He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 21 (Patreon)

XXI

The Thread That Ties Him

The Hand's solar was a room that smelled of ink and parchment and the faint, persistent mustiness of old wood that had absorbed too many decades of spilled wine and tallow smoke. The windows faced north, overlooking the inner bailey of the Red Keep, and the afternoon light that came through them was thin and grey, the kind of light that made everything in a room look slightly tired. The shelves that lined the walls were heavy with ledgers and bound records.

Alicent Hightower sat in the chair beside the window with a book in her lap. She had been reading it for the better part of an hour, or rather, she had been holding it open and moving her eyes across the pages in a rhythm that suggested reading while in fact doing nothing of the sort. The words blurred and reformed and blurred again, the same sentence about the Crone's light guiding the faithful through darkness repeating itself three times before she gave up the pretense of comprehension and simply stared at the page, her thoughts elsewhere entirely.

They were with Rhaenyra.

Three days. It had been three days since Princess Rhaenys Targaryen and Lady Laena Velaryon had departed the Red Keep on dragonback. They flew north. Toward the Wall. Toward whatever had risen from the earth in the Haunted Forest, glowing blue-white in the dark like a second moon caught in the branches.

Alicent did not know what had been said in the private audience between the king and Princess Rhaenys. She had not been present. Her father had not been present-or if he had, he had not told her. The council meeting where the raven from Castle Black had been read was the last public discussion of the matter, and since then everything had gone quiet, the way things went quiet when powerful people were making decisions they did not want examined too closely.

What Alicent did know was this: Rhaenyra had begged.

She had begged her father, who had refused. She had begged her mother, who had looked at her with those gentle, sorrowful eyes and shaken her head. She had begged Princess Rhaenys, who had knelt and taken her hands and spoken to her softly and seriously, woman to girl, dragonrider to dragonrider, and had still said no. She had even begged Lady Laena, seventeen and fierce and mounted on the largest dragon in the world, who had laughed-not unkindly-and told her that when she was older they would fly together, and that the Wall would still be there.

None of it had worked. Rhaenyra had stood in the courtyard with her fists clenched and her violet eyes burning and her jaw set in that particular line of absolute, immovable stubbornness that Alicent knew better than anyone in the world, and she had watched the dragons rise and turn north and shrink against the grey sky until they were gone, and she had said nothing. She had turned and walked back into the keep with her back straight and her braid swinging and her silence louder than any scream.

And then, a few hours later, she had come to Alicent.

"I'm going to fly," she had said. Her voice had been light-too light, the careful casualness of someone who has already made a decision and is not inviting discussion. "Syrax needs the exercise. She's been cooped up in the Dragonpit for days. I'll take her up, circle the city, be back before dark."

Alicent had looked at her friend's face and seen the lie there as clearly as she saw the words on the page of her book. She had known-known with the bone-deep certainty that the princess was going to follow them. That she was going north. That no argument and no plea and no invocation of duty or safety or paternal decree was going to stop her, because Rhaenyra was blood of the dragon and dragons did not sit in courtyards while the world unfolded without them.

She had said none of this. She had said, "Be careful."

Rhaenyra had smiled-that bright, fierce, reckless smile that made Alicent's chest ache in a way she did not fully understand-and she had gone.

That was three days ago.

The last report-relayed through the dragonkeepers, who had their own network of eyes and ears along the Narrow Sea coast-was that Syrax had been seen flying north over the Trident, moving fast, riding the thermals with the effortless grace of a creature born to the sky. Heading in the same direction as Meleys and Vhagar. Following the dragons north.

Following the magic.

Alicent turned a page she had not read and stared at the new page she was not reading and thought, with a ferocity that surprised her: You idiot. You stubborn, reckless, magnificent idiot. You could be dead. You could be lost. You could be frozen in a ditch somewhere between here and the Wall, and I am sitting here holding a book about the Crone's light while you chase fairy stories on dragonback.

Her father sat at his desk across the room, bent over a letter. Ser Otto Hightower wrote the way he did everything-deliberately, precisely, each stroke of the quill placed with the care. His back was straight, his shoulders squared. He had not spoken in some time. The scratch of his quill was the only sound in the room.

A knock came.

It was sharp and brief. Alicent's eyes flicked up from her book. Her father's quill paused, hovering above the parchment, a single bead of ink trembling at its tip.

"Enter," Otto said.

