He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 16 (Patreon)

XVI

The Two Crowns

The room smelled of tallow and old featherbeds and the faint, persistent dampness that crept into everything north of the Trident during the long summer's humid nights. The window was open a crack-not enough to let in the cold, but enough to let in the sound of the river running south toward the mouth of the Trident, and the quieter sounds of the village beyond the low moss-covered wall: a dog barking, the last hammering from the forge, a woman calling children home for supper.

Kallen stood at the window with his arms crossed, his back to the room, his reflection a dark outline against the fading amber of the sunset.

"I'm not having this argument again," Tomlyn said from the bed, where he sat pulling on his boots.

"Then stop having it," Kallen said, without turning around. "I'm going. The ring is pulling north. I can feel it every morning when I wake up, like a rope tied to my chest. Whatever my mother left for me, it's beyond the Wall, and I need to find it."

"And I've told you, we go together."

"You can't keep up."

"I don't need to keep up. I need to be there."

"There?" Kallen turned from the window, and the expression on his face was the one Tomlyn had come to think of as his argument face-patient, logical, and utterly infuriating. "Where exactly? I'll be past the Wall before you've finished saddling your horse. I'll be wherever the ring is leading me while you're still riding through the Neck. I can cover more ground in an second than you can in a week. The only thing you'd be doing is slowing me down, and I don't mean that as an insult, Tomlyn. I mean it as a fact."

"Facts can go fuck themselves." Tomlyn yanked the second boot on and stood, his full height-which was not considerable, and had never been considerable, and had stopped bothering him somewhere around his twentieth nameday. "This is the last time we are talking about this, Kallen. You are not going alone."

"I know what's beyond the Wall."

"Do you? Have you been there? Have you seen it?"

"I've read about it. I've heard about it. I've listened to every maester and every ranger and every half-drunk traveler who's ever come south of the Wall and talked about what they saw. I know more about what's beyond the Wall than anyone alive south of it."

"You know what men have written and said. You don't know what it's like to stand in it." Tomlyn crossed the room and stopped in front of Kallen, close enough that the boy had to look up to meet his eyes-not far, now, not the distance it had been even a year ago, but enough to remind them both who had carried whom and for how long. "You're ten years old."

"I'm more than-"

"You're ten years old." Tomlyn said it the way he said everything that mattered-flat, firm, without negotiation. "You are ten years old, and you are not walking into the frozen end of the world by yourself. I don't care if you can run faster than a horse. I don't care if you can see through mountains. I don't care if you can punch a hole in a castle wall. You are not going alone, and that is the end of it."

Kallen's jaw worked. The muscle at the hinge tightened and released, tightened and released, the way it always did when he was caught between the desire to argue and the knowledge that arguing with Tomlyn when he used that particular tone was like arguing with a stone wall. The stone wall would win. The stone wall always won.

"Fine," Kallen said, and the word came out like a stone dropped into a well. "Together."

There was a silence. The kind that follows the end of an argument that neither side has truly won, where the combatants sit in the wreckage of their positions and take stock of what remains. Kallen went back to the window. Tomlyn sat on the bed and stared at the floor.

Then he said, "You need to stop."

Kallen didn't turn. "Stop what?"

"Using your gifts. In public. Where people can see."

Now Kallen did turn. His face was incredulous-genuinely baffled, the way a person looked when told to stop doing the thing that came most naturally to them.

"That's not-"

"I'm serious, Kallen. The fire in Lannisport. The bandits outside Crakehall. Every time someone is in trouble, you step in, and every time you step in, someone sees something they can't explain, and every time someone sees something they can't explain, they talk about it."

"People talk about everything."

"People talk about ordinary things. They don't talk about boys who lift casks like feathers and freeze fires with their breath. That's not ordinary talk, Kallen. That's the kind of talk that travels. The kind that grows. The kind that reaches ears you don't want it to reach."

Kallen's expression shifted. The incredulity faded into something more guarded-the look of someone who understood the argument and was choosing not to engage with it.

"Daemon is in Essos," he said.

The words landed in the room like a stone thrown into still water. Tomlyn stared at him.

"What?"

"Daemon. He left King's Landing six weeks ago. Sailed for Essos with Caraxes and a company of sellswords. He's gone."

Tomlyn's mouth opened, then closed.

"When were you going to tell me that?"

Kallen said nothing. He stood at the window with his arms crossed and his jaw set, and the fading light caught his face in a way that made him look older than ten.

