He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 26 (Patreon)

My apologies. Posting this chapter later than usual cause there was a power outage. Almost a day and a half without electricity. This is the last chapter set in 109 AC. Next up is a Daemon PoV and I aim to drop the chapter either Wednesday or Thursday.

XXVI

A Symbol on the Steps

The morning light came through the narrow windows of Queen Aemma's bedchamber in pale, slanting columns that caught the dust motes and turned them to drifting flecks of gold. The room smelled of dried rosemary and fresh linen and the faint, persistent sweetness of the honey-water the queen drank each morning to settle her stomach. Myla had prepared it herself before dawn-warming the water at the hearth, stirring in the honey with a wooden spoon that had been worn smooth by years of the same motion, adding a single crushed leaf of mint because the queen had mentioned once, offhandedly, that she preferred the taste. Myla remembered things like that. It was what made her good at her work.

She was making the bed now-drawing the linen taut across the feather mattress, tucking the corners with the sharp, precise folds that the queen's household required. The queen herself had risen an hour past, dressed, and departed for the morning meal with the king. She had been quiet this morning, quieter than usual-her movements slow, her eyes distant, her hands pausing on the clasp of her cloak as though she had forgotten what she was doing. The queen was worried about her daughter. Everyone in the household knew it-The princess had been gone a week, and the queen had not slept properly since. The room was empty. Or rather, it was empty of royalty. It was very much not empty of servants.

Myla was tucking the corner of the coverlet when the door opened behind her.

"You missed a spot."

Myla did not look up. She knew the voice. Every servant in the queen's household knew the voice.

Brianel. She was a gossip-not a malicious one, Myla had never known her to spread lies or invent stories, but a gossip the way a sponge is wet: it was her nature, and she could not help absorbing and releasing the things she heard.

"I didn't miss a spot," Myla said, smoothing the corner flat.

"The left side. Near the post. It's puckered."

Myla looked. It was puckered. She fixed it without a word, and Brianel watched her fix it with a satisfied expression.

"Brianel," Myla said, keeping her voice neutral. "Was there something you needed?"

"I was wondering the same thing about you." Brianel crossed the room and sat on the bench near the window, arranging her skirts with the practiced ease of a woman who had spent years sitting on other people's benches. "I've been watching you, Myla."

"That's a comfort, truly."

"Not like that. I mean I've been watching the way Lady Alicent looks at you."

Myla's hands stilled on the coverlet-just for a moment, a fraction of a second, no longer than a heartbeat-but Brianel caught it, because Brianel caught everything.

"Lady Alicent," Brianel repeated, savoring the name the way a cook savors a particularly good spice. "The daughter of the Hand of the King and she has taken an interest in you. Myla. A maid. The daughter of a mill worker."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Three times this week. Three times, Lady Alicent has sought you out. She spoke to you in the corridor outside the small council chamber. She brought you a cup of watered wine in the yard. She asked about your family-where you're from, what your mother does, whether you have siblings."

Myla's jaw tightened. She had noticed the attention-the way a rabbit notices the hawk's shadow.

"She's being kind," Myla said. "Lady Alicent is kind to everyone."

"Lady Alicent is polite to everyone. Polite is a nod in the corridor and a 'good morning.' Polite is not seeking out a specific maid three times in a week and asking about her family. That is something else."

Myla straightened the pillows. Fluffed them twice. Set them back.

"I don't know why she's taken an interest in me," she said, and the words were true-honestly true, because Myla had turned the question over in her mind a dozen times and found no answer that satisfied her. She was not beautiful. She was not clever in the way court people valued. She was a maid. She made beds and carried water and emptied chamber pots and kept her mouth shut, and those were not qualities that drew the attention of the Hand's daughter.

"Well," Brianel said, leaning forward with the eagerness of a woman who had been waiting for exactly this opening, "whatever the reason, I want you to know that I am happy for you. And I want you to know that if there are any... secrets-anything you've learned, anything you've heard, anything that might explain why the daughter of the Hand of the King has decided that you, out of every servant in the Red Keep, are worth her time-I would very much like to hear them."

Myla looked at her. Brianel's face was open and friendly and completely transparent in its desire. She was not being cruel. She was not being manipulative, at least not in the way court people were manipulative, with layers and angles and hidden purposes. She was simply curious.

"There are no secrets," Myla said. "I make the bed. I carry the water. Lady Alicent is being kind. That is the whole of it."

"Hmm," Brianel said. "Well, if you think of anything-"

"That's enough."

The voice came from the doorway. Anabes stood there, arms folded across her chest.

Anabes was in her thirties-she never said exactly how many, and no one asked, because asking Anabes personal questions was a good way to receive a look that made you feel struck.

"Brianel," Anabes said. "You have duties."

"So do you, I imagine."

