He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 23 (Patreon)

Think of his current suit as the "chill at home" suit.

XXIII

What the S Stands For

Rhaenyra Targaryen was flying. The sky was opening before her like a door kicked wide, Syrax cutting through the air beneath her with powerful strokes that pressed Rhaenyra's thighs against the saddle and pulled tears from the corners of her eyes.

She had left King's Landing three days ago, without asking permission. Permission would have meant another refusal, another pat on the head, another gentle, immovable no from a father who saw danger in every shadow and his daughter as something fragile that needed keeping behind walls. She was not fragile. She was the blood of the dragon. She had Syrax. She had the sky.

The Kingsroad unspooled beneath her like a pale thread stitched through green and brown. She loved it-the emptiness, the sense that she was flying toward the edge of the known world, past everything that had ever been charted or mapped or tamed.

Then she saw the Wall.

It rose on the northern horizon like a line drawn by a god-ice so vast, so high, so absurdly impossible that her mind refused for several seconds to accept it as real. She had heard the numbers in her lessons: seven hundred feet, three hundred miles. She had written them on parchment and recited them for Grand Maester Runciter. But numbers were abstractions, and this was not. This was a cliff of ice filling the whole northern sky, stretching east and west until the curve of the earth swallowed it, luminous in the pale afternoon light, giving back the weak sun in shades of silver and sapphire and white so pure it hurt to look at.

"Oh," she breathed. The wind tore the word away, but Syrax felt it through the bond and banked slightly, adjusting course, and Rhaenyra leaned forward in the saddle and stared.

She could see Castle Black now-a dark smudge at the Wall's base, its towers small against all that ice. And on the trampled snow south of the castle, two shapes that sent a complicated surge of relief, excitement, and competitive fire through her chest.

Meleys, scarlet and copper, her long neck curving as she tracked Syrax's approach. And beside her, vast and ancient and utterly unmistakable, Vhagar-the largest dragon in the world, scales the color of old bronze and dark jade, coiled like a sleeping mountain. Even from this height Vhagar's size was staggering; she made Meleys look like a courser beside a warhorse, and Meleys was no small dragon.

Rhaenyra's grip tightened on the saddle horns. They were here-and she had followed, against every order, and the Wall was here and whatever had risen from the ground beyond it was here too. She was going to see it.

The wind shifted, the cold sharpened, and through the bond she felt it: Syrax didn't want to go closer.

It was not a thought. It was pressure, a tightening in the set of her wings, a stiffness that had not been there before. She was still flying forward, still obeying, but reluctantly, the way a horse pulls against the bit.

What is it? Rhaenyra pressed the question through the bond, not in words but in intent. What's wrong?

Syrax's answer was a feeling-the sense of a line drawn in the air, invisible and absolute, and the instinctive certainty that it was not meant to be crossed. The dragon didn't know why. She didn't need to. She simply knew, the way a bird knows south, that there was a place she wasn't supposed to go.

Rhaenyra ignored it. She was eleven years old and the blood of the dragon, and she had flown three days against her father's orders to reach this place. She was not going to be stopped by a feeling. Fear could be mastered-she had mastered it the first time she mounted Syrax, and she would master this too.

Fly, she commanded, and the word cut through the bond like a blade. Forward. Over the Wall.

Syrax obeyed, as she always obeyed. She banked toward the ice, wings beating harder, each stroke a negotiation between the rider's will and the dragon's instinct, and the gap closed between them and seven hundred feet of ancient, luminous barrier.

They reached the Wall. Syrax crossed it.

For one perfect, triumphant heartbeat, Rhaenyra was past it. I made it, she thought. I'm here. They wouldn't let me come and I came anyway-

Syrax stopped-wings locked mid-beat, her whole body rigid, as if she'd struck something solid in the empty air. She hung there shaking every attempt to push forward.

"Sōvēs! Sōvēs!" she commanded.

Syrax didn't fly. She shook-wings, neck. She wanted to go back. She rolled and bucked.

Rhaenyra's legs slipped. The saddle horn tore free of her grip. Her fingers scraped uselessly against leather, and her body pitched sideways with the sickening momentum of something no longer attached to anything solid. The sky became the ground. The ground became the sky. Her hair whipped across her face in a silver-gold curtain, and the wind tore the scream from her mouth before it could fully form.

Syrax!

The bond was a shriek of panic-hers and the dragon's, tangled together. She grabbed for the saddle, the horns, anything, and found only air. She was falling, and the Wall was below her, and the ground was below her, and between them lay more than seven hundred feet of nothing.

No no no no no-

Tears streamed sideways from her eyes, freezing on her cheeks. No dragon could dive fast enough. No hand could reach her. She was going to die, and she was going to die because she hadn't listened, because she'd been stubborn and reckless.