"You heard it," Tomlyn said.

"I hear everything. You know that."

"And you decided not to mention it because-"

"Because I don't know why he left." Kallen's voice was careful, measured. "I heard the gold cloaks talking about it. He had an argument with the King and left. That's all I know."

"What kind of argument?"

"I don't know. The gold cloaks didn't know." He paused. "But I can guess."

"Guess."

"He's looking for us." Kallen met Tomlyn's eyes. "Mysaria lie must have worked. If he's in Essos, it's because he's looking for us there. Which means he's not in King's Landing. Which means he's not watching the Street of Flour. Which means Ma and Myla are safer than they've been in years."

"Or it means he's in Essos because of something completely unrelated to us, and you're fitting the facts to what you want to believe."

"I don't think so. Daemon doesn't leave King's Landing unless he's forced to or he's hunting something. The King can't force him to do anything-he learned that when he tried to send him back to Runestone. That leaves hunting."

Tomlyn stared at the boy he had carried in his arms through a storm in the Kingswood, the boy who had grown into something he could not always follow or always understand but had never, not once, given him reason to doubt.

"You should have told me," Tomlyn said quietly.

"I know."

"But you didn't."

"No."

"Why?"

Kallen did not say anything. Tomlyn stood and crossed to the door.

"Daemon being in Essos doesn't mean we're safe. It means he's looking for us in the wrong place, and when he doesn't find us there, he'll come back. And when he comes back, he'll be angrier, and the first thing he'll do is start listening for any whisper, any rumor, a boy who does impossible things. And every time you use your gifts in public, you're giving him another whisper to follow."

Kallen looked at him. The blue eyes were steady, and beneath the steady patience there was something that would not be moved by argument or threat or practical reasoning-something that lived in the place where Aldric's words had taken root years ago, in a small room on the Street of Flour, when a hedge knight had told a boy what it meant to be a knight.

"I can't stop," Kallen said quietly. "I won't. If someone is in trouble and I can help, I'm going to help. That's not a choice, Tomlyn. That's who I am."

Tomlyn looked at him for a long moment. The boy was ten years old and could hear across kingdoms and see through walls and run faster than the eye could follow and freeze fire with his breath and punch holes in oak trees, and he was standing in an inn room arguing that he had a moral obligation to help strangers in trouble, and the worst part-the absolute worst part-was that he was right.

"Right," Tomlyn said. "Dinner. Before anything else happens."

They left the room and headed for the stairs. The staircase was narrow and cramped, the kind that required sideways navigation for anyone broader than a child, and the treads groaned with the particular complaint of old wood that had been walked on by too many feet for too many years. The sound of the common room rose as they descended-the hum of conversation, the clink of cups, the crackle of a good fire in the hearth.

And over all of it, cutting through the noise with the clarity of a voice trained to carry:

"In Lannisport where gold is coined, Where fires burned and fate was joined, A boy appeared from out the flame, Who knew no fear and felt no pain.

He bore the burning children clear, Through smoke and ash and blazing fear, And when the fire roared its worst, He breathed out frost and quenched its thirst.

Oh, the spinach boy, the spinach boy, With ice for breath and heart of flame, He saved the inn, he saved the folk, And no one ever learned his name.

Some say he was a god come down, Some say a spirit of the Crown, But those who saw him know the truth- He was just a boy who ate his youth.

Oh, the spinach boy, the spinach boy, Strong as ox and brave as knight, He froze the fire, saved the folk, And vanished in the morning light."

Tomlyn stopped on the stairs. His boot froze on the next tread, his hand frozen on the wall, his entire body locked in the particular stillness of a man who has just heard something he was not prepared to hear. He turned, slowly, and looked at Kallen, who was two steps behind him.

Kallen's face was a study in confusion. His brow was furrowed, his head tilted slightly to one side, his mouth half-open in the beginning of a question that had not yet found its shape.

"Spinach," he said.

Tomlyn said nothing. His expression was moving through stages-the first was disbelief, the second was recognition, the third was the slow, dawning horror of a man watching his worst prediction fulfilled in rhyming verse. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"That," Tomlyn said, his voice very controlled, "is a song. About you."

"I can hear that."

"About a boy who breathes frost and saves children from fires. About a boy who is, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, associated with spinach."