The door opened. A guard of the household stood in the frame. "My lord Hand. Ser Larys Strong requests a moment of your time. He says it is urgent."

Otto set his quill down with a precision that suggested the interruption was not entirely unwelcome. "Send him in."

The guard stepped aside. Larys Strong entered the room with the careful, unhurried gait that his clubfoot imposed upon him-each step a calculated negotiation between his body and the floor, the cane tapping a slow, irregular rhythm that Alicent had learned to recognize the way one recognized the sound of an approaching storm.

The guard closed the door behind him.

Alicent turned back to her book. She adjusted her posture slightly-angling the page toward the light, settling deeper into the chair, performing the small, unconscious movements of a reader absorbed in their text. She was not reading. She had not been reading for an hour. But her father's visitors did not concern themselves with the Hand's daughter and her devotional reading, and she preferred it that way.

Larys's eyes found her anyway. She felt them-the weight of that gaze, light but deliberate. He looked at her for a moment, then turned to Otto.

"My lord Hand," he said, and his voice was silken and unhurried. "Forgive the intrusion. There are developments that require your attention."

"Larys." Otto gestured to the chair opposite his desk. "Sit. What news?"

Larys did not sit. He glanced at Alicent again-a brief, measuring look, the kind he gave to everyone and everything, cataloguing and filing-and then back at Otto.

"My lord," he said, "the matter is of a sensitive nature. Perhaps-"

"She stays," Otto said.

His voice carried the flat, unyielding authority that Ser Otto Hightower brought to all things great and small. It was the voice of the Hand of the King, and it did not invite negotiation.

Larys looked at Alicent a third time. Then he inclined his head, accepting the judgment.

"My lord," he began, settling into the chair with the slow care of his condition, "you recall the men I dispatched several weeks past. Concerning Prince Daemon's... companion. The Lyseni woman."

Alicent's eyes widened behind the safety of her book. She did not move. She did not turn the page. She held herself very still, the way a hare holds still when the hawk's shadow crosses the grass, and she listened with every fiber of her being while her eyes remained fixed on the book.

"Mysaria," Otto said. The name was spoken without inflection, a label applied to an object of no particular emotional significance. "Yes. I recall. What of it?"

"My men found her," Larys said. "In Oldtown, of all places. She had been following a certain boy, traveling with a hedge knight. My men caught up with her in a wynd off Roper's Row, if you can believe it. A miserable little alley, the sort of place where men go to do things they don't want witnessed."

A pause. Larys shifted in his chair, his clubfoot finding a more comfortable angle against the leg of the seat.

"They were preparing to do the deed," he said. "Three of my best. She was alone, unarmed-"

"Get to the point, Larys."

"The point, my lord, is that they did not complete the task." Larys's voice remained smooth, but something tightened beneath it-a thread of genuine frustration, carefully controlled. "The woman is still alive."

Otto's quill hand, which had been resting on the desk, curled slowly into a fist. Alicent watched the knuckles whiten from behind the edge of her book. The gesture was small, controlled, almost invisible-but she knew her father's hands, knew the language they spoke when his voice was silent, and the fist said more than any word could have.

"What happened?" Otto asked. His voice was very quiet. The kind of quiet that men who served powerful lords learned to fear.

Larys crossed one leg over the other, resting his hands on his cane. His expression was composed, but there was something new in his eyes-a flicker of something that Alicent, watching from behind her book, could not quite identify.

"My lord," Larys said, "I interrogated one of the men myself. The one I was able to recover. The other two..." He paused, choosing his words. "The other two are no longer in a condition to be interrogated. They were found in the alley where the confrontation took place. One had been thrown against a wall with sufficient force to crack the brickwork. The other's arm had been broken-snapped, my man said, like a dry branch. Neither was dead, but neither was in any state to talk coherently, and the one I did recover was..."

He stopped. His eyes moved to Alicent and then back to Otto, and the something in them deepened.

"He was not himself," Larys finished. "He could describe what had happened, but not well. He kept repeating the same details."

Otto stared at Larys for a long moment. Then he leaned back in his chair, and the expression on his face was not surprise.

"Let me guess," Otto said, and his voice was heavy with exhaustion. "A boy. Nine or ten years old. Black hair. Blue eyes. Moving faster than anything they had ever seen. And strength that defies all reason."

Larys said nothing for a moment. He looked at Otto with those watchful, calculating eyes, and something passed between them. Then Larys nodded. Once. Slowly.

