Chapter 164: Growing Pains, Part 1
JAEHAERYS
Nobody had warned Jaehaerys that a fourth child would change the shape of the mornings.
In living memory the Red Keep had never housed four children at once, not since the Targaryens began their long slow decline, and the family wing had been built for fewer. It had felt enormous when it was only his mother and the three of them. Now there were small boots in the corridor that belonged to nobody in particular, and an argument every morning over the painted horse Maelor swore was his and Aegon carried off under one arm without asking, and a fresh dispute at every meal over who sat at their mother's right hand.
That morning the steward stood in the solar doorway with his slate and asked, again, how many places to set.
"Six," Jaehaerys said.
"Six, Your Grace."
"Mother, Father, Jaehaera, Maelor, me." He stopped. For two years the sixth name had lived in his mouth wrapped and hidden, to be spent only behind a closed door, and his voice dropped to carry it before he could catch himself. "And the boy."
The steward wrote nothing. He waited, patient, the chalk resting on the slate, because the steward did not know which boy.
Jaehaerys's ears went hot. There was no reason on earth to whisper. The whole court had heard his father claim the child in open hall. Half the realm had heard it by now, carried out on every ship that left Blackwater Bay. He'd stood there himself while it happened, in his crown, and had not looked away.
"Aegon," he said, at ordinary speaking volume, and it came out stiff, like a lesson recited. "My brother Aegon. Six places."
"Six." The steward bowed and went.
Jaehaerys stayed where he was for a moment, annoyed with himself in a way he couldn't quite name. Two years of lying was apparently a thing the body remembered after the mind had stopped needing it.
Breakfast was porridge and a great deal of noise. Maelor announced that he had learned six new words in High Valyrian and would say them all now. Nobody stopped him, so he did, and got two wrong, and looked around the table to see who had noticed. Jaehaera noticed. Jaehaera noticed everything and said none of it, only pushed her bowl aside and set her spoon down parallel to her knife.
"He's saying them at the wrong end," she said. "The words go the other way round."
"They do not."
"They do."
Their mother did not settle it. She sat with her hands around a cup of hot milk and let them get on with it, quiet, patient, her eyes moving between the two of them and never landing. Jaehaerys had caught her doing that all week. She would step in for blood or fire and for nothing smaller. When Aegon reached across the table and took the last piece of bread off Maelor's plate, she looked at Maelor. Maelor looked at her. She raised her eyebrows a very small distance and drank her milk, and Maelor tore the bread in half and gave the bigger half back, furious and dignified, and got no praise for it, which Jaehaerys thought was probably the point.
Afterward Maelor followed Jaehaerys down the corridor and asked whether kings ever needed anyone to carry things for them.
"Sometimes."
"I could carry things. I'm good at it. Better than before." He waited. "You haven't asked me to carry anything since he came."
Jaehaerys hadn't. He didn't know what to say about that, so he said he'd remember, and Maelor turned the promise over, plainly suspecting it was copper under the silver, and went off to find his tutor without another word.
The nursery courtyard caught the sun after midday. Jaehaerys sat on the warm stone of the step with his back against the wall, and Aegon sat in front of him with the wooden dragon Maelor had given him, and the whole afternoon smelled of dust and rosemary from the kitchen garden.
Aegon had decided things about the world already, with the flat certainty of a boy of two. Dragons were the most important subject there was. The carved ones counted, and the painted ones on Jaehaera's wall counted, and the real ones that went over the Dragonpit and dragged their shadows across the towers counted most of all. And Jaehaerys was the person who answered.
"Where do dragons come from?" Aegon asked, holding up the wooden dragon.
"Eggs," Jaehaerys said. "They come from eggs. The eggs are kept warm, very warm, and after a long time, they hatch."
"What's inside?"
"A baby dragon. Small, at first. Then it grows."
"Like me?"
Jaehaerys looked at him. The silver-blond hair. The violet eyes. The face turning more into their mother's every week, which was the reason two years of the boy's life had happened in a fishing village and not here.
"Like you," he said. "You started small. Now you're getting bigger. Someday you'll be as big as me."
Aegon thought about it, one finger in his own ear. "Then I'll ride a dragon."
"Maybe. If you're brave enough."
"I'm brave." He clutched the wooden dragon against his chest with both arms. "I'm very brave."
"I know you are. Now come on. Mother says it's time for dinner."
Aegon didn't move. That was, apparently, an answer.
Jaehaerys tried a different door. "Hands out," he said. "Flat. Like this."
He laid his own hand palm-down on his knee, and put Aegon's small hand on top of it, and his other hand on top of that, and Aegon's other hand on top of that, a stack of four. Their father had taught him this on a bad night the winter he was six, when the shouting downstairs wouldn't stop and neither of them could sleep.
"Now the bottom one comes out," Jaehaerys said, sliding his hand free and slapping it down on top of the pile, "and goes on the top. Then yours. Fast as you can. When it gets too fast, you've lost."
They went slowly four times. On the fifth Jaehaerys sped up and Aegon shrieked and pulled both hands away and lost completely, and the sound that came out of him bounced off three walls of the courtyard and startled a pigeon off the parapet.
Nobody hushed him. That was the strange part. Two months ago a laugh that loud from that child would have emptied the corridor of servants and sent someone running for Ser Cole.
"Again," Aegon said, already stacking his hands wrong. "Again, again."
Their mother had come out onto the gallery above with Jaehaera beside her, and did not call down. In the doorway behind them, his father's shoulder showed against the frame, not coming in, watching. The kitchens would be holding dinner. The steward would be standing over six cold places with his slate.
"Slower," Jaehaerys said, laughing, "you have to actually keep your hands there, Aegon," and put the boy's fingers back where they belonged, and started the count again.