"The innkeeper's daughter. In Lannisport. I told her I ate a lot of spinach when she saw me lift a wine cask." Kallen's face was very carefully blank. "I didn't think she'd-"

"Write a song about it? No. I don't imagine you did. But someone did. And now it's here." Tomlyn gestured at the stairwell, at the sound drifting up from below, at the Two Crowns inn in the Riverlands where a bard was singing about a boy with ice for breath and a dietary preference for leafy greens. "Which is exactly what I told you would happen. Exactly. Word for word. People see, people talk, people sing, and songs travel faster than horses on good roads."

"It could be about someone else."

"No, Kallen. It cannot be about someone else. There is not a surplus of boys in Westeros who breathe frost and lift wine casks and save children from burning buildings. You are the only one. The song is about you. The spinach is about you. The frost is about you."

"It's not entirely accurate. I don't-"

"I don't care if it's accurate. I care that it exists." Tomlyn leaned against the wall, his hand pressed flat against the stone, and breathed.

"He won't hear it."

"He will. Songs reach everywhere. I've been telling you-information travels. It doesn't matter if it's a song or a rumor or a merchant's tale overheard in a winesink. It travels, and it grows, and eventually it reaches the ears of the one-handed prince who has been obsessed with finding you since you broke his hand in a stable."

Kallen said nothing. His jaw was set in the way that meant he heard the argument and accepted the logic and was still not going to change his behavior, because the part of him that Aldric had shaped-the part that believed, with the uncompromising certainty of a child who had been taught that knights protect the innocent-would not bend for practical concerns.

Tomlyn recognized the look. He had seen it a hundred times. He would see it a hundred more.

"Fine," Tomlyn said. "Dinner. We'll talk about this later."

"We won't talk about this later."

"We will absolutely talk about this later."

They continued down the stairs.

The common room of the Two Crowns was long and drafty, running the full depth of the building from the kitchen doors at one end to the hearth at the other. Wooden kegs lined the wall near the bar, and the fire in the great stone fireplace threw a warm orange glow across the trestle tables and the rush-strewn floor. The room was perhaps half full-farmers and merchants and smallfolk finishing their suppers, a cluster of traders arguing over a map in the corner, a pair of women sharing a jug of summer wine near the window. The bard stood near the fire, a thin man with a wispy beard and a lute that had seen better decades, and he was milking the final chorus for everything it was worth, his voice rising to a theatrical quaver on the high notes.

Melisandre sat at a table near the center of the room, a cup of wine before her and a plate of bread and cheese barely touched. The burgundy robes she wore these days were modest by the standards of her past, her hair pulled back in a simple braid, the ruby at her throat hidden beneath the collar. She looked like a merchant's wife, or a scholar traveling with her family. She looked ordinary.

She was smiling when they reached the table. The smile of a woman who had just heard a very bad song about a very extraordinary boy and had enjoyed every moment of it.

"I've been listening for the better part of an hour," she said, as Tomlyn and Kallen took their seats. "He's sung it twice. The second time with additional verses about the frost." She looked at Kallen and winked. "I like the part about the spinach."

"Don't," Tomlyn said.

"It's catchy."

"Don't encourage him."

"The spinach is a nice touch," Melisandre said. "A god who eats spinach is a god you can approach." She sipped her wine. "You can't stop stories, Tomlyn. You can only choose which ones get told."

"Which is why he needs to stop giving people stories to tell."

Kallen, who had been quietly reaching for the bread throughout this exchange, said nothing. He tore a piece off and began eating it with the studied nonchalance of a boy who was aware that he was the subject of the conversation and was choosing to wait it out rather than participate.

The food arrived-mutton stew, thick with root vegetables and flavored with rosemary from the inn's kitchen garden, and bread still warm from the oven, and a cup of ale for Tomlyn and water for Kallen.

The bard had finished the spinach song and moved on to something about a fisherman's daughter, which was at least not about Kallen. The common room had filled further-a group of merchants had arrived from the south, dusty and tired, and a party of pilgrims on their way to the sept in the village. The innkeeper, a stout man named Elras who had the harried look of someone running an establishment that was too large for his staff, moved between the tables.

They were halfway through the stew when the door opened.

Five men. They entered in a loose formation. They wore no sigils. No colors. Their clothing was plain-travel-stained tunics, leather jerkins, good boots-and their weapons were of better quality than their clothes would suggest. Short swords at their hips, and the easy, loose-limbed stance of men who knew how to use them.

The leader was the largest. Broad across the chest, with a thick neck and small eyes and a jaw that looked like it had been designed for clenching. He wore a half-cape over one shoulder, and his hand rested on his sword hilt with the casual familiarity of a man who considered the weapon an extension of his arm.

