He Would Be A God To Them Chapter 30 (Patreon)

Sometimes life kicks you in the balls and you have to make lemonade? or something. Anyways-here is the next chapter. Not completely satisfied. Gonna be looking this over some more and maybe expand upon it during the week.

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Breakfast in the Godswood

Rhaenyra Targaryen was falling.

The wind was a wall against her face, tearing the breath from her lungs before she could draw it, pulling the scream from her mouth before she could form it. The sky spun above her-blue, grey, white, blue again-the colors smearing into streaks as the world rotated around her and the ground rushed up to meet her with the slow, unhurried certainty of something that had been waiting for her all along.

The ice was below her and she was falling toward it and there was nothing between her and the ground, nothing at all, no arms, no warmth, no boy with blue eyes who moved faster than sight-

She hit the ground.

The impact was-

Rhaenyra Targaryen sat up in bed.

She was soaked. The sheets were twisted around her legs, damp with sweat, clinging to her shins like wet rope. Her hair was loose and matted against her face and neck, silver-gold strands plastered to her skin. Her shift was plastered to her chest and her back, and she could feel her own heartbeat in her teeth, in her wrists, in the hollow of her throat.

She pressed her hands against the mattress and breathed.

In. Out. In. Out. In-

The dream was always the same. Always the same sequence: the fall, the wind, the ground rushing up, and then-nothing. .

In the real fall, the real moment, there had been a boy who moved faster than anything alive, who had closed the distance between her and death in the space between heartbeats and folded himself around her so completely that the world could not touch her. She remembered the feeling-the absolute, unquestioning safety of being held by something that would let the world break before it let her break.

The dream did not have him.

The dream never had him.

She had not told anyone about the dreams.

They had started three months after her return from the Wall-every night. Or nearly every night. Some nights were worse than others. Some nights she woke screaming, and on those nights she bit the pillow until her jaw ached and waited for the sound of footsteps in the corridor-her mother's, or a servant's, or a guard's-and the footsteps never came, because she was quiet enough, because she had learned to be quiet, because she was the blood of the dragon and the blood of the dragon did not scream in the night.

She was fourteen-had turned fourteen only recently, in fact-and the nameday had passed with the usual festivities: a feast, a tourney of minor lords, gifts of jewels and cloth, the tedious, performative generosity of a court that loved its princess the way it loved all pretty things-superficially, and only for as long as they remained pretty.

Almost three years. Three years since the Wall, since the fall, since the boy with the S on his chest had caught her and carried her through seven hundred feet of ice and set her down in a crater south of Castle Black and asked, in a voice quiet and steady and entirely unafraid, if she was okay.

She had not flown since.

Not a single time in three years had she mounted Syrax, not for a flight around the Dragonpit, not for a short circle over the Blackwater, not for anything. The thought of it-the mere thought, the idle, passing contemplation of climbing into that saddle and feeling the dragon's muscles shift beneath her and the ground fall away-made her hands shake and her chest tighten and the dream surge up behind her eyes like a tide.

She still visited Syrax. Every few days, she walked down to the Dragonpit and she would watch the dragon sleep or eat or pace the great stone floor, and Syrax would lift her great golden head and look at her with those eyes-amber, intelligent, patient, waiting without complaint for a rider who no longer came.

Rhaenyra would stand there and watch, and sometimes she would speak-High Valyrian- and Syrax would rumble, low and deep, and the sound would vibrate in Rhaenyra's chest, and she would think: I should fly. I should get on her back and fly, because I am the blood of the dragon and dragons do not sit in pits while the world turns without them.

And then she would think about the fall, and the feeling of nothing beneath her, and the ground, and her hands would shake, and she would turn and walk back up to the Red Keep without flying.

Her mother seemed glad.

Queen Aemma Arryn had never said so directly but Rhaenyra could see it in the way her mother's shoulders relaxed when the conversation turned to dragons and Rhaenyra did not mention flying. She could see it in the way Aemma watched her when she thought Rhaenyra wasn't looking.

Rhaenyra did not blame her. Her mother had nearly lost her. The whole court knew the story- or the version of the story that had been allowed to circulate, which was a thin, sanitized thing stripped of everything that mattered. The small council had been ordered to silence by the king himself, and the small council had obeyed in the way that small councils always obeyed: for about a week, and then the whispers had started, and the whispers had grown into rumors, and the rumors had spread through the Red Keep and out through the gates and into the taverns and markets and harbors of King's Landing and from there to every corner of the Seven Kingdoms.

The rumors were, of course, dismissed.

