rot.

The flowers won in the daylight-nightbloom and moonshade and the heavy, sweet perfume of pomegranate blossoms drifting from the courtyards of the Hightower district-but after dark, when the lanterns guttered and the watch made their rounds and the respectable folk barred their doors, the rot crept back in. Salt fish and wet stone from the wharves. The sour tang of the black brothels in the undercity. The green smell of the Honeywine as it lapped against the quay stones, carrying with it whatever the tanneries and fishmongers had seen fit to dump upstream.

Mysaria had grown up in places that smelled worse. The slave pens of Lys had a stench all their own-excrement and despair and the chemical bite of the perfumes they daubed on the merchandise before auction. Compared to that, Oldtown was a garden. A garden with rats in the walls and knives in the wynds, but a garden nonetheless.

She kept to the shadows as she had for twelve nights now.

The routine was predictable, which was both useful and tedious. The boy left the Citadel through the River Gate just before the evening bells, walking with two other novices-a lean, quick-eyed boy who talked too much and a round, freckled one who ate too much. They would stop at a pie seller's stall near the Quill and Tankard, or at a fruit stand on Ragpicker's Wynd where the peaches were overripe and cheap, and they would talk and laugh and argue about things that nine-year-old boys argued about-conjugations and maesters and which of them could run the fastest. Then the other two would turn toward their respective lodgings in the city, and the dark-haired boy would walk north.

North, out past the Guildhalls, past the last of the stone bridges, past the river road where the lamplighters stopped their rounds, toward the dark stretch of farmland and orchard that lay between Oldtown and the Honeywine's westhern bend. Toward a farm she had not yet visited, because following him that far would mean leaving the city's streets and its witnesses, and Mysaria had survived this long by never putting herself in places where screams went unanswered.

She knew where the farm was, roughly. The boy went there every night and came back every morning, and in between he studied at the Citadel and ate pie with his friends and laughed in a way that did not belong to any monster she had ever heard of.

Not that she had believed Daemon about the monster.

She had believed him about the boy-that much was real, a child matching the description he'd given her, down to the blue eyes. But the rest of it? The fire from the eyes? The skin that broke Valyrian steel? Daemon had recited these things with the flat, hollow certainty of a man describing a fever dream, and Mysaria had nodded and agreed and resolved to find the boy because Daemon had asked, and because there was a time when she would have done anything Daemon asked-but she had not believed. Boys did not shoot fire from their eyes. Valyrian steel did not shatter. Princes did not lose hands to children's faces. The whole story had the shape of a man who had been broken and was trying to make the world fit the shape of his breaking.

She had expected to find a clever boy, perhaps, or a strange one-a boy with some gift that Daemon had magnified in his grief and rage into something impossible. She had expected to report back that the boy was ordinary enough, and that Daemon was seeing demons where there were only children.

Instead, she had found Kallen.

And Kallen was-

She turned the word over in her mind as she leaned against the wall of a candle-maker's shop on the corner of Silver Street, watching the three boys emerge from the River Gate with their heads together and their robes flapping in the evening breeze. Sweet. That was the word she kept coming back to, and it refused to fit anywhere near the thing Daemon had described.

He was sweet in the way of children who had been loved well. You could see it in the way he moved among people-without flinching, without the careful accounting of threat and advantage that children learned when the world was not safe. He shared his food with the freckled boy without being asked. He listened when the lean one talked, really listened, his blue eyes fixed on the speaker's face with an attention that most adults could not muster. When an old woman dropped her basket of apples on Ragpicker's Wynd three nights ago, he had been the first to kneel and help her gather them, and when she'd tried to give him a coin for his trouble, he'd refused with a shake of his head and a small, grave courtesy that had made something in Mysaria's chest ache in a way she did not care to examine.

This was not a monster. Daemon was wrong. Or Daemon was lying. Or Daemon was mad, which was what the court whispered and what Mysaria had privately suspected since the first time he'd visited her after the coma-she had seen the way his eyes tracked shadows that weren't there.

But she had promised. One last favor. And so she watched.