The common room went quiet. The quality of the noise changed, the way it always changed when armed men walked into a room and the balance of power shifted with them.

Elras saw them. Something crossed his face-resigned weariness.

"Masters," he said, approaching with a towel over his arm and a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "What can I-"

"Taxes," the leader said.

Elras's smile flickered.

"My taxes are paid. I sent the coin to Riverrun with the last-"

"Not those taxes." The leader stepped closer. He was a head taller than Elras, and he used the height the way men like him always did-as a tool, a reminder, a quiet statement about the relative positions of the two bodies in space. "The special taxes. The ones Lord Bracken's appointed collectors gather for the protection of travelers on this road. You're on our road, master innkeeper. You benefit from our protection. You pay the tax."

"I've never heard of-"

"You've heard of it now." The leader's voice was patient in the way that a cat was patient with a mouse. "Twenty silver. Quarterly. You're two quarters behind."

"Two quarters-"

"Forty." The leader smiled. "Pay now, and we'll say no more about it. Pay later, and there will be more to say."

At the table near the center of the room, Kallen set down his spoon.

Tomlyn's hand was on the boy's arm before he could stand. The grip was not hard but it was firm, and the meaning behind it was firmer.

"Don't," Tomlyn said, very quietly.

"He's extorting-"

"I can see what he's doing. I'll handle it."

"Tomlyn-"

"I'll handle it." Tomlyn released the boy's arm and stood. He adjusted his sword and crossed the common room to where the leader and his men stood surrounding the innkeeper.

The conversation had attracted attention. The merchants in the corner were watching. The pilgrims had stopped praying entirely. The bard had stopped playing, which was perhaps the most notable thing of all, because bards never stopped playing unless something was genuinely wrong.

Tomlyn stopped a few feet from the group. Close enough to be heard, far enough to not be threatening. He had learned that distance from Aldric, who had learned it from years of being a hedge knight with more ambition than coin-the precise measurement of space that said I'm here without saying I'm looking for a fight.

"Trouble?" Tomlyn asked, his voice easy and conversational.

The leader turned. His small eyes swept Tomlyn with the quick, appraising glance. He took in the sword, the leather jerkin, the plain clothing, and reached a conclusion that was not entirely wrong but not entirely right either.

"Nothing that concerns you, friend. Innkeeper's business."

"I'm a friend of the innkeeper. Drank his ale, ate his bread, slept under his roof." Tomlyn kept his voice level. "His business is my business while I'm under his roof."

"Is it." The leader's tone was flat. "Well. The innkeeper owes taxes. Forty silver stags. That's the trouble, and it's between me and him, and you can go back to your supper and forget you saw anything."

"You don't look like tax collectors."

The leader's eyes narrowed. "What do we look like?"

"Soldiers. Good ones. Well-armed, well-fed, organized." Tomlyn met his gaze. "Tax collectors carry ledgers and seals and wear the colors of their lord. You carry swords and wear nothing. That makes you not tax collectors."

A murmur went through the common room. The merchants exchanged glances. Elras's face had gone very still.

The leader's smile returned. It was the same smile as before-patient, cold. He found the challenge amusing rather than threatening.

"We're special tax collectors," he said. "Lord Bracken's appointed us personally. We don't need seals and ledgers. We need the coin." He paused. "Now fuck off."

"I'm asking you to leave," Tomlyn said. His voice had not changed. Still easy. Still conversational. But his hand had moved to the hilt of his sword, not gripping it, just resting there, and the gesture was not subtle.

The leader looked at the hand. Then at Tomlyn's face. Then at his four men, who had arranged themselves behind him in a loose semicircle.

"And if we don't leave?" The leader's voice dropped half a register. "What then? You draw that sword? You face five men?" He chuckled. It was a low, rumbling sound, genuine in its amusement. "Five against one. Those are bad odds, friend. Even for a man with a sword."

Tomlyn hesitated.

If he won, he would not win cleanly, and not winning cleanly meant getting hurt, and getting hurt meant Kallen would get involved, and Kallen getting involved meant-

The leader disappeared.

He was there-standing, smirking, his hand on his sword, his men behind him-and then he was not. One moment present, the next absent, as if he had been erased from the world by a hand that did not want him in it.

The second man went next. He had time to look startled-a brief, comical widening of the eyes, the beginning of a word that might have been what-before he, too, was simply gone. The air where he had stood rushed inward with a soft pop.

