He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 27 (Patreon)

Lord Fleabottom and his not very good time.

XXVII

A Beautiful Lie

Daemon Targaryen sat the Iron Throne.

The hall was empty. The tall windows along the eastern wall let the afternoon light in through long, slanting columns that caught the dust motes and turned them to drifting flecks of gold. Daemon stared at the far end of the hall. The doors were open-great oak doors banded with iron, tall enough for a mounted rider to pass through without ducking.

He lifted his right hand.

He turned it over, studying it. The fingers were whole. The knuckles were smooth. The skin was unbroken, unscarred. There was no stump, no phantom ache, no tightness in tendons that no longer existed, no sickening twist of bone healed wrong. The hand was there. It was his.

He made a fist. Opened it. Made it again. The fingers closed with the strength he remembered- the grip of a man who had held a sword since he was five, who had trained in the yard every morning for twenty years, who had killed with that hand and loved with it, and struck a boy in a stable with it, and felt it shatter against a face that would not break.

He reached across with his left hand and gripped his right wrist, feeling the pulse beneath the skin. Strong. Steady. Blood moved through him the way blood moves through living men, and he was living, and the hand was living, and everything was as it should be.

He wore the crown of the Conqueror. He could feel it-a weight on his brow. It was heavier than he'd imagined. Aegon had worn it like a weapon. Jaehaerys had worn it like a burden. Viserys had worn it like a mistake.

Daemon wore it like it belonged to him.

He had not taken it. He was certain of that-no memory of a conquest, a coronation, a council chamber where the lords of the realm bent the knee. The crown was simply there, the way the hand was simply there, as if it had always been. As if the world had rearranged itself around a truth Daemon had always known and never spoken: that the throne was his, had always been his, and the men who'd sat in it before him had only been keeping it warm.

The thought should have troubled him. It didn't. Nothing did. The hall was quiet, the light was warm, the crown was on his head, his hand was whole, and he was happy.

He could not remember the last time he had been happy, or the last time the word had applied to him at all. Happiness was for other men. It was not for princes married against their will to women they despised, sent to cold keeps in colder mountains to do cold duty, who had lost a hand to a boy with red eyes and a sword to a face that would not break.

But he was happy now-in his chest, in his bones, in the steady beat of his heart and the warmth of the light on his face, in the certainty, absolute and unshakeable as the throne beneath him, that everything was as it should be.

Footsteps. Light, unhurried. They echoed off the stone floor and the tapestries and the blades of the throne, growing louder, closer. Then she was there.

Rhaenyra.

She came through the doors and into the light, and the light found her the way light finds things that are beautiful-not reflecting off her so much as settling into her, as if the sun had decided that here, finally, was something worth illuminating. Her silver-gold hair hung loose past her shoulders, longer and thicker than he remembered, catching the afternoon gold until it seemed to glow. Her face was older-not the child's face he remembered from his last years in King's Landing, but a woman's face, grown into those same features and made lovelier. Her violet eyes found him on the throne with a look of such easy, unquestioning love that something in his chest cracked open and let the light in.

She was pregnant. The swell of her belly showed beneath a dark, rich gown that moved with her the way water moves with a current. She carried the child high, the way women carry when the babe is still months from coming, her hand resting on the curve of it with the unconscious, protective habit of a mother who had done this before.

His child. Daemon knew it the way he knew his own name-a son, silver-haired and fierce, blood of the dragon on both sides, heir to everything Daemon had built and everything Daemon was.

Rhaenyra climbed the steps to the throne. Her hand left her belly and found his jaw, turning his face toward hers. Her palm was warm, her fingers gentle. She looked at him with those violet eyes, and the love in them was so plain, so unconditional, that the crack in his chest widened, and something fell into it-a piece of himself he'd lost long ago and never expected to find again.

"Is something wrong?" she asked.

Her voice was the voice of the woman he had loved since before she was a woman-the voice that had called him uncle, and then called him something else, something closer, something that tasted like fire and home. It carried the concern of someone who knew him well enough to read the thoughts behind his eyes even when his face gave nothing away.

Daemon looked at her - at her hand on his face, her belly swelling with his child, the crown on his head that she did not question, the hall around them that was theirs, the way the throne was his: by right of blood and fire, and the simple, inarguable fact that this was how the world was meant to work.

"Everything is as it should be," he said.

And he meant it. He meant it the way he had never meant anything in his life.

Rhaenyra smiled-warm, knowing, faintly amused. She opened her mouth to speak-

And her clothes changed.