Stories from the Wall were always dismissed. The Night's Watch sent ravens about this or that impossible thing, and the small council rolled their eyes, and the lords chuckled into their wine, and the smallfolk repeated the tales with the wide-eyed credulity and knowing winks that meant they didn't believe a word of it but enjoyed the telling anyway. A crystal fortress rising from the ground? A boy who punched through the Wall? A woman made of light who called herself the Mother? Tall tales from the edge of the world, no different from the stories of snarks and grumkins and giants that wetnurses told children to keep them well behaved.

The only confirmed fact-the one thing that could not be dismissed, because it was visible, tangible, and sitting in the princess's wardrobe-was the garment.

She wore it less these days. The garment drew stares even in the Red Keep, where strange things were commonplace. But she still wore the ring.

She never took off the ring.

The ring-the dark band of alien metal with the S-shield rendered in lines of blue light - sat on her finger, pulsing with a quiet, steady rhythm all its own. The ring that had been meant for Daemon, offered as a peace offering.

Her uncle had not returned to King's Landing. The last report her father had received-and the king had received several, each more terse and more irritating than the last-placed Daemon in Pentos, where he had been for the better part of two years, engaged in what the reports described with diplomatic delicacy as "pursuing personal interests." Drinking and whoring, in other words.

Rhaenyra had not tried to contact him.

The sky outside her window was lightening. Grey to pearl to the faintest blush of pink along the eastern horizon. Dawn was coming. The day was starting whether she was ready for it or not.

She pushed the sheets back and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her feet found the cold stone floor, and the chill of it bit into her soles, and she stood and stretched and felt the muscles in her back and shoulders protest the night's contortions.

A knock came at the door.

"Come in," Rhaenyra called. Her voice was hoarse. She cleared her throat.

The door opened.

Lady Elinda Massey entered the room. She was twelve years old, small and neat, with dark hair pulled back in a braid so tight it looked painful, and brown eyes that missed nothing and judged less than they should have. She was the newest of Rhaenyra's ladies-in-waiting, appointed three months past.

Behind her came two servant girls, each carrying a steaming pail, and behind them a third with an armful of linen. They filed past Elinda without being told where to go, already at work before Rhaenyra had said a word-the tub dragged out from its corner, the water poured, the linens set warming near the hearth.

"Good morning, Your Grace," Elinda said, dipping a curtsy that was technically perfect and slightly too deep for the hour. "I trust you slept well?"

"I slept fine," Rhaenyra said.

"Your bath is nearly ready."

The water was too hot when she first stepped in, and then, a moment later, exactly right. She sat with her knees drawn up and let the servants work the sleep and the sweat out of her hair, and for a little while she did not think about the dream at all. Elinda hummed something under her breath, off-key and unselfconscious, and one of the other girls laughed, and Rhaenyra let her eyes close.

By the time she was dry and wrapped in linen, the room smelled of soap and woodsmoke instead of sweat, and the day felt, if not new, at least survivable.

Elinda crossed to the wardrobe-a massive, dark-wood thing that dominated the western wall of Rhaenyra's chambers. She opened it and stood back, waiting for the princess to choose.

Rhaenyra looked at the wardrobe. On the left side, hanging on its hook in its own section, was the garment. Black and red, the fabric shifting faintly even in the stillness of the wardrobe, the S-shield over the heart keeping a slow rhythm of its own light. It seemed to breathe. It seemed to wait.

On the right side, her dresses. Silk and velvet and cotton, in the colors of her house-black and red, mostly- with a few in green or blue or the pale ivory she sometimes wore to please her mother. Ordinary dresses. Ordinary fabrics.

She chose a dress. A simple one-dark velvet, long-sleeved, with the three-headed dragon picked out in thread along the collar. Not her finest, not her plainest.

She reached for the ring on her nightstand.

She had taken it off in the night. She slid it onto her finger. The blue light pulsed once, as if acknowledging her, and settled again into its familiar, low rhythm.

Elinda helped her dress. The laces in the back required a second pair of hands, and Elinda's were quick and practiced.

"Her Grace the Queen and Lady Alicent are breaking their fast in the godswood," Elinda said, as she tied the final knot and smoothed the fabric at Rhaenyra's shoulders.

"I'll join them," Rhaenyra said.

They left the chambers and walked the corridor toward the godswood. The Red Keep was stirring-the morning shift of guards changing in the yard, servants carrying water and linens, cooks shouting at each other in the kitchens. The castle had a rhythm, and Rhaenyra knew it the way she knew her own heartbeat, and she moved through it without thinking, Elinda a half-step behind her.

The godswood was a walled grove at the heart of the Red Keep. The weirwood stood at the center-white bark, red leaves-the carved face staring into the pool below.

Queen Aemma Arryn sat on the stone bench near the pool, a plate of bread and honey and figs balanced on her lap. She looked well-better than she had in years, Rhaenyra thought. The queen had always been fragile, prone to illness, worn thin by pregnancies that ended in grief. But the past few years had been kind to her. Her face was fuller. Her eyes were brighter. She moved with an ease that had been absent when Rhaenyra was a child, as if a weight had been lifted from her that she had carried so long she had forgotten it was there.