The third man had time to shout. A single syllable-sharp, frightened, cut off at the end as though a hand had closed over his mouth from behind, though there was no one behind him. Then he was gone.

The fourth man turned to run. He made it half a step. Then the space where he had been was empty.

The fifth man-the smallest, the youngest, the one who had been standing at the back of the group and watching the door-stood alone in the middle of the common room. His hand was on his sword. His face was white. His eyes were wide and wild and fixed on the space where his four companions had been standing moments before, and his mouth was open, and no sound was coming out.

Then he was gone too.

The common room was silent. The merchants had stopped talking. The pilgrims had stopped praying. The bard had stopped breathing. Elras stood behind his bar with his towel frozen in mid-air, his mouth open, his eyes fixed on the empty space where five armed men had been standing.

Tomlyn stood where he was, his hand on his sword hilt, his face carefully composed, and looked at the empty floor.

Then he turned.

At the table near the center of the room, Kallen sat in his chair. His spoon was in his hand. His bowl of stew was before him, half-finished. His posture had not changed-he was leaning slightly forward, elbows on the table, the relaxed pose of a boy enjoying his supper. He lifted a spoonful of stew to his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and looked up at Tomlyn with an expression of mild, innocent curiosity.

Tomlyn stared at him.

Kallen blinked. "What?"

"You know what."

"I don't." Kallen took another spoonful of stew. "I've been sitting here the entire time. Eating my dinner. You can ask anyone."

Tomlyn looked at Melisandre. Melisandre was drinking her wine. She set her cup down, dabbed her lips with a napkin, and looked at the empty space in the middle of the common room with an expression of thoughtful consideration.

"The gods," she said, loudly enough for the entire room to hear, "are just."

Every head in the common room turned.

"Did you see that?" She addressed the room at large. "Five armed men, extortionists, threatening an honest innkeeper-and the gods took them. Simply took them. As if they had never been."

A murmur went through the room. The bard was scribbling something on a scrap of parchment.

"The Mother's justice," one of the pilgrims said, loud enough to be heard. "She protects the innocent."

"The Warrior," another corrected. "The Warrior strikes down the wicked."

"Both," Melisandre said, with the benevolent smile of a woman who had once served a different god entirely and found that the Seven served her purposes just as well when the situation demanded it. "The gods move in mysterious ways. Who are we to question their methods?"

She looked at Kallen and winked.

Kallen continued eating his stew.

Tomlyn looked at Melisandre. He looked at Kallen. He looked at the common room, where the patrons were already building a miracle out of a mystery.

He could see it happening in real time-the story forming, the details being assigned, the narrative crystallizing. By morning, the five men would have been demons. By the next town, they would have been giants. By the time the bard finished his new song, they would have been an army, struck down by the gods themselves for threatening a holy inn on a holy road.

And somewhere in the middle of it, a ten-year-old boy would be eating his stew, and no one would think to look at him twice.

Tomlyn crossed the room back to the table, sat down heavily, and stared at Kallen across the bowls of stew and the bread and the cups of ale and water.

Kallen met his gaze. His expression was perfect-blank, innocent, mildly puzzled by the intensity of Tomlyn's stare. If Tomlyn had not spent the last eight years watching this boy grow from a toddler in a crater to a child who could shatter Valyrian steel with his shoulder, he would have believed it. He would have believed every word of it. The innocence was that good.

"I didn't move," Kallen said.

"I saw."

"I didn't move from this chair."

"I know what I saw."

"What did you see?"

"I saw you not moving from that chair."

"Then we agree."

"You also saw five men disappear."

"I saw five men disappear. I was eating stew. These things happened at the same time. I don't see how they're connected."

Tomlyn looked at Melisandre. Melisandre was smiling into her wine.

"Don't," Tomlyn said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was going to observe that the gods are mysterious and their ways are beyond mortal understanding."

"You were going to encourage him."

"I would never."

"You are always encouraging him. You have been encouraging him since the day you knelt in the mud and called him the Prince That Was Promised. You are encouraging him right now, by sitting there with that smile on your face, and if you wink at him one more time I am going to-"

"The gods are just," Melisandre said, serenely, and took another sip.

The bard began to play a new tune and the common room of the Two Crowns settled into the comfortable murmur.

Tomlyn sighed. It was a deep, bone-level sigh.

"Please," he said, to no one in particular, "let that be the last surprise of the evening."

Kallen reached for the bread. "No promises."

Melisandre refilled her wine. "None at all."