It happened without warning, without any of the gradual shift that marks the ordinary movement of fabric. One moment she wore the dark gown he'd seen her in- rich, ordinary, the kind of thing a queen might wear in her own chambers. The next, the gown was gone, replaced by something that was not a gown at all, not like anything Daemon had seen on any woman in any court in any city in the known world.

And on her chest-the symbol.

The symbol from the ring. The mark that had burned itself into his memory, in a storm over the Kingswood, when he'd chased a star across the sky on Caraxes and watched it slip away from him.

Daemon's face changed. The happiness cracked.

"What is wrong, my love?"

Her voice was the same-warm, concerned, carrying the same easy love it had a moment before. But her face had changed too. The smile was gone, replaced by confusion, genuine and unfeigned-the confusion of a woman who couldn't understand why her husband was looking at her like a stranger.

She cupped his face with both hands, palms warm against his jaw, fingers gentle, holding him the way she always had-tenderly, carefully, as if he were something precious that might break.

"Rhaenyra. Where did you get those garments?"

Her confusion deepened, her brow furrowing.

"Your mother gave them to me," she said.

The words landed like a blow.

My mother. His mother. Alyssa Targaryen, dead for years, burned on a pyre, her ashes scattered to the wind, her memory kept in the hearts of her sons and the histories of the maesters.

His mother had given no one anything in years. His mother was ash and memory and nothing else.

"Do you not remember?" Rhaenyra asked.

"Rhaenyra-"

"Father!"

The voice was high and bright, carrying the unselfconscious joy of a child. The footsteps that came with it were small and quick.

A girl of five, perhaps six-small, fine-boned, black hair falling past her shoulders in dark waves. Her eyes were purple, the deep amethyst of Targaryen blood.

She called him father.

The word hit Daemon like a fist to the chest. He knew, with the bone-deep certainty, that this girl was not his. He had no daughter. He had never had a daughter.

And yet she called him father, ran to him with the easy familiarity of a child who had done it a thousand times, expecting to be lifted and spun and set on a knee and told stories-and the expectation was so plain and so complete that it made its own truth, a truth in which Daemon was this girl's father whether he remembered being her father or not.

The confusion must have shown on his face, because Rhaenyra's hands tightened on his jaw, her eyes shifting from concern to something sharper.

"My love?" she said. "What is it?"

The girl hadn't noticed. She was already at the base of the throne, small hands reaching up, purple eyes bright.

"Look, Father! Look what I have!"

She held out her hand. In her palm, small and intricate and gleaming, was a mirror.

Daemon took it. His hand closed around the mirror, and he lifted it to his face.

He looked into it.

The face that looked back was not his own.

It was the boy. Grown.

Daemon was looking through his eyes. He could feel the wrongness of it.

"He takes what was meant to be yours."

The voice came from everywhere-the walls, the floor, the tapestries, the blades of the throne, the air itself. Quiet, intimate, the volume of a whisper spoken directly into the ear, but coming from every direction at once, filling the spaces between his thoughts.

"He takes what was meant to be yours."

The throne was gone. Rhaenyra was gone. The girl was gone.

The voice filled the space where the world had been.

"He takes what was meant to be yours."

Then darkness swallowed everything.

When the darkness lifted, Daemon was in his study.

Mysaria stood before the desk.

She had come back. She'd been gone for weeks-sent to Oldtown to find the boy, to watch him, to report. Now she stood in his study, white hair loose around her shoulders, her face composed in the careful neutrality she wore when delivering news she knew he wouldn't like.

"The boy has left Westeros," she said. "He and the hedge knight-Ser Tomlyn- boarded a ship in Oldtown harbor, bound for Braavos. A woman in red robes traveled with them."

Daemon looked at her. His left hand-the only hand he had, the stump of the right hidden beneath his sleeve as it always was now-tightened on the edge of the desk.

"You saw them board."

“Yes."

He stared at the desk.

Mysaria had never lied to him. In all the years he'd known her-through the beds and the arguments and the slow erosion of whatever they'd been to each other-she had withheld truth, yes. Deflected. Chosen silence over speech when speech was dangerous. But never told him an outright falsehood. It was the one thing he'd always trusted about her, the single anchor he'd fixed to her when every other quality she possessed was shifting and uncertain.

And she was lying to him now.

He could see it-not in her face, which was perfect, composed, giving nothing. Not in her voice, which was the same measured, practiced instrument it always was. But he knew her. He knew the small things beneath the surface of her control-the way her left hand hung a fraction too still at her side.

The boy could control minds.