"My duties don't involve pestering other girls about things that aren't their business."

Brianel's mouth opened, then closed. She looked at Anabes, then at Myla, then back at Anabes, and whatever she saw in the older woman's face convinced her that the conversation was, in fact, over. She stood, smoothed her skirts, and crossed to the door.

"I was only talking," she said, pausing at the threshold.

Brianel left. The door closed behind her. The room was quiet.

Anabes looked at Myla. Her expression softened.

"Myla."

"Yes?"

"It is not always a good thing to have the highborn look at you favorably."

Myla frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I mean the attention of the great is not a gift. It is a leash. They draw you close because they want something, and when they have it, they let go, and you are left hanging." She paused, dark eyes steady. "Lady Alicent is young. She may be kind. But her father is not kind, and what the father wants, the daughter serves, whether she knows it or not."

Myla opened her mouth to respond-to defend Alicent, perhaps, or to deny there was anything to defend-but Anabes had already turned back to the door.

"Brianel is a fool," she said, quietly enough that only Myla could hear. "She thinks the favor of the great is a ladder. It is not a ladder. It is a rope, and the rope has a noose."

She left. The door closed. Myla stood alone in the queen's bedchambers and stared at the bed she had just made.

The afternoon found Myla on the steps.

She had been sent to deliver a message to the kitchens and the most direct route took her past the small council steps. She was going down the steps, head down, her mind still turning over the morning's conversation with Brianel and Anabel, when the sound of boots on stone below her made her look.

They were coming up.

Two Kingsguard knights in white cloaks and white enamel armor led the way. Behind them, three women.

Princess Rhaenys Targaryen came first. Lady Laena Velaryon walked beside her. And behind them both, Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen.

Myla had seen the princess a hundred times. The Realm's Delight, they called her-silver-gold hair, violet eyes, the fine, sharp features of her house. She was eleven years old and she walked through the Red Keep as though it had been built for her personal use, which, in a sense, it had. Myla had served her at the table, had seen her in the corridors.

She walked like a girl who had seen something that had changed the shape of the world, and knew it, and wanted everyone else to know it too.

But it was not her walk that made Myla stop. It was not her face, or her hair, or the violet eyes that swept the corridor with a light in them that Myla had never seen before.

It was her clothes.

The princess was dressed in something Myla had never seen-something that did not belong to any tailor's shop or merchant's stall or lord's wardrobe in the Seven Kingdoms. It was black-deep, true black, the black of Targaryen banners, the black of a night sky without stars-but it was not the black of dyed wool or silk or leather. It was a black that seemed to hold light rather than reflect it, alive with a quality that Myla could not name but could feel, the way one feels the warmth of a fire before seeing it. The fabric shifted as the princess moved, flowing and settling with a suppleness that no ordinary cloth possessed.

Red traced the seams-collar, cuffs, the lines that ran from shoulder to waist-deep crimson, the red of blood and dragonfire and House Targaryen. The design was elegant and alien at once, form-fitting and built for movement, suggesting both armor and gown, practical and beautiful in equal measure. A cloak hung from her shoulders, lighter than it should have been for its size, lined in red, clasped at the throat with a fastening Myla could not quite see.

And over the princess's heart, rendered in lines of deep red that seemed to hold their own quiet light, was a symbol.

Myla's breath caught.

She knew that symbol.

The princess was wearing the symbol of her little brother.

And then the clothes moved.

The fabric of the princess's garment began to change. The color held, black and red, steady and true. But the shape of it shifted-the collar widening, the sleeves thinning, the cloak drawing tighter against the shoulders, the whole garment adjusting itself to the warmth of King's Landing the way a living thing adjusts to its surroundings. The heavy, insulating quality that the clothes must have possessed in the cold of the North softened and thinned, becoming something lighter, more breathable, suited to the summer heat of the capital. It was as if the clothes were alive-as if they could feel the temperature of the air and the body beneath them and reshape themselves accordingly.

Myla heard Brianel gasp beside her. She had not known Brianel was on the steps-had not noticed her, had been too focused on the princess and the symbol and the impossible, shifting fabric.

"Seven hells," Brianel breathed, and grabbed Myla's arm.

The princess did not seem surprised. She did not look down at her clothes, did not touch the fabric, did not acknowledge in any way that anything unusual had happened. She walked up the stairs with her chin lifted and her eyes forward, and the expression on her face was pride.

Behind the three women, two guards in the livery of the Red Keep carried a chest between them. It was heavy-the guards' faces were strained, their steps careful, the muscles in their arms taut with the weight. The chest was bound in iron, locked, and unremarkable in every way except the care with which it was being transported. Whatever was inside it was valuable.

The procession passed. The Princess Rhaenys turned. Her voice carried the flat, unyielding authority.

"Return to your duties," she said. "All of you."

