Chapter 163: Aegon Comes Home
DALLA
Gray morning, low cloud sitting on the river, the masts at the Mud Gate going up into nothing. Dalla had carried him the other way down this same road on a morning the same color, five months old and wrapped in her own shawl because the queen's had gold thread in it and gold thread got remembered. The war had still been burning then. Now the road was only a road, and the boy sat up on the cart bench beside her with his boots swinging clear of the boards, wanting to know why the water had houses on it.
"Those are boats," she said.
"Why?"
"So men can stand on the sea and not drown."
"Why?"
She'd been answering him since Rosby.
The day wasn't hers. A man in Ser Cole's colors had ridden down to the village a fortnight back with a date inked on a strip of parchment, and the date was this one, because the herald wanted it and the septons wanted it and two hundred people needed one morning to be ready in. She'd asked for midsummer. Failing that, three short visits first, a night, then two, then a week, so the strangeness came at him in pieces. Nobody had been unkind about refusing. They'd simply said today, and written it down.
They went in by the main entrance. Not the sally port, not the cellar stair under the kitchens where she'd been walked twice with a hood over the basket, but the wide gate the lords used, with the doors already open. Ulf had arranged that. It said something without anyone having to say it.
Aegon stopped talking at the gate. That was how she knew.
He'd been noise since Rosby, and in the outer ward he went quiet all at once and put his face into her neck. Iron on stone from the smithy, twenty horses on cobbles, dogs, a wheel screaming for grease, and above all of it the bells of Baelor's rolling out the hour so the sound came down off the walls twice. He was afraid of loud noises. He always had been. She covered his ear against the noise and turned so her body was between him and the horses, and his fist closed on her collar and stayed closed.
"Big," he said, into her throat.
"It is."
"Bigger than the boats."
"Bigger than the whole village, love. All of it. Boats and nets and Wat's pigs."
He thought about that with his heels dug into her hip. Then, in a very small voice: "I want to go home."
She didn't answer him, because the answer was standing across the yard.
Helaena came down the steps before the steward had finished announcing her, and stopped short of them, which was the right thing to have done. She was in gray wool with no jewels on her at all. Her hands went out and came back to her own waist and gripped there.
"He doesn't like the bells," Dalla said.
"They stop at the hour." Helaena knelt down on the wet stone in the gray wool. "Aegon. Do you remember the room with the candles?"
He turned his head enough to look at her with one eye. Six visits in two years, four of them by night. It was not much to build a face out of.
"You gave me honey," he said.
"I did."
His grip loosened. Dalla had to open her own fingers off him deliberately, one at a time, and then he was going across the last of the distance on his own legs and Helaena had him, and Dalla's arms were empty and still bent where he had been.
She made herself talk, because talking was better.
"He eats three times a day," she said, steady enough. "He sleeps best with the window open, even in winter. He's afraid of loud noises. Thunder, shouting, the sound of horses too close. He asks questions constantly. He'll want to know everything about everything, and he won't stop asking until you answer."
"I'll answer," Helaena said. "Everything. For the rest of his life."
Dalla nodded once, short, and got her jaw back under her before it did anything else. "Good. He deserves answers."
Inside, past the doors, the noise stopped, and Aegon lifted his head off his mother's shoulder to find out where it had gone.
The family wing smelled of beeswax and cold stone and, faintly, of roasting meat from three floors down. Jaehaera crossed the room before her mother had finished setting him on his feet.
"You're Aegon," she said. "I'm Jaehaera. You're my brother, so I have three brothers now and one of them is small. Come and see." She had his hand already. "I painted a dragon and the wing is wrong. Do you know if crabs dream? Nobody ever answered me."
Aegon looked back at Dalla. Dalla nodded at him, and the girl towed him off toward the window seat where the paintings were laid out, corners weighted with river stones, and he went, stumbling twice, because Jaehaera walked at her own pace and had not thought about his legs.
Maelor stayed where he was, behind a chair, with two fingers hooked over its arm. He watched for a long while. Then he came sideways to Dalla, not to his brother.
"Does he know how to share things?" he asked.
"Not yet. He's had nobody to share with."
Maelor took that in with his whole small serious face. Then he crossed the room, and held out the carved wooden dragon he'd been holding behind his back, and let Aegon take it without a word. Aegon put the tail in his mouth immediately. Maelor looked stricken, then decided to allow it.
Jaehaerys stayed at the edge of the room by the door, hands behind him, and did not come and did not leave. Nine years old, standing like a man at a funeral he was hosting. Twice his eyes went to the windows, to the guards on the ward below, and came back.
"He'll want feeding at midday," Dalla said. "He gets savage about it."
"Eats like a dragon," Helaena said. "You wrote that."
"Screams like one too. I wrote that as well."
Helaena laughed, and then she didn't, and she turned to the steward waiting by the door with his book open. "Ser. Write this where it stays written. Mistress Dalla of the fishing village keeps a room in this wing, hers, kept aired, whether she is in it or not. She comes at every turn of the season and oftener if she wants. She is named at table. She is not paid at a side gate and thanked and forgotten." Her voice hadn't lifted. It had only gone flat, and flat was worse. "Read it back to me."
He read it back.
Dalla stood there with her scarred hand shut around her other wrist and could not get a word up out of her chest. She'd been telling herself for a fortnight that she'd be a cart and a debt, useful until the door closed. She had rehearsed being gracious about it on the road.
"That wasn't necessary," she said.
"It was," Helaena said. "You had him first."
Dalla knelt down on the rug, which was a longer way down than it used to be, and Aegon came to her with the wooden dragon still in his fist.
"You're going to live here now, little one. With your mama and your papa and your brothers and sister. You'll like it. There are dragons."
"Dragons?" His eyes went round.
"Big ones. With wings." She got both his shoulders in her hands and held on for exactly as long as she could afford. "Be good. Be brave. And remember the fishing village, when you're old enough to remember anything."
Then she stood up and walked out while her face was still hers.
Ulf came with her to the gate, his hand on her shoulder the whole way across the ward, which was the only thanks he had that would mean anything and they both knew it.
"You saved his life," he said. "Two years of hiding. Two years of secrets. You kept him safe when the realm would have killed him for existing."
"I kept him safe because he was a child who needed keeping safe." She put her boot in the stirrup and got up in one go, which she was pleased about. "Take care of him. And take care of her. She loves you more than she loves the crown, and that's the only reason any of this worked."
She turned the horse toward the village. Behind her, through the open doors, Helaena had sat down in the middle of the floor with all four of them around her and Aegon on her lap, her face wet and no longer being managed at all.
"Welcome home," she was saying. "Welcome home."
The doors swung shut on the four of them. Riding out under the arch, she saw everything she'd spent two years keeping in two separate places now sitting behind one set of hinges and one gate and one wall, and she did not like the arithmetic of it, and there was nothing she could do about it. So she counted instead. Twelve days to the turn of the season. He'd need boots by then. She'd bring the small knife he liked, and the crab shells, and she'd ask the girl whether anyone had answered her yet.