Tonight, the boy was late.

The other two novices had left the Citadel at the usual hour, but Kallen had stayed behind.

He emerged at last just as the last light bled from the sky and the lamplighters were making their final rounds. He moved quickly, with the slightly hurried step of someone who knew they'd stayed too long and was now racing the dark. His robes were tucked up at the hem, his satchel bouncing against his hip, his breath misting in the cool night air.

He turned north, as he always did. But tonight the timing was wrong, and the path was wrong, and Mysaria felt the first prickle of genuine unease.

The route from the River Gate to the southern farmland ran along the Honeywine for a stretch, then cut inland through a tangle of wynds and alleys that connected the Guildhall district to the outer roads. By day it was safe enough-merchants and scholars and the servants of the Hightower kept it populated. By night, it was something else. The lamplighters stopped at the Guildhalls. The watch made their rounds on the main thoroughfares and left the crookback streets to whatever crawled through them after dark.

The boy did not seem worried. Mysaria wondered what that felt like-to move through the world without the bone-deep awareness that the shadows held teeth.

She followed at a distance, keeping to the deeper darkness of the alley mouths, her soft shoes making no sound on the cobblestones. The boy turned onto Roper's Row, where the rope-makers' shops were shuttered and dark. Then left onto a narrow wynd that angled toward the river, its stones slick with evening damp, the walls close enough to touch on either side.

She lost sight of him around a bend.

That was fine. She knew where the wynd came out-onto the river road, where the streetlamps still burned and the way was clear. She would catch up there, see him safely past the worst of it, and-

The hand closed over her mouth.

It came from behind-fast, hard, practiced. A rough palm pressing against her lips, fingers digging into her cheek, the smell of onions and sour wine and unwashed skin flooding her nostrils. A body pressed against hers, pinning her, and a second figure stepped out of the shadows to her left, blocking the wynd.

The third appeared at the mouth of the alley, cutting off the way she'd come.

"Right on time," the one at the alley mouth said. He was the largest of the three-broad and thick-necked, with a scar that split his left eyebrow and a smile that held no warmth at all.

The one holding her chuckled against her ear. "Told you she'd come this way."

"The Lyseni whore," the big one said, the smile widening to show teeth that were brown and uneven. He stepped closer, and the lamplight from the distant river road caught the knife in his hand-a short blade, well-used, the edge nicked and stained. "White hair, pretty face, walking the wynds alone. Who'd have thought a prince's leman would be so easy to find?"

Mysaria's heart hammered. Three men. One knife that she could see. An alley with two exits, both blocked. Her own weapons-a blade in her sleeve, small but sharp, useless against three.

The hand over her mouth tightened. "Not a sound," the man behind her rasped. "You scream, I'll open your throat before you draw breath. Understood?"

The leader moved closer, and the ease of him was the worst part. The looseness in his shoulders, the way he rolled his neck as he stepped forward, the small, satisfied exhale of a man who had run this particular errand enough times to find it boring. He had done this before. He would do it again.

He reached up and slid the knife back into his belt.

His eyes moved over her face, her hair, her body with the appraising gaze of a man pricing meat at market. Then his attention snagged on her throat.

The scarf had slipped. She'd been watching the boy and not herself, and the silk had shifted, and the light found the scar.

It ran from just below her left ear to the hollow of her throat-a ridge of pale, twisted tissue, wider at the base, narrowing to a point near the jaw. The skin around it was smooth in the way of scars that have been given time to heal but never quite finished.

The leader reached out and traced the scar with one finger. His touch was light, almost curious, and that made it worse.

"Where'd you get this?" He tilted his head. "Someone wanted you to remember them."

Mysaria said nothing.

"Doesn't matter," he said, and reached back for the knife. "First we take our turn. Then we put you in the river. Just another drowned whore. The prince will find another."

The man behind her shifted-

And then the leader's hand stopped.

He did not draw the knife. He stood very still, his fingers resting on the hilt, and the ease went out of him the way heat goes out of a room when a door opens onto winter. His eyes fixed on something behind her.