The thought arrived whole, certain. It was the only explanation that fit. Not sorcery as the maesters understood it. Something else. Something the boy could do with his voice, or his eyes, or his presence, the way he did impossible things with his body. He could reach into a mind and make it believe what wasn't true. He could plant a falsehood so deep the person carrying it never felt the seam where the lie had been stitched into their memory. He could turn the faithful against the truth without their ever knowing they'd been turned.

Mysaria did not know she was lying. She believed every word. The boy had gotten into her head-twisted something, planted something, made her see a ship and a departure and a route to Braavos that did not exist-and she reported it as fact because to her it was fact. She wasn't betraying him. She wasn't choosing the boy over him. She was a prisoner, and the prison was her own mind, and the boy had built the walls and locked the door and thrown away the key, and she didn't even know she was inside.

The realization should have made him angry. It made him cold instead. The anger was there- would always be there, a furnace burning in the deepest part of him-but above it, containing it, was something harder and more useful. Clarity. The boy wasn't just strong, or invulnerable, armed with fire that could melt stone. He was a thing that could reach into the minds of men and reshape what it found there, and that power was worse than all the others combined, because it couldn't be fought with a sword or burned with dragonfire. It couldn't be fought at all. It could only be endured, or resisted, or broken-and Daemon did not know how to do any of those. Yet.

He looked at Mysaria, standing before the desk in her careful neutrality.

"Thank you," he said. His voice was steady. "That will be all."

Mysaria looked at him. For a moment something flickered in her eyes-he thought she might press, might ask why he was dismissing her so quickly, might sense something wrong in the way he looked at her. But the moment passed. She inclined her head, turned, and walked out.

The boy was not in Essos. He was still in Westeros. And he had the power to make people believe things that weren't true.

He could do it to Viserys. To the small council. To every lord and lady and knight and servant in the Red Keep, and by the time anyone understood what had happened, the boy would own them all.

Daemon sat at his desk in the dark and planned a war he could not fight with swords.

The scene shifted. He was in the throne room.

Standing on the floor of the hall, looking up at the Iron Throne and the man who sat upon it. Viserys. His brother. His king.

Viserys looked tired. He always looked tired now.

"You have done good work with the City Watch, Daemon." Viserys's voice carried the careful, rehearsed tone of a king delivering lines he'd practiced. "The gold cloaks are more disciplined than they've been in years. The streets are safer. The smallfolk speak well of you."

Daemon said nothing. He stood before the throne, his one hand at his side, his stump hidden, his face arranged in the neutral, attentive expression he wore for his brother.

"But the Watch is not a kingdom, and King's Landing is not your home." Viserys paused, the fatigue in his eyes deepening. "Lady Rhea is waiting for you. Runestone is waiting for you. You have a wife, Daemon. You have duties. You have-"

"I am not going back to that woman."

The words came out harder than he meant them to.

"Daemon-"

"I am not going back."

Daemon turned and walked out. The doors of the throne room closed behind him with a sound like the sealing of a tomb.

He found Garth in the yard, sharpening his sword.

"Gather a few men," Daemon said. "Good men. Ones who can keep their mouths shut and follow orders. Meet me at the docks before sunset."

Garth didn't ask where, or why. He looked at Daemon's face and nodded once.

"I'll be there," he said.

He was. Before the sun touched the western horizon that same day, Daemon Targaryen boarded a ship at the King's Landing docks with Garth and a few men loyal to the prince rather than the crown. The ship was a Braavosi trader, its captain a man who understood that gold bought silence as reliably as it bought passage, and the gold Daemon gave him bought a great deal of silence.

They sailed east. Daemon stood at the rail and watched King's Landing shrink against the horizon. He didn't look back. There was nothing behind him worth looking at. Everything he needed lay ahead, across the Narrow Sea, in the lands where magic was not a story but a commodity, where men who understood the dark arts could be found, hired, and pointed at the thing that had taken his hand and his sword and his future.

He would find something-a weapon, a spell, a force that could stand against the boy's impossible power. He didn't know what shape it would take, but he knew it existed, because the world did not allow a thing like the boy to exist without also providing a way to destroy it. That was the balance. That was the order. And if the world had forgotten it, Daemon Targaryen would remind it.

Pentos smelled of salt and spice and the cloying sweetness particular to a city grown rich on trade and complacent on its wealth. The harbor was crowded-Braavosi galleys, Myrish traders, Lyseni pleasure barges with silken sails furled like the wings of resting birds. The buildings rose from the waterfront in tiers of white stone and red tile, and the sun beat down on the terraced streets with a heat unlike King's Landing's-drier, cleaner, without the reek of half a million bodies pressed into too little space.