I'm sorry, she thought-for her father, her mother, Alicent, everyone she'd left behind-and it was the last thought she expected to have.

Then she heard it: a boom, distant and muffled, from somewhere north of the Wall. A sound like the earth cracking open, like something massive and fast launching itself upward from the ground. She heard it through the wind and the rushing of her own blood, not understanding what it was-only that it was there, and getting closer.

Something hit her. Something that closed the distance in a span of time too small to measure-arms, human arms, wrapping around her with a force that drove the breath from her lungs. A body pressed against hers, folding around her, shielding her completely. Her face pressed into a chest that was warm, solid, alive.

And then the feeling came. Safety. Absolute and unquestioning. The feeling of being held by something that would let the world break before it let her break-not the way her father protected her, with walls and guards and prohibitions that felt like chains, but the way a shield protects, standing between her and the dark and refusing to move.

She closed her eyes. She didn't mean to; her body simply did it, the tension releasing, her muscles going slack against the thing that held her.

Loud, tearing, shattering sounds went on and on, each impact building on the last. She felt the vibrations through the arms around her, through the chest against her face, through legs braced somehow beneath them both. The world was breaking apart around her, and whatever held her went through it, and none of it touched her.

Then a final, enormous impact drove the air from her lungs, and then stillness. Silence after the noise. The absence of falling, of wind, of everything except the arms around her and a heartbeat against her cheek-steady, human, alive.

She lay still, breathing. The air smelled of earth and ice and something else, clean and warm, like the sky after lightning.

She opened her eyes.

The first thing she saw was a symbol, printed or woven into the fabric in front of her face. A stylized letter, something like an S but unlike any she'd seen in a maester's book. It sat inside a shield-shaped border, rendered in the color of a summer sky.

She stared at it the way a drowning person fixes on driftwood-something real and solid to hold onto while her mind reassembled itself. Then she looked up.

Blue eyes looked back at her, careful and focused, the expression of someone checking whether something fragile had been damaged. They belonged to a face young enough to be close to her own age, perhaps a year or two older. Dark hair fell across his forehead, tousled by the wind.

A boy, only slightly taller than her, his arms still around her, his body still shielding hers.

"Are you okay?"

His voice was quiet and steady. Rhaenyra could not speak. Her mind was a storm of impressions. She was Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, blood of the dragon, rider of Syrax, sitting in a hole in the ground looking up at a boy who had just caught her from seven hundred feet, and she could not think of a single thing to say.

She nodded. It was all she could manage.

The worry in his expression eased, the corners of his mouth lifting a fraction, the tension in his arms loosening enough to let her breathe.

"Can you stand?"

She nodded again, though she wasn't sure-she hadn't tried, and her legs felt like they belonged to someone else.

He released her carefully, the way one releases something not entirely sure to hold its own weight, and pulled back just far enough to give her space. He stood first, rising with an ease that seemed wrong for someone who had just gone through the Wall carrying her-she realized that now, with a distant, dissociated shock-and landed here, in this crater, as if it were nothing.

He extended his hand. She took it. It was warmer than the cold air could account for, his grip firm and careful, the grip of someone very aware of his own strength and choosing to use very little of it. He pulled her to her feet and did not let go until she was steady.

She looked at him properly now. His garment was unlike anything she had seen-pale, near-white fabric that caught the light and gave back a faint glow that seemed to come from within the material rather than off its surface. It fit close across his chest and shoulders, loosening at the waist into dark breeches of the same alien cloth, simple and unadorned, the clothing of someone who dressed for purpose rather than display. On his chest, the symbol again-the S in its shield, vivid blue and precise. She found it easier to look at than his face.

Then she noticed the way he was studying her. His eyes moved into her rather than across her, as if reading something beneath her skin. His brow furrowed. "You have nothing broken," he said, with quiet certainty.

"How do you-" She didn't finish the question, because she already believed him, though she had no reason to. She believed him the way she believed the sun would rise. Completely, without reservation.

She heard wings. Syrax had landed at the crater's edge, golden scales dulled by the cold, neck curved down so her head was level with the rim, golden eyes fixed on the boy. Rhaenyra knew her dragon's every mood-anger, hunger, fear-and this was none of them. This was a stillness, an alertness she had never seen Syrax direct at anything but prey or another dragon. She was looking at him the way she looked at things that were powerful. Things that mattered.

"You saved my life," Rhaenyra said. The words came out flat, she was still in shock.

"You were falling," he said, as though that explained everything-as though the reason for what he'd done needed no further elaboration.

"And you caught me."

"Yes."