Alicent Hightower sat beside her. At sixteen, Alicent had grown from a quiet, watchful girl into a woman who turned heads in every room she entered. Her auburn hair was loose around her shoulders, catching the morning light, and her hazel eyes were warm as she looked up at Rhaenyra's approach. She wore a dress of pale green.

Ser Harrold Westerling stood at the edge of the grove, his white cloak bright against the dark trunks of the trees. The Lord Commander of the Kingsguard was greying now, his face lined, his movements slower than they had been in his youth, but his eyes were still sharp, and his hand still rested on the hilt of his sword with the ease of a man who had been standing guard longer than most people in the Red Keep had been alive.

"Ser Harrold," Rhaenyra said, pausing as she passed him.

"Your Grace," the old knight said, inclining his head. "Lady Elinda."

Elinda curtsied. Rhaenyra continued to the bench.

Nearby, standing at the respectful distance that servants maintained when their betters were at leisure, were two women in the livery of the queen's household. Myla-Rhaenyra knew her by sight - the quiet maid who made the queen's bed and carried her water and remembered that the queen preferred mint in her honey-water. Beside her was Brianel-with a face that seemed permanently set in an expression of eager curiosity.

"Mother. Alicent," Rhaenyra said, taking the seat Aemma indicated.

"Good morning, darling." Aemma reached over and touched Rhaenyra's hair, smoothing a strand that had escaped the night's tossing. "You look tired."

"I'm fine."

Aemma's eyes said she didn't believe this, but she let it go.

"We were just talking about Alicent," Aemma said, turning back to the table.

Rhaenyra reached for a fig. "What about?"

Aemma smiled.

"I have been wondering," the queen said, carefully, "whether her father is looking into marriage matches for her." She turned towards Alicent. "You are a woman grown now. Sixteen. It is past time, don't you think?"

Alicent's face did something complicated. A flush crept up her neck, and her hazel eyes dropped to her plate, and her fingers, which had been breaking a piece of bread, went still.

"My father has not brought the topic up," Alicent said. Her voice was even, controlled.

Aemma frowned.

Rhaenyra knew why.

Kallen.

The name sat in her chest like a coal, warm and bright and persistent.

And she suspected that Otto Hightower had looked at his daughter and looked at the future and decided that the best match for Alicent Hightower was not a lord's son but a god.

She did not like it.

But she did not say any of this.

Instead, she ate her fig and changed the subject, and the conversation moved on to lighter things the weather, the latest gossip from the court, a particularly absurd poem that Grand Maester Runciter had been tricked into reading aloud at dinner.

They were chatting when the sound came.

It was not a sound Rhaenyra had heard before. It was not thunder. This was sharper. A single, concussive crack that split the morning air like a stone dropped into still water, sending a shockwave of sound outward in every direction. It shook the leaves of the weirwood. It rattled the stones of the garden wall. It made the water in the pool tremble, and the carved face of the weirwood seemed to frown.

Aemma's hand went to her chest. "What was that?"

Alicent looked up, eyes wide. Ser Harrold's hand went to his sword, and his eyes swept the sky.

"Thunder?" Elinda said, her voice uncertain.

Rhaenyra looked up. The sky was clear.

"That was not thunder," Rhaenyra said.

"It sounded like thunder," Alicent offered.

"On a clear day?" Rhaenyra shook her head.

They looked at the sky. They looked at each other. They looked at the sky again.

"How strange," Aemma murmured, and the queen returned to her breakfast, but her eyes drifted upward once more, as if the sky had said something she was not quite sure she had heard correctly.

The conversation resumed. Rhaenyra reached for another fig and let the talk wash over her-the safe, comfortable chatter of women at breakfast, the kind of conversation that did not require anything of her except presence. But her ears were sharp, and her attention was a net cast wide, and beneath the queen's discussion of a new seamstress who had arrived from Myr, she caught another conversation.

Myla and Brianel, standing ten feet away, near the garden wall. Whispering. The kind of whisper servants use when they've forgotten a princess with sharp ears is sitting close enough to hear.

"Does your brother plan to participate in the upcoming tourney?" Brianel asked. Her voice was low, conspiratorial.

Rhaenyra's ear caught it. She knew Myla had brothers-she had mentioned them, years ago, in the vague, unembellished way that servants mentioned their families when the highborn asked. But Myla had never said their names. Rhaenyra had noticed this the way she noticed everything - not consciously, not with intent, but with the passive, all-absorbing attention of a girl raised in a court where information was currency and failing to collect it was its own kind of poverty.

"He does," Myla said. Her voice was carefully neutral. "Why?"