The servants scattered. Myla did not scatter. She stood on the step where the procession had passed her, her hands at her sides, her heart hammering against her ribs.

Brianel turned to Myla, eyes wide, face flushed, mouth already forming the question.

"Where," she whispered, "could I get garments like that?"

Myla could not answer. Her mouth was open and her mind was empty.

"Princess Rhaenys," Brianel was saying, her voice low and eager, "looked like she'd swallowed a lemon. And Lady Laena-did you see her face? She kept looking at the princess's clothes like she wanted to tear them off and wear them herself. And the way they just-changed. Like they were alive. Like they were-Myla? Myla, are you listening?"

"Myla?" Brianel's hand touched her arm. "Are you all right? You've gone white."

"I'm fine," Myla said. Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone standing very far away. "I need to go."

She left Brianel on the steps and walked quickly toward the kitchens, her mind turning over and over the same impossible, insistent question: What had happened at the Wall?

The evening settled over King's Landing in the usual way-the heat of the day giving way to a warmth that was merely uncomfortable rather than oppressive, the streets filling with the sounds of commerce and conversation and the endless, restless movement of a city that never truly slept. Myla walked the familiar route from the Red Keep to the Street of Flour with her hood up and her eyes down, moving through the crowds.

The green door appeared at the end of the street, its paint chipped and fading, the iron handle worn bright by years of hands. Myla opened the door and stepped inside.

The room was exactly as it always was-small, warm, smelling of bread. Rosey stood at the hearth, stirring a pot of something that smelled of onions and barley. She turned when the door opened, and her face did what it always did when Myla came home-softened, just slightly, the lines around her eyes easing, the worry that lived permanently in the set of her mouth releasing for the space of a breath.

And then Myla saw Tomlyn.

He sat at the table, his hands wrapped around a cup of ale he had not touched. He was broader than she remembered-harder, the softness of youth ground away by years on the road, replaced by something angular and weathered. His nose was still the same squashed, broken thing it had always been, and for a moment the familiarity of it hit her like a fist, and she was 10 years old again, watching her brother ride away on a grey mare behind a hedge knight.

"Tomlyn!" She crossed the room in three strides and threw her arms around him. He was stiff for a moment and then his arms came up and held her, and he smelled of horses and road dust.

"You're home," she said, her voice muffled against his shirt. "Why didn't you send word?”

"I only arrived this morning," he said. His voice was rougher than she remembered.

Myla pulled back. She held Tomlyn at arm's length and looked at him-really looked, the way a sister looks at a brother she has not seen in too long, cataloguing the changes and the constants, the things time had touched and the things it had not.

"Why aren't you with Kallen?" she asked.

Tomlyn's face changed. The softness that had come from holding his sister drained away, replaced by something harder-bitterness.

"Kallen left me behind," he said.

Myla frowned. "He left you?"

"He went north alone-didn't ask me, didn't wait for me, just... In the middle of the night, while I was sleeping, like I was nothing. Like the years I spent with him were nothing." His hand tightened. "I decided to come home. He left both of us. Melisandre-she-" Tomlyn paused, choosing his words. "She went her own way after. Said she had things to do in King's Landing. She's somewhere in the city. I don't know where."

"And you came home."

"I came home." Tomlyn said it flatly. "What else was I supposed to do? Sit in the woods and wait for a boy who can run faster than a horse to decide he needs me again?"

Rosey turned from the hearth, her face set in the expression Myla knew well.

"You are being a fool," Rosey repeated, her voice firm and steady. "It is obvious that Kallen left because he is trying to protect you. Whatever is beyond that Wall, whatever he went to find, he decided it was too dangerous for you to follow. And rather than argue with you-because arguing with you is like arguing with a wall, and the wall is more reasonable-he left in the night so you would have no chance to follow."

Tomlyn's jaw tightened. "It is the duty of the older brother to protect his younger brother. Not the other way around."

Myla snorted-the sound pulled out of her by the sheer absurdity of it, the idea that the normal rules of brotherhood applied to a boy who could melt stone with his eyes.

"That applies to normal younger brothers," she said. "Not Kallen."

Tomlyn looked at her. His eyes were hard, and beneath the hardness there was something raw.

"Kallen is normal," he said, but the words had no force behind them.

"Kallen is many things," Myla said. "Normal is not one of them."

The room was quiet. The fire crackled. The smell of the stew Rosey had been cooking filled the small space, thick and warm and ordinary.

Myla sat down at the table. She looked at her brother-at the lines around his eyes, the stubble on his jaw, the set of his mouth that said he was hurting and did not want anyone to know- and felt a surge of affection so fierce it was almost anger.