She looked at this boy who had gone through the Wall to catch her, with his blue eyes and his strange clothes and the symbol on his chest, and she hugged him. She didn't decide to; her arms simply went around him, her face pressing into the fabric of his garment, the S warm against her cheek.

He went rigid, arms at his sides, frozen for three full heartbeats, clearly a boy unused to being embraced by someone he'd just met. Then, slowly, carefully, his hands found her back, tentative at first, and he hugged her in return, and the safety came again-the same warmth, the same wall-like certainty of being held by something that would not let go.

She liked it. She liked the steadiness of him, the way he held her not because she was a princess or a Targaryen, but because she had been falling and he had caught her and that was enough.

She stepped back. His face had settled into bewilderment.

"That was-" he began.

"Thank you," she said, her voice steadier now, the princess reasserting herself over the frightened child. "For saving my life. Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said, with a formality that was almost funny, standing as they were in the smoking crater his own body had carved into the earth.

His expression shifted again, the clinical focus returning. "I'm surprised."

"At what?"

"That you don't hate me."

"Why would I hate you? You just saved my life."

"Because of what happened with your uncle."

She went still. The story the small council had never quite managed to keep quiet rose up in her.

"Are you the reason his hand was broken?" she asked.

Something in his face went careful.

"He broke it," he said. "The sword too, after. Both of them, on me."

Rhaenyra blinked.

"He hit me first," the boy said. "Backhanded me-hard, the kind of blow meant to hurt and to put me in my place." He said it plainly, without satisfaction-a fact he was sorry to be part of, not a story he wanted to tell. "His hand broke on my cheek before either of us understood what that meant. Then he went for Dark Sister, and it didn't cut me any better than his hand had. It broke too."

She should have doubted that. A boy claiming a prince's Valyrian steel had shattered against his own skin, and not the other way around, was the sort of claim that deserved at least a raised eyebrow.

She didn't doubt it at all.

She only had to look around her-at the crater his body had punched into frozen ground, at the ragged gap he'd torn clean through seven hundred feet of ice that had stood since before the Seven Kingdoms had a name, at herself, whole and unbruised and alive when the fall alone should have killed her ten times over. If the Wall could not hold him and the ground could not break him, there was no reason at all a sword should have managed it.

"The sword was reforged," she said. The words came out with a crispness that surprised her-the voice of a princess, not a child. "Valyrian steel can be reforged. And my uncle is still alive." She looked at him directly.

"Duskendale." The word came out quieter than she meant it to. "That was also you, wasn't it?"

Sadness crossed his face like weather moving over open ground - slow, total, changing everything it touched. His eyes went dark, his mouth settled into something that lived next door to grief, and for a moment he looked less like a boy than a man carrying something too heavy for the space he had to carry it in. He answered the same plain way he'd answered about Daemon, without flinching from his own words - but this time there was no relief underneath it. Only weight.

"It was an accident," he said quietly. "I didn't know what I was. I didn't know what I could do. It-" He stopped, swallowed. "It happened, and I couldn't stop it, and people died, and I will carry that for the rest of my life."

He didn't explain the beams, or the fire, or the impossible power that had carved a trench through a city. He simply stood there in his strange white clothes with the weight of Duskendale on his face and let it speak for itself.

Rhaenyra believed him because his face was the face of someone telling the truth-not the performed truth of a courtier or the calculated truth of a schemer, but the raw, unguarded truth of someone who had done something terrible and would not pretend otherwise.

She hugged him again. This time it was deliberate-she stepped forward and put her arms around him with the conscious intention of a girl who had decided this person needed to be held. He stiffened for a shorter heartbeat than before, then his arms came up, and she felt the same warmth again.

She stepped back. "What was that for?" he asked, bewildered.

"You looked like you needed it," she said simply.

His mouth opened, closed, opened again, and for a moment he looked like a fish that had been unexpectedly handed a compliment and had nowhere to put it.

"He's fortunate, my uncle."

The boy tilted his head. "Fortunate?"

"He raised his hand to something that could have ended him before he finished the swing, and all it cost him was the use of one hand." She held his eyes as she said it, testing the shape of the thought and finding she believed it more the longer she looked at him. "You didn't hold back because you couldn't have done worse. You held back because you chose to. He should be on his knees thanking every god there is that you're the sort of thing you are, and not the sort that would have killed him for it."

Whatever crossed the boy's face wasn't pride. If anything it looked closer to discomfort.

"I didn't think about killing him," he said finally. "I didn't think about anything. I just didn't move."

"That's the part he should be grateful for," Rhaenyra said. "That you didn't have to think about it."

She then looked down at the symbol on his chest, and thought of the song the minstrel had sung in the godswood-the boy who breathed frost and saved children and ate spinach, the song that had made her heart race and her father speak of impossible things in the small council chamber.

"Does the S stand for spinach?"