She did not hear anything.

The hand over her mouth vanished.

The man who had been holding her was against the far wall. The brickwork cracked around his shoulders, dust and mortar raining down, his eyes rolled back, his mouth open in a silent shape of shock. His knife lay on the ground ten feet away.

The second man was on his knees, clutching his wrist, his face white. His arm bent at an angle arms did not bend.

The leader still stood. He still had his knife, his fingers still resting on the hilt where they had stopped. But his face had changed utterly. He had the expression of a man watching the rules of the world rewrite themselves in a language he had never been taught.

He did not draw the knife. Mysaria understood, distantly, that he had forgotten it was there.

Between her and the leader, standing in the mouth of the alley with his back to her, was a boy.

Nine years old. Slight and dark-haired, dressed in the grey robes of a Citadel novice, the hem muddy, the satchel still slung over one shoulder. He stood with his feet planted and his shoulders squared and his hands at his sides, and there was nothing about him that should have been threatening-nothing except the way the air seemed to crystallize around him, the way the temperature dropped, the way the two men on the ground did not move because they could not.

The leader's knife hand trembled. "What-"

"Leave," the boy said.

His voice was quiet in the way the sky before a storm is quiet.

The leader's eyes moved from the boy to the two men on the ground.The leader looked at the boy. The boy looked back.Then the leader turned and ran. He ran the way rats run-low and fast and without dignity, his knife clattering to the stones behind him, forgotten.

The boy turned around.

His face was calm. His blue eyes found Mysaria's, and in them she saw concern-genuine, unguarded.

"Are you hurt?"

Mysaria stared at him.

The world had come apart in the space of a heartbeat. She had not seen him move. Not heard him. He had been on the river road one instant and in this alley the next, and two grown men were down before any of them had drawn breath to shout.

"I-" Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat. "No. I am not hurt."

"Good." He glanced at the two men on the ground, then back to her. "We should move."

He was right. She knew he was right. But she could not make her legs move, because she was standing in an alley in Oldtown with a nine-year-old boy who had just dismantled three cutthroats in the space of a breath, and everything she thought she knew about the world was crumbling like wet mortar.

The boy seemed to understand. He did not rush her. He simply stood there, patient and steady, his blue eyes on her face, and after a moment the stillness of him-the absolute, implacable calm of him-gave her something to hold onto.

She pushed off the wall. Her legs were shaking. She ignored them.

"Come on," he said, and led her out of the wynd.

They walked in silence through the dark streets. The boy seemed to know instinctively which paths were safe-he turned away from a crookback alley that looked deserted but wasn't, angled toward a broader street where the lamplights still burned, adjusted his pace to keep her close without crowding. He did not look behind him or check for pursuit. He walked with the easy, unhurried stride of someone who knew-truly knew-that nothing was following them.

They reached the river road. The Honeywine slid past in the darkness, its surface catching the distant lights of the Hightower and the Citadel, the smell of it-green and faintly sweet-washing over them like a benediction. A barge passed downstream, its lantern swaying, the sound of rowers singing a work chantey drifting across the water.

The boy stopped at a stone bench near the water's edge. "Sit," he said. "You're shaking."

A fine tremor ran through her hands and shoulders-the body's delayed reckoning with what had nearly happened and what had happened instead.

He sat beside her present, solid, real.

"Who are you?"

The question came out wrong. Not what she'd meant to ask-she knew who he was, had known since the first night she'd seen him leaving the Citadel. The question she'd meant was something else entirely: what are you, or how, or any of the hundred impossible questions the last five minutes had raised.

But what came out was who, and the boy seemed to understand, because his face shifted-just slightly-and for a moment she saw the weight beneath the calm. The weight of someone who had been carrying something for a very long time and had learned to hide it so well that most people forgot it was there.

"Kallen," he said. "Just Kallen."

"You know who I am."

She saw the flicker of recognition in his eyes-the knowledge that he was not saving a stranger but someone specific, someone connected to something he already understood.