"Something has happened," she said quietly. "I don't know the details. But today-on the steps of the small council chamber-I saw Princess Rhaenyra wearing clothes I have never seen-some fabric that moved on its own, that changed shape. And on her chest-" Myla stopped. She looked at Tomlyn, and then at Rosey, and she said the words carefully, precisely, the way one handles something fragile. "She was bearing the S. The one from the ring."

Rosey's hand went to the edge of the table. She gripped it, her knuckles whitening, her face very still. Tomlyn stared at Myla. His face had gone pale beneath the stubble and the road dust, his eyes wide.

"The S," he said. "On her chest. You're sure?"

"I know what that symbol looks like."

Tomlyn leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. His jaw worked, the muscle at the hinge tightening and releasing.

"Does anyone at the Red Keep know I'm your brother?" he asked. "That Kallen is too?"

Myla shook her head. "People know I have two brothers. I've mentioned that much. But I've never shared your names. I've never given anyone reason to connect me to-to any of this."

Tomlyn nodded. "Keep it that way." He paused. "Can you find out what happened at the Wall? What the princesses saw? What the symbol means-why she is wearing it?"

Rosey's voice cut through the room like a blade. "No."

Tomlyn looked at her.

"No," Rosey repeated. "It is best to leave this alone. Kallen is out there, doing whatever he is doing, and he will tell us about it when he is ready. We do not need to go digging into the affairs of princesses and gods."

"She's right, Tomlyn," Myla said. "Kallen has never forgotten us. He won't start now."

Tomlyn's face twisted. "He might," he said, and the bitterness was back. "He might forget about us. He might decide he doesn't need us anymore. He might-"

Myla slapped him.

It was not a hard slap but it was sharp and deliberate, the crack of skin on skin in the quiet room.

"Kallen is not forgetting about us. Kallen has never forgotten about us. He left to protect you, you stubborn ass, and if you can't see that, then you're not the brother I thought you were."

Tomlyn looked at her. His cheek was red where she had hit him. His eyes were bright, and for a moment Myla thought he was going to shout.

"I know," he said quietly. "I know he left to protect me. I know that. I just-" He stopped. Swallowed. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do without him."

Rosey crossed the room and put her hand on his shoulder. She did not say anything. She just stood there, her hand on her son's shoulder.

Myla took a breath.

"Listen," she said. "Lady Alicent-the Hand's daughter-she has taken a shine to me. I don't know why. She has been seeking me out, asking about my family, my life. It is strange, and I do not trust it entirely, but-" She paused, weighing her next words. "Maybe I can use that. Maybe I can learn what happened. What the princess knows. What the small council is saying."

Rosey's face tightened. "Myla-"

"I know," Myla said. "I know it is dangerous. I know the highborn do not notice the lowborn without reason. But if something has happened with Kallen then we need to know."

Rosey did not like it. Myla could see it in her face. But she also saw the understanding-the recognition that Myla was right, that knowledge was a weapon and ignorance was a wound.

Rosey did not give her blessing. But she did not forbid it.

Tomlyn shifted in his chair. The heaviness of the conversation was still on him, but he pushed through it.

"Brus," he said. "The blacksmith's apprentice. What happened with him?"

The change in Myla's face was immediate and volcanic. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw set. Her hands, resting on the table, curled into fists.

"Brus," she said, "couldn't keep his breeches laced, and I never want to hear his name again."

Tomlyn blinked. The vehemence was greater than he'd expected.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know."

"Now you do. Don't mention him again."

"I won't." He paused, searching for safer ground. "Aldric, then. His lady love. How are they?"

Rosey's eyebrows rose. "How do you know about that?"

Tomlyn laughed-a genuine laugh.

"Kallen heard them," he said. "With his hearing. The poor boy looked like he'd been struck."

Myla laughed.

Rosey shook her head, but she was smiling.

"They are doing well," Rosey said. "Very well. She is a good woman. Patient, kind. She suits him." She paused, something shifting in her expression-a warmth, a softness, the glow of a woman delivering news she'd been saving for the right moment. "He is going to be a father."

"Good for him," Tomlyn said. "Good for him. He deserves it." He paused. "Should we tell him? About Kallen?"

Rosey considered this. "He will want to know," she said. "He has a right to know. Kallen is his charge as much as ours-he carried that boy's secret for years, and he has earned the right to know what the boy is doing with it now." She nodded slowly. "I will talk to him tomorrow."

Myla looked at her mother-at this woman who had taken in a child fallen from the stars and raised him as her own, fed him, loved him, kept his secrets, and watched him grow into something she could not follow and did not try to hold-and felt, beneath the fear and the confusion and the weight of everything she had seen that day, a deep and unshakable gratitude.

They were a family. And whatever came next-whatever Kallen was doing beyond the Wall, whatever the symbol on the princess's chest meant, whatever Lady Alicent wanted from Myla, whatever Daemon Targaryen was doing in the east-they would face it together.