Daemon had been in Pentos three days. Garth was with him-always with him now, the shadow that had attached itself to the prince in the King's Landing barracks and hadn't detached since. They'd taken rooms in a merchant's house near the harbor, and Daemon had spent those three days asking questions.

On the third day, the child appeared.

He came to Daemon in the market-a boy of perhaps eight or nine, small and slight, skin the color of old bronze, eyes too large for his face. He wore a simple tunic of undyed wool, and his feet were bare, and there was nothing about him that would have drawn a second glance in any market in any city in the world.

Except his eyes. They were wrong-the color of lapis lazuli, bright, too blue, and they did not move the way a child's eyes move. Still. Fixed. Focused on Daemon with the unblinking attention of something that was not what it appeared to be.

"Prince Daemon," the child said. His voice was high and clear, carrying an accent Daemon couldn't place.

Garth's hand went to his sword. Daemon stopped him with a look.

"You have me at a disadvantage," Daemon said, his voice easy and conversational, the voice of a man who had dealt with stranger things than children in markets. "You know my name. I don't know yours."

"My name is not important," the child said. "What is important is that you're looking for something. And I know where to find it."

Daemon looked at the child. The child looked back. The blue eyes did not blink.

"Where?"

"Qarth," the child said. "The greatest city that has ever been or ever will be. The Jewel of the South, built where the Summer Sea meets the Jade Sea, where the merchants of every nation gather, and where the warlocks of the House of the Undying have practiced their art since before the Doom of Valyria."

The House of the Undying. Daemon had heard the name. The warlocks of Qarth. Men who could see through walls and across oceans and into the hearts of other men. Men who drank the shade of the evening and walked through shadows.

Men who might know how to fight a boy with fire in his eyes and skin that could not be cut.

Garth leaned close, his voice barely a whisper. "Can we trust him? This has the feel of a trap."

Daemon looked at the child. The child looked back, the blue eyes holding no malice, no deception.

"It doesn't matter," Daemon said.

Garth blinked. "My prince?"

"It doesn't matter whether we can trust this boy." His voice was flat. "Because if the people of this city don't give me what I want, I'll burn it to the ground with Caraxes and find someone who will."

The child smiled-small, knowing, approving, a smile that had no business on the face of an eight-year-old. The smile of something much older, much larger, and far more patient than a child could be.

"Then come," the child said. "The road to Qarth is long. But the warlocks are waiting."

The memories collapsed.

They folded inward, each one into the next, the way pages fold shut in a closing book-scenes and faces and voices compressing into a single point of darkness with no shape, no sound, no temperature. The throne. Rhaenyra. The girl with the mirror. Mysaria. Viserys. Garth. The child in the market. Pentos. All of it every memory, every moment, every thread of the story that had carried him here-gone, and what remained was darkness.

Daemon Targaryen opened his eyes.

He was in a room.

Small. The walls were close-he could feel them on either side, not touching but near, near enough that the air had the stale, used quality of a space breathed in too many times by too few lungs. The ceiling was low, or the darkness only made it seem so; he couldn't see it, could see almost nothing, because the light in the room was barely light at all. It came from somewhere he couldn't place-a faint blue-white glow that might have been a candle, or a crystal, or something else-enough to see by, not enough to see well, and the shapes it revealed were incomplete and misleading.

There were no doors he could find. No windows. The walls, what he could make out of them, were smooth-stone, or something like stone, without the grain or texture of any stone he'd ever touched. They seemed to swallow the faint light rather than throw it back, the way the boy's black garment had swallowed light in the dream, and the echo of that was not lost on him, and the fear building in his chest since he'd woken found the detail and fed on it.

He was chained. The chains were on both wrists. The left ended in a hand, fingers stiff and cold, the grip weak but present. The right ended in a stump, wrapped in something and the chain bit into the skin above it, chafing flesh already scarred from an amputation years old.

The hand was not whole. The dream-the throne, the crown, Rhaenyra-all of it had been a lie. A beautiful, seductive, devastating lie, built from the things he wanted most and designed to break him the moment it was taken away. .

He pulled at the chains. They didn't move-fastened to something behind him, a wall or post he couldn't see, holding his arms spread and taut. The metal was cold against his skin, and the cold climbed his arms and settled in his shoulders and hardened the fear in his chest into something colder still.

And there was hair.

It was everywhere-around him, beneath him.

His hair.

His head was bare-he could feel the air on his scalp, the cold with nothing to stop it.

They had cut his hair. Whoever had brought him here had cut it-the long, silver-gold hair of House Targaryen, the hair that marked him blood of the dragon, the hair he'd carried since birth-and left it on the floor around him like the remains of a shedding.