"You're Mysaria," he said. "Daemon's-"

"Whore," she finished, when he hesitated. "Leman. Mistress. Whatever word you prefer. They all mean the same thing in the end."

His jaw tightened. Just for a moment-a flash of something hard and uncompromising that came and went before she could name it.

"I prefer Mysaria," he said.

She looked at him. This boy sitting on a bench by the river with his hands folded and his eyes steady, choosing to call her by her name as if it mattered. As if she mattered.

"Why did you save me?"

The question had been sitting in her chest since the alley. She felt the weight of it now-the genuine, aching curiosity of someone who could not quite believe that anyone had bothered.

The boy looked at her as if the question confused him. As if the answer were so obvious that the asking of it required explanation.

"A knight protects the innocent," he said.

She'd heard knights say similar things a thousand times, in courts and taverns and the pillow talk of men who wanted to believe themselves noble-but without the performance. Without the careful modulation of voice and face that men used when they were reciting what they wished were true. He said it the way someone says the sky is blue or water is wet: a fact so fundamental to his understanding of the world that it required no embellishment.

She laughed. She did not mean to-it just came out, a short, sharp sound with nothing to do with humor.

"I am a whore," she said. "And a spy. I have been following you on the orders of a prince who wants to use you for his own purposes. I am not innocent, boy. I am the farthest thing from innocent you will find in this city."

The boy did not flinch. Did not show any of the reactions she had expected-the disgust, the coldness that came when people learned what she was and decided that cancelled out everything else.

"I don't care about that," he said.

"You should."

"Why?"

"Because-" She stopped. The argument died on her tongue. Because he was looking at her the way no one had ever looked at her, not in Lys and not in King's Landing and not anywhere in between: as if what she had done and what had been done to her were separate things, and only one of them mattered, and it wasn't the one she thought.

"You were about to be hurt," he said quietly. "That made you innocent of what was about to happen. The rest doesn't change that."

Mysaria stared at him. The river murmured. The Hightower's beacon swept the sky above them, a great eye of light turning slowly.

Something cracked in her chest. A small thing-a hairline fracture in a wall she had built so long ago that she had forgotten it was there. The wall was still standing. It would keep standing. But the crack was there now, and she could feel the air coming through it, and it was warm.

"Daemon sent me," she said.

The words came out before she could stop them-not the careful disclosure of a spy choosing what to reveal, but the raw truth of a woman who had just been saved by a child and could not bring herself to repay that with lies.

"He learned from one of his gold cloaks that you and Tomlyn were in Oldtown. He sent me to find you. To watch you. To report back on where you go and who you see and what you do."

She expected the calm to crack. Expected the blue eyes to harden, the trust she had somehow earned in the space of five minutes to evaporate.

"I know," the boy said.

Mysaria blinked. "You-what?"

"I've known since the third day. I could hear you following me-your footsteps, your heartbeat, your breathing. You smell like the Street of Silk in King's Landing; the perfume you wear is expensive. And your heartbeat is different from the people around you. Faster. More controlled. Like you're always thinking about what comes next."

She stared at him. She had been careful. Professional. She had kept her distance, varied her routes, never taken the same position twice-and he had known the entire time. Had heard her. Had let her follow him anyway.

"Why didn't you say something?"

He shrugged-a small, boyish gesture that seemed almost startling after everything else. "You weren't hurting anyone. And I wanted to know why you were there. If you were a threat, you would have done something by now. If you weren't, it didn't matter."

"And when I was attacked-"

"I wasn't going to let you get hurt." Simply, as if the decision had been made long before the moment came, and the only question was how, not whether.

The silence that followed was filled by the river and the wind and the distant song of the barge rowers, and Mysaria sat on the stone bench and felt the crack in her chest widen.

She thought of Daemon. He had been telling the truth.

The realization settled into her bones with the cold precision of a key turning in a lock. Everything he had described all of it was real. The boy was exactly as dangerous as Daemon had said.

And she did not think he was a monster.