"The description is consistent, my lord," he said quietly. "In every detail."

Alicent's fingers had gone white on the edges of her book. The Crone's light guided the faithful through darkness. She stared at the words and saw none of them. Her heart was hammering so hard she was certain both men could hear it.

The spinach boy.

The thought surfaced unbidden, breaking through the careful composure she had maintained, and with it came the memory of the minstrel in the godswood, his thin voice singing about a boy who breathed frost and walked through fire, and Rhaenyra's face-bright, fierce, hungry for the impossible-and her own careful, measured skepticism, her reasonable explanations about frightened people and embellished tales and the way brave men became sorcerers in the retelling.

She had been wrong.

The realization settled into her chest with the weight of a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples spread outward through her mind, disturbing everything. She had been wrong, and Rhaenyra had been right, and the world was not as small and tidy as she had believed, and somewhere out there-a boy with black hair and blue eyes who could throw men into walls and move faster than sight and freeze fire with his breath-was real.

She kept her face still. She kept her eyes on the page. She did not move. But behind the mask of her composure, something fundamental shifted, and the book in her lap might as well have been written in a language she did not speak for all the sense the words made.

"There is more," Larys continued. "An additional incident. Consistent with the pattern."

Otto's eyes sharpened. "Go on."

"The Two Crowns inn, on the northern bank of the Trident." Larys shifted in his chair. "This one is more recent. I learned of it through an innkeep who trades information for coin, one of my more reliable informants in the Riverlands."

He leaned forward, and the clubfoot scraped against the floor, and his voice dropped half a register.

"The innkeep tells it thus. Five men entered his common room-armed, well-organized, claiming to be tax collectors in the service of Lord Bracken. They were extorting the innkeeper, demanding silver under threat of violence. A hedge knight in the common room-a Ser Tomlyn, the same name as the Crakehall incident-confronted them. Words were exchanged. The situation was escalating toward steel."

Larys paused. His eyes moved to Alicent again-brief, measuring-and then back to Otto.

"And then, according to the innkeep and the dozen-odd witnesses in the common room, the five men vanished. One by one. One moment they were standing there, armed and threatening. The next-gone. Simply gone. No sound. No struggle. No door opening or closing. They were there, and then they were not."

He let the silence hold for a moment.

"The innkeep's account is-colorful. He speaks of a woman in red robes who declared that the gods had taken the men for their wickedness. A boy was sitting next to her, eating his stew. He speaks of a miracle, witnessed by all present."

"The boy," Otto said. "Black hair. Blue eyes."

"The innkeep did not mention his eyes specifically, but the description of the boy is consistent. Small, dark-haired, traveling with the hedge knight and the woman in red. And the manner of the disappearance-the speed of it, the impossibility of it-is consistent with what my man reported from Oldtown."

Larys spread his hands, a gesture of presentation. "The pattern is clear, my lord. The Oldtown incident. The Crakehall incident. The Two Crowns. The Lannisport fire, which the entire realm has heard of by now. Each event follows the same shape: a boy, traveling with a hedge knight, sometimes accompanied by a woman in red. Each event involves the same impossible abilities-speed, strength, and other gifts that defy explanation. And each event occurs further north than the last."

He drew a line in the air with one finger, south to north.

"Oldtown. Crakehall. Lannisport. The Trident." He looked at Otto. "Whatever is happening beyond the Wall-whatever rose from the ground in that clearing-it is tied to this boy. He is moving toward it."

Otto sat in his chair and stared at the surface of his desk.

"Yes," Otto said. "I see it."

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he looked up, and his eyes were sharp and clear, the exhaustion gone, replaced by the focused, calculating clarity that Alicent recognized as her father at his most dangerous.

"Do you have eyes on the Wall?" he asked.

"I have a man in Winterfell," Larys said. "A servant in Lord Stark's household. My last report from him was four days past. Lord Stark had received the same raven from the Night's Watch that we did-or a similar one-and had departed Winterfell with a small company of men, riding north for the Wall. His purpose was not stated, but one does not ride to the Wall in the depth of summer without reason."

"Keep me informed," Otto said. "I want to know the moment you hear anything from the North. Anything at all. And continue tracking the boy's movements-if he surfaces again, I want to know within the day."

"Of course, my lord." Larys rose from his chair, his cane finding the floor with the practiced tap of long habit. He inclined his head-a gesture of respect that was perfectly calibrated, neither too deep nor too shallow. "I will send word the moment I have more."