A man appeared.

He was bald, his head smooth and pale, the skin stretched tight over the skull, veins showing beneath it like roots beneath thin soil. His face was narrow, cheekbones sharp, nose thin and hooked. His eyes were blue-deep, vivid, wrong in the same way the child's eyes in Pentos had been wrong, too bright, too still, the color of something not natural.

And his lips were blue. The blue of the liquid in the cup he carried.

The cup was small, clay, unglazed-the sort of cup a beggar might use. The liquid inside It smelled of something Daemon couldn't name-sweet and bitter together, rich and repellent, the smell of a thing meant to be consumed and not meant to be, the contradiction itself part of the smell.

The man raised the cup to Daemon's lips.

"Drink," he said. His voice was quiet, calm. "And you will have the power to stand against the boy."

The words found the place in Daemon's chest where the obsession lived.

The power to stand against the boy.

Daemon pressed his lips together and turned his head away.

He did not want to drink because he knew, in the part of his mind that was still his own, that the liquid was shade of the evening, and shade of the evening was the warlocks' drink, and warlocks did not give it freely. They gave it to bind. To open. To take what they wanted from the minds of those who drank it.

The man's hand closed around Daemon's jaw, the grip stronger than a man that thin should have managed-strong enough to force his head forward, pry his mouth open, hold him still while the cup pressed to his lips and tilted and the dark liquid poured into his mouth, and he could not stop it.

The shade of the evening hit his tongue like something alive.

The room dissolved.

He was in the Red Keep, dragged, pulled through corridors he recognized but could not stop moving through, as though his feet were on a road with no exits. The corridor outside the small council chamber. The corridor to Maegor's Holdfast. The corridor toward the Dragonpit, where the dragonkeepers kept their charges and the walls were black with soot and the air smelled of sulfur and ash. He saw the doors, the tapestries, the torches in their iron brackets, the faces of the guards frozen mid-expression, unaware they were being seen by eyes that weren't his own. He was looking through his own eyes, but someone else was steering, someone else choosing where to look, pulling the memories out of him like thread off a spool.

Dragonstone. He knew these halls. He had walked them as a boy, exploring the castle that had been the seat of House Targaryen since before the Conquest. The memories were old - fifteen years, twenty - but clearer than they had any right to be.

The dragonkeepers' paths. The tunnels beneath the castle, where the dragons nested, where heat from the volcanic vents kept the eggs warm and the walls ran with condensation. The chambers where Syrax had been kept as a juvenile, where Caraxes had his own lair, where the wild dragons came and went through cave mouths that opened onto the sea. He saw all of it- felt the heat, smelled the sulfur, heard the deep, rhythmic breathing of sleeping dragons echoing off the stone.

And then the last one.

The place where the Cannibal nested.

The memory was old-years old. He'd gone alone, in the dark, following the sound of something breathing-deep, slow, the breath of a thing so vast that each exhale was a geological event, a shift of air and heat moving through the tunnels like the pulse of the mountain itself.

He had found the Cannibal's lair. He had stood at the edge of it-just for a moment, just long enough to see the dark shape coiled in the heat, scales black as pitch, the head enormous, jaws closed but the teeth visible, each one as long as a longsword. The Cannibal was the oldest and largest and most savage of the wild dragons, and it ate other dragons, and its lair was littered with bones.

The memory was pulled from him. He felt it go-felt the shade of the evening reach into his mind and take it, the way a hand reaches into a chest and closes around a jewel.

Daemon screamed.

The sound tore from his throat raw and endless, filling the dark room, bouncing off the walls. His body convulsed against the chains. His left hand clenched and unclenched, fingers white, tendons standing out like rope. His right arm yanked against the chain above the stump, and the pain of metal biting scarred flesh was nothing against the pain of the thing reaching into his mind and taking, and taking, and taking. His back arched. His bare scalp pressed against the stone behind him, and the cold of it was nothing against the cold of what was inside his head.

The warlock stood before him, his blue lips moving, shaping words Daemon could not hear over the sound of his own screaming. The cup was empty. The shade of the evening was inside him now, doing what it was made to do-opening him the way a man cracks an egg, spilling the contents of his mind out into hands that were not hands but shadows, and the shadows drank.

All of it. Taken. Every path he had walked, every door he had opened, every secret carried in the vault of his Targaryen blood-gone.

The last thing he knew before the dark took him again was the feeling of being emptied-the terrible, hollow, echoing emptiness of a man from whom everything of value had been taken and carried away into the night.