Learning to live with his dreams is already battle enough for Daeron Targaryen's tastes. Yet he is the blood of the Dragon, and the nest he came from is not a very quiet one. Forced to navigate both his family and his true dreams, Daeron will need to gather all his wits about him to handle reality... even if that reality includes a servant girl who does not set much stock in the whims of a Targaryen scion.
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He hears it as he walks, no matter how well he draws his hood over his ears. That rush of wings – heavier than any wind he has ever felt in his life – and then a meadow’s silence soon after. His ears can pick out a bird’s fading tune, the squelch of mud underfoot, the quiet they’d always told him would herald a dragon’s coming. Once a dragon decided to leave, boy, he’d been told, long ago, you would have known its passage by the anguished screams it left in its wake.
There are no screams in his dreams this time. Daeron supposes such is a small mercy – he does so hate when they steal too close to his ears – though he does not think their absence means the dragon will yet live. He knows it dead when he sees it. A great black beast, felled upon soil and stone. Fallen atop a knight, of which he still thinks are too many in this world. He believes he knows the dragon’s eyes – fluttering in their gaze, then staring at naught at all – and he turns his face away from the great red mass that spills from its head.
He hears its heralding over and over. Stronger now, no matter how often he takes to drink. Stronger here, which he’d suspected it would be the closer they’d drawn to Ashford.
Would that his father had not found him until the tourney and nameday were all but concluded, but Daeron cannot fault the man for simply wandering into each inn in Ashford’s vicinity in the hunt for him. Such is the manner of a drunken firstborn, after all. He can always be found in the simplest of places. Jousting with cups instead of lances.
He already knows what his father would say, if he bothered to learn the reason for his son’s perpetual drainage of cups. There are no more dragons! He can almost hear his father’s biting exclamation before it is drowned out by that heaviest of all wingfalls that would make a liar of his old man.
Daeron blinks away the sight of a dead dragon. Wonders, not for the first time, what it means that they are gone and yet he remains. His is a family of mummer’s dragons these days. His tread on the ground all but confirms so. And now it seems that their wings span the whole of this meadow that stretches out at his back. His own lie a shadow residing in the dim dark of his brother’s greater one. His own death but a trinket for his brother to toy with, if it comes to that, and no amount of wine will drain the fear of such madness.
He means not to die on the morrow. Perhaps this is why he has taken to wandering. Why he lets his shadow grow taller on the walls of Ashford’s keep, now, and prays no wings will unfold from his back.
A shout echoes instead. “Halt! Halt I bid!”
He pauses on his next step. Recognizes the voice to be that of a woman, melodic but yet sharp. Knows it rose somewhere at his back, but he has not passed her on this night. It is enough to make him blink with confusion. Enough to make him burrow deeper into his cloak as well.
“Turn around, ser,” she says, and he hears the last of her footfalls die down behind him. “Now is not the time for shadows.”
He scoffs out a small laugh. “Is it not?”
“Aye, we do have those aplenty.” She sounds not too terribly distraught by that. “But you are a stranger here, and strangers are not granted their use.”
Daeron does not wish to quarrel with a tone such as this. His cloak does not loosen, but he can manage a turn on his heel just fine. Can manage a glance at her, even, though she already drops into a curtsy at the first glimpse of him. A servant girl in servant’s garb. Dark hair braided up and out of the way. Her cuffs are dyed in the garish Ashford orange, which he only sees because time spent around Aerion is ill-survived unless one troubles himself with what is concealed in hands.
Her hands are empty.
“What would you have done”– he says, speaking louder than her apologies and her obvious recognition of him –“were I to have refused to reveal myself?”
The girl shrugs. “Screamed, ser. I can be loud.”
“And if I’d bade you silence?”
“I serve the Ashfords, ser.” Not you. He can see it in the set of her jaw, in the coil of her hand turned fist. “I would bid for your understanding in my reluctance to permit any man to pass through these halls without showing who they are. The trial has made many look askance at one another, if you’ll permit me saying so.”
Daeron inclines his head. “My brother enjoys his… matters of discord.”
“Such matters do serve to make Lady Gwin’s nameday a particularly memorable one, ser.”
He blinks. Grapples a moment with Lady and Gwin before he recalls Ashford’s daughter, who’d subtly wrinkled her nose at the sight of him only a few hours ago. She’d been a Gwin, had she not? Valarr had all but stepped on his toes to get him to muster something polite to the girl. Valarr does rather a lot of those sort of things – all courtly and knightly courtesies, all polite demurrals – though he supposes Valarr will one day be named King of the Andals and all the rest of that. It would be a rather sorry affair if he became that without knowing the value of being polite.
“Lord Ashford’s daughter, ser,” says the servant girl.
Daeron’s laugh dances upon his breath. “I do recall, thank you.”
“Of course you do,” she agrees, though her up-and-down-and-back-up-again look at him speaks otherwise. “Can I do anything for you, Prince Daeron? Fetch you anything?”
The strongest drink you have. “A prayer, mayhaps.”
“Would you like it now or on the morrow, ser?”
“Perhaps two prayers will not go amiss.” He exhales another laugh. He’s always believed it’ll be a long ways yet before anyone in his family learns to breathe fire, though Aerion has no such reservations. Daeron is still safe, even though he may be bound to his doom. “If I can trouble you for two, lady…?”
“Oh, none of that! Please, ser, not all us servants are secretly more than what we seem.” Her own laugh is more tentative. She hides her greatest smile by ducking her head, though he still spies a dimple in both cheeks. “I am named Lora, ser. Lora Flowers.”
A bastard born to the Reach, then, in a time when being a bastard is a dangerous affair. Of course she would not dare ask if that pleases him, not when the Blackfyres and Rivers had made a merry mess of all the realm’s comings and goings. The girl – nay, young woman – before him would remember such things well enough. Perhaps better than he, though he has dreamed of the sword and raven many a time.
“Lora,” he muses aloud, omitting Flowers swiftly and decisively, “I mean not to die on the morrow, Lora.” He’s aware of how hollow his voice sounds. How shrouded in his own dark he has become, burrowing into his cloak, as if this can hide him from divine recompense. “I mean not to…”
Not to witness a rise and fall of wings. Not to watch the world freeze, then fall atop a knight whose face he first saw in an inn not too long past. Not to watch another dream be birthed, and be left to wonder which dream will follow its passing.
Her voice is as quiet as a mouse’s pitter-patter underfoot. “I will pray for you, Prince Daeron, if you still wish it.”
She has heard his omission, then. “Pray for me as you pray for us all, Lora,” he asks as he turns his face away. The realm has heeded the prayers of bastards long before it ever heeded the demands of the dragon. “We may yet have need of such a thing.”
He leaves her then, this young woman with her bright orange cuffs and the twine bound in her hair. Believes he could pick her out of the crowd on the morn, though it seems equally likely she would not attend at all. He can already imagine asking his father where it is that servants go. Can imagine the answer, too. In ditches you will not sleep in, boy, and in castle halls mired in filth. Where else would they go?
Where else indeed, father, muses Daeron. He may well ask Lora such a matter if he lives longer than his darkest thoughts allow. Hopes it might be a sight better than a dragon’s nest that has been usurped by vipers.
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