She looked at Kallen-at his open face, his steady eyes, the quiet certainty with which he held himself-and she thought: This is what a monster looks like when it decides not to be one. And the thought that followed, unbidden and unwelcome and absolutely true: Daemon cannot see that. Daemon looks at this boy and sees only the thing that broke him, and he will never see anything else.

"You need to be careful," she said. "Daemon is patient. He lost his hand to you, and he's not going to forget that. He's building something in King's Landing-the City Watch, two thousand men, reorganized and reformed, loyal to him. When he thinks he's strong enough, he's going to come for you."

The boy absorbed this in silence. She could see the wheels turning behind his eyes-processing, fitting this into whatever framework he used to understand the world.

"I'm not afraid of him," he said.

"I know you're not. That's what worries me." She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her white hair falling around her face like a curtain. "Not being afraid of something doesn't make it less dangerous. It just means you're less likely to see it coming."

"He can't hurt me."

"He can hurt the people you love."

The words landed. She saw it-the slight tightening of his jaw, something hard and protective shifting behind his eyes. The boy who was not afraid for himself was very much afraid for others, and that, she realized, was the lever.

"Rosey. Aldric. The girl, Myla. They are all in King's Landing, and Daemon knows who they are. He has men watching the Street of Flour. He has men watching Aldric. He is waiting for you to come back, and when you do-"

"I'm not going back to King's Landing," Kallen said. "Not yet."

She studied his face. Good. That was something.

"Then I will go back," she said, "and I will tell Daemon that you and Tomlyn have left for Essos. That you boarded a ship in Oldtown harbor, bound for Braavos. That you are gone, and there is no trail to follow."

The boy frowned. "You would lie to him?"

"I have lied to better men than Daemon Targaryen."

"Why? If he finds out-if he learns you've deceived him-"

"What? Kill me?" She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I would rather take that risk than let him use the people you love as bait in a trap."

The boy was quiet. The river lapped at the stone embankment. The Hightower's beacon turned.

"I don't want to put you in danger," he said.

"You're not putting me in danger. I'm choosing it."

"That's not-"

"A knight protects the innocent." The words felt strange in her mouth-strange and right and heavier than she expected, as if they had been sitting somewhere inside her, waiting for a reason to come out. She met his eyes. "So let me do this. Let me protect someone for once. Let me be the knight."

The boy looked at her. And something shifted in his face-not the guarded assessment of someone weighing a strategic offer, but the simple, open recognition of someone who understood exactly what she was saying. Who had felt the same thing himself. The same bone-deep weariness of watching the world be cruel and wanting, desperately, to do something about it.

"Thank you," he said quietly.

"Thank me by staying alive," she said. "And by not going back to King's Landing until you're ready. And when you do go-wherever it is you're going-be careful. The things you can do don't stay secret forever. And there are people in this world who will want to use them, or destroy them, or both."

He nodded.

She stood. Her legs had stopped shaking, and the night air was cool on her face. Something in the world had shifted-some axis had turned-and she was not the same woman she had been an hour ago.

"Go home," she said. "Your family will worry."

The boy stood as well. He was small-the top of his head barely reached her shoulder-but there was something about the way he held himself that made him seem larger, as if the space around him had expanded to accommodate something that could not be contained in a nine-year-old's frame.

"Mysaria," he said.

She looked down at him.

"Be careful."

"I will be careful," she said.

She turned to go. She had taken two steps when she stopped and turned back.

The boy was still standing by the bench, watching her go. The lamplight caught his face, and for a moment he looked very young-just a child, alone in the dark, carrying a weight that no child should have to carry.

She crossed the distance between them in three quick strides, bent down, and kissed his cheek.

It was a brief touch-her lips against his skin for no more than a heartbeat-but she felt the warmth of him, the solid reality of him, and his sharp intake of breath. When she pulled back his face had gone the color of a summer strawberry, from the tips of his ears to the line of his jaw, and the blush was so completely, utterly nine years old that something in her chest broke open and she laughed-a real laugh, warm and startled and entirely involuntary.

"You'll do," she said. "You'll do just fine."

She turned and walked away before he could see the tears in her eyes. Mysaria walked into the dark.