His face underwent a transformation so complete that Rhaenyra would remember it for the rest of her life. The solemnity shattered. Horror-pure, undiluted, adolescent horror-replaced it.

"NO!" The word cracked an octave above his speaking voice, and a flush climbed from his collar to his hairline with the speed of a fire. His hands came up, palms out. "It does not stand for-I don't-spinach?" He actually sputtered. "I said that once. Once." He stopped, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the middle distance with resentment "Curse that song."

Rhaenyra laughed-with her whole body, head thrown back, hair flying, the sound bright and completely uncontrolled, the way she laughed with Alicent in the godswood, the way she laughed at Daemon's outrageous stories.

The boy stood there red-faced, watching her, and something in him softened. The horror faded, the embarrassment eased, and the corners of his mouth twitched in a losing battle before he smiled-small, reluctant, helplessly amused.

"It stands for Hope," he said.

The laughter stopped because of how he said it. As a fact, the way sunrise is a fact.

A chill ran down Rhaenyra's spine, and it was not unpleasant-the chill of standing near something that mattered. She looked at the symbol on his chest, then up at his steady blue eyes, and opened her mouth to speak-

"Rhaenyra!"

The voice came from the crater's edge. Princess Rhaenys reached the rim first, dark hair wild, the composure that had defined her whole public life stripped away. Her eyes found Rhaenyra standing upright, alive, unharmed, and something broke in her expression-relief so fierce it looked like pain.

A step behind her, Lady Laena Velaryon's silver-gold hair streamed in the wind, her violet eyes fixed not on Rhaenyra but on the boy-on the white garment, the symbol, the dark hair and blue eyes-her face moving through recognition and confusion, as though she were reaching for a name just out of memory's grasp.

The boy's gaze found hers, and something in him shifted-subtle, but not subtle enough to miss. The stillness that had settled back into his shoulders eased into something closer to sheepish. Color crept up his neck, the same helpless flush that had climbed from his collar to his hairline minutes before over a song about spinach, except there was no protest in it this time, no sputtering-just a boy caught looking at someone he plainly hadn't meant to be caught looking at.

Rhaenyra did not have a name for the feeling that rose in her watching it happen. She only knew she didn't like it, and that she liked even less how closely she found herself tracking the seconds his eyes stayed on Laena Velaryon before he made himself look away.

Behind them came the Night's Watch, dozens of black cloaks, faces raw with cold and shock, and among them a broad, plainly dressed man with the bearing of a lord, and beside him a watchman with a wrapped hand, staring at the boy with an expression Rhaenyra couldn't read but that was very still.

Every face turned toward the crater-toward the boy in white who had caught a falling princess and put a hole through the Wall to do it.

His own face settled into something more composed. He turned to the man in black at the front of the watchmen.

"Apologies for the Wall, Lord Commander," he said, polite and sincere, like someone who had accidentally broken something that didn't belong to him.

The Lord Commander of the Night's Watch opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed his mouth. Opened it again. Closed it. Eight thousand years the Wall had stood, and the Night's Watch with it, and there was no protocol for a boy apologizing for the hole he'd put through it.

Before anyone found words, the boy turned-and vanished. One heartbeat he stood in the crater, dark hair ruffled, the symbol catching the pale light; the next he was gone.

Every mouth fell open. The Lord Commander stumbled back a step. Lord Rickon Stark's heavy brow climbed toward his hairline. Rhaenyra's hand flew to her mouth.

For one frozen instant they saw him again-a dark shape against the ice, impossibly high and impossibly fast, leaping rather than flying, his body cutting a rising arc up and over the Wall, white bright against blue-white for a single moment before he crested the top and he was gone.

Rhaenyra stared at the empty air where he had been, and felt something drop through her chest that had nothing to do with the fall she'd just survived. He hadn't said goodbye.

She wanted to call after him. She didn't, because calling after a boy who could clear the Wall in a single bound felt about as useful as calling after a bird already past the tree line. But some small, stubborn part of her decided, right there in the crater with the cold creeping back into her bones now that his warmth was gone, that this could not be the last of it. She was the blood of the dragon. She had crossed half the realm and she was not going to let a boy who called himself Hope simply vanish out of her life without her seeing him again.

A dozen men stood there, trying to process something their minds weren't built to hold, men who had spent their lives guarding a Wall that a boy had just cleared like a hedge.

Only the watchman with the wrapped hand didn't look surprised.

The wind blew. The wound in the Wall gaped, eight thousand years of ice breached, and through it the Haunted Forest breathed its cold, ancient breath into the lands of men.

Laena Velaryon stood at the rim, violet eyes fixed on the place where the boy had vanished, her face moving at last from confusion into certainty.

"Kallen!"