"I am looking for a dashing knight to sweep me off my feet," Brianel said, and the flutter in her voice was so theatrical, so exaggerated, that Rhaenyra almost laughed.

Myla chuckled. "My brother is many things, but dashing is not one of them. Now, my younger brother-he is the dashing one."

Rhaenyra's attention sharpened.

"You know," Brianel said, leaning closer, her whisper dropping to a level that suggested she was about to say something she should not, "I find it odd that you avoid saying both of your brothers' names. I don't think you have told anybody in the keep what they are called. Were they brigands or something?"

"What! No!" Myla's whisper was sharp, indignant, the sound of a woman whose family's honor had been impugned. Rhaenyra heard the fear beneath it, too-a fear that belonged to someone with something to hide, and the questions pressing closer than she liked.

Rhaenyra laughed.

The sound burst out of her before she could stop it.

The laugh shattered the whisper. Myla and Brianel both turned, faces flushing, eyes wide, and behind them Aemma and Alicent looked up from their breakfast with the startled expressions.

"Your brother is a knight, Myla?" the queen asked. Her voice carried the same gentle interest it always did.

Myla's face went through a sequence of expressions that Rhaenyra tracked. Surprise. Fear. Calculation. And then the careful, composed mask of a servant who had been asked a question she did not want to answer but could not refuse.

"Yes, Your Grace," Myla said. She curtsied. The curtsy was deeper than it needed to be, the way curtsies always were when the person making them was buying time.

"What is his name?" Aemma asked. "Perhaps we have seen him at a tourney?"

A beat. The briefest pause. The space between one breath and the next, in which Myla's eyes flickered-not to Brianel, not to the queen, but to Rhaenyra-as if checking whether the princess was listening.

"Tomlyn, Your Grace," Myla said. The word came out with a trepidation that was audible to everyone present, though its source was a mystery to all but Myla.

Tomlyn.

The name landed in Rhaenyra's mind and found nothing to grip. She knew it. She was certain she knew it-she could feel the shape of it, the familiarity of it, the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue that your mind refuses to produce.

Where had she heard it? When? In what context?

The question turned over in her mind, fruitless and maddening, and she let it go.

"I do not know the name," Aemma admitted. "But if he has a good showing in the tourney, perhaps he can join the household knights. We are always in need of good men."

Myla's face transformed. The trepidation drained out of it, replaced by open, unguarded relief.

"Thank you, Your Grace," Myla said. "That is-that is very kind."

Then the sky broke.

It started as a hum. Low, deep, a vibration that came up through the ground and into the bones of the bench and the stones of the godswood and the soles of Rhaenyra's shoes. It was not a sound the wind made.

The hum built. It rose in pitch, gaining a resonance that Rhaenyra felt in her chest, and the water in the weirwood pool began to shudder, and the leaves of the trees shook harder than any wind alone could explain, and then-

They came.

Ten shapes, low enough to see clearly. They cleared the towers of the Red Keep with room to spare, and for the several seconds it took them to cross the godswood, Rhaenyra could make out every detail.

They had no wings. Each one rode low on a hunched, armored hull. Beneath the black plating, threads of blue light pulsed faintly along their length.

They flew faster than any bird, faster than any dragon Rhaenyra had ever seen, trailing thin lines of blue-white light that lingered in the air behind them like the tails of falling stars. They made no sound she could put a name to only the deep, bone-felt hum, and the wind of their passage, which reached the godswood a heartbeat after they did and set the weirwood's leaves thrashing as if a storm had touched down and moved on again.

Every face in the godswood turned upward. Aemma's hand found Rhaenyra's wrist and gripped it. Alicent stood, her bread forgotten, her face pale. Ser Harrold had drawn his sword halfway, the blade clear of the scabbard but not raised. Elinda had both hands pressed over her mouth. Myla and Brianel stood frozen, side by side, their faces mirror images of shock and awe.

The shapes cleared the godswood. The hum followed them, fading, diminishing, sinking back into silence as the distance swallowed them. Rhaenyra would wonder, later, whether they had meant to be seen.

They were gone.

The godswood was very quiet.

No one spoke. No one moved.

Ser Harrold sheathed his sword. His hand, Rhaenyra noticed, was shaking.

"What," Aemma whispered, "was that?"

No one answered.

Alicent's face was white. She was staring at the sky where the shapes had been, her lips parted, her breath coming in short, shallow draws. Elinda was crying silently, tears running down her cheeks-the tears of a twelve-year-old frightened beyond her capacity to process it. Brianel had grabbed Myla's arm and was gripping it with both hands. Myla herself had gone very still, her face a mask, her eyes fixed on the sky with an expression that Rhaenyra could not read but that was very, very controlled.

Rhaenyra looked at them all and felt something rise in her chest that was the opposite of fear.

She was smiling. Because she knew.

Those shapes in the sky were his.