"That will be all, Larys."

The Master of Whisperers turned and made his way to the door, his uneven gait and the tap of his cane the only sounds in the room. The door opened. The door closed. He was gone.

The silence that followed was thick and heavy, broken only by the distant sounds of the castle. Otto sat at his desk, staring at the wood, his mind visibly working-Alicent could see it in the way his eyes moved, the way his fingers drummed once, twice, against the surface, the way his jaw tightened and released.

Then he turned to his daughter.

"Alicent."

She looked up from her book. The pretense was over-she knew it, and he knew it, and neither of them was going to acknowledge the fiction that she had been reading for the past hour. She closed the book and set it in her lap and met her father's eyes.

"Father."

"I need you to do something for me."

His voice had changed. The cold, calculating clarity was still there, but it was wrapped now in something softer-the tone he used when he was asking his daughter to do something difficult, something she might not want to do, something he needed her to understand was important. It was the voice he had used when he had asked her to befriend Rhaenyra Targaryen, years ago. The voice that preceded requests that were not really requests.

"What do you need me to do?" she asked.

Otto was quiet for a moment. He studied her.

"There is a young woman serving in the queen's household," he said. "A maid. Her name is Myla. She is three-and-twenty. She has been in the queen's service for several years now. She is quiet, diligent, well-regarded by the other servants. She keeps to herself. She has no friends at court, no allies, no enemies. She is, in every visible respect, perfectly ordinary."

Alicent frowned. The request was already strange, and her father's voice was already the voice that preceded strangeness. "You want me to... befriend her?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

The question was simple and direct-the question of a daughter who had learned, through years of practice, that the best way to understand her father's intentions was to ask plainly and let him decide how much to reveal. Sometimes he revealed nothing. Sometimes he revealed everything. The decision was always his, and Alicent had learned to accept that, because accepting it was how she survived in this house, in this court, in this world where her father's will was the tide and she the shore it shaped.

Otto looked at her. And then he told her.

"She is the boy's sister." Otto's voice was quiet, precise, each word placed with the same care he gave to his letters.

Alicent stared at her father. The spinach boy had a sister.

"The boy who can throw men into walls and move faster than sight and freeze fire with his breath," Otto continued, his voice dropping lower, "has a family. They are the thread that connects him to this world. And his sister is here, in the Keep, within arm's reach."

He leaned forward.

"One day soon, Alicent-and it will be soon-the whole of Westeros will learn of this boy's existence. What he can do. What he is. And when that day comes, every lord in the Seven Kingdoms will want what every lord always wants when power appears in the world: to tie it to his house. To bind it with marriage, with oaths, with the thousand small chains that men forge from ambition and call alliance."

His eyes held hers.

"A god in human form, Alicent. A boy who can shatter Valyrian steel and melt stone with his eyes and run faster than anything. The lords will descend like ravens on a corpse. They will offer their daughters. They will promise their swords. They will do everything in their power to make him theirs."

He paused. The light shifted.

"And when that day comes," Otto said, "he will perhaps look more favorably upon a woman who was kind to his sister."

The words settled into the room like snow falling-silent, cold, covering everything. Alicent sat in her chair by the window with her book in her lap and her father's voice in her ears and the afternoon light dying on the floor, and she understood, with the terrible, crystalline clarity of someone who has just seen the shape of their own future laid out before them, what her father was asking her to do.

Not friendship. Not kindness. Not the genuine warmth that existed between her and Rhaenyra, complicated and real and fragile as it was. This was something else. This was a seed planted in soil that had not yet been turned, a investment made against a future that had not yet arrived, a bet placed on a boy she had never met whose sister she was now expected to befriend-not because Myla was worth knowing, but because Myla was a door, and her father wanted her to hold the key.

She thought of Rhaenyra. Rhaenyra, who had believed when no one else would. Rhaenyra, who was right.

She thought of the spinach boy. The song. The way the minstrel's voice had trembled on the high notes. The way Rhaenyra's eyes had blazed.

"Father," Alicent said. Her voice was steady. It was always steady. "I understand."

Otto looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded-once, a small, satisfied dip of the chin-and turned back to his letter.

Alicent opened her book. She turned to a new page. She did not read it.

She sat in the chair by the window and stared at the words.

And in the Red Keep, in a room that smelled of ink and old wood, Alicent Hightower began to plan.