Scene 1: The Starvation
Location: King's Landing, Flea Bottom.
Time: Two weeks after the Council at Riverrun.
The city did not smell like a city. It smelled like a cage where too many animals had been trapped for too long.
Siro pulled the hood of his roughspun wool cloak lower over his face. He wasn't the man who had drunk wine with a Lord Paramount in Riverrun. He wasn't the future Master of Whispers. Today, he was just a man with a limp and a hungry look, indistinguishable from the thousands of other desperate souls washing through the gutters of the capital.
He moved through the Gate of the Gods with the morning crowd. The air was thick with the shouting of guards and the bleating of livestock.
"Move it, scum!" a Gold Cloak roared, shoving a farmer whose cart had a broken wheel. "Clear the gate! The supply wagons are coming!"
Siro watched as a line of heavy wagons lumbered past. They bore the rose sigil of House Tyrell, but they weren't stopping in the markets. They were rolling straight up the Street of Seeds, headed for the Red Keep or the barracks.
The farmer scrambled to pull his cart aside. "My Lord, please! A toll! I have onions! Good onions!"
The Gold Cloak laughed, a harsh, metallic sound. He didn't ask for a coin. He reached into the cart, grabbed a handful of onions, and stuffed them into his pouch. Then he kicked the farmer in the shin.
"Consider that your toll," the guard spat. "Be glad I don't take the cart for the King's defense."
Siro kept walking, his eyes darting left and right. Rats don't fight wolves, he reminded himself. Rats watch.
He passed into the main thoroughfare, and the reality of the war economy hit him like a physical blow.
Hyper-inflation had turned the markets into a battlefield. The war had severed the trade routes from the Riverlands. The North was hostile. The Vale was closed. The Reach was sending food, yes, but it was being funneled into the bellies of the soldiers and the courtiers. The common people were fighting over crumbs.
Siro stopped by a baker's stall near the base of Visenya's Hill. The baker was a massive man with forearms like hams, clutching a cudgel as he watched the crowd with paranoid, bloodshot eyes.
There was bread on display—black, heavy loaves that looked more like stones than food.
"How much?" a woman asked. She was dressed in the faded velvet of a merchant's wife, but her face was gaunt, the skin stretched tight over her cheekbones.
"Four stags for a loaf," the baker grunted.
"Four?" the woman cried, her voice cracking. "It was three yesterday! This is robbery!"
"This is war, woman," the baker sneered, banging his club on the counter. "Flour is scarce. Wood is scarce. The King takes his share first. You want it or not? There's ten people behind you who do."
The woman looked at the silver stag in her hand—a coin that, a year ago, could have bought a suckling pig. Now it wasn't enough for a loaf of black bread. She wept, clutching the coin to her chest, but she didn't leave. She began to haggle, her dignity forgotten.
Siro moved on, descending the slopes toward Flea Bottom.
The architecture changed. The stone manses of the merchants gave way to timber tenements that leaned against each other like drunkards, blocking out the sun. The streets narrowed into claustrophobic veins of mud and filth.
Here, the mud was black. A slurry of human waste, rotting garbage, and ash.
But it wasn't quiet. It was terrifyingly loud.
Flea Bottom was a pressure cooker. People were everywhere—shouting, arguing, pushing. There was a manic energy to the misery. Men with wild eyes stood on crates, screaming about the "Usurper."
"He eats the dead!" a preacher in tattered robes shrieked, pointing a bony finger at the crowd. "Robert Baratheon is a demon sent by the Stranger! He will burn your homes! He will rape your daughters! We must fight! We must bleed for the Dragon, or the Stag will gore us all!"
Siro watched the crowd. They were nodding. They were terrified.
Propaganda, Siro realized. Aerys scares them, but they know Aerys. They don't know Robert. And the unknown is always worse.
He turned down an alleyway known as the Pig's Run. It was so narrow his shoulders brushed the slimy walls on either side.
He saw a "butcher" shop. It was a plank of wood set up on two barrels.
There were no pigs. There were no cows.
Hanging from iron hooks were rats. They were skinned, their long, pink tails swaying in the stagnant breeze.
"Fresh," the butcher croaked. He had a patch over one eye and sores on his lips. "Caught this morning in the flour store. Big ones. Grain-fed."
Siro looked at the meat. It was grey and stringy.
"How much?" Siro asked, pitching his voice to the rough rasp of a common laborer.
"Copper star for the small ones. Silver moon for the big bitch," the butcher said, pointing to a rat that looked like it had been the size of a cat.
"Steep," Siro muttered.
"Meat is meat," the butcher said, wiping a bloody knife on his apron. "Unless you want 'Bowl of Brown.' I hear they're using boot leather in the pot today."
Siro turned away, his stomach twisting. He had eaten hardtack and dried beef on the road, but the hunger here was contagious. It hung in the air like fog.
He walked deeper into the slum. He saw Gold Cloaks moving in pairs, never alone. They walked with their hands on their sword hilts. They weren't patrolling for crime; they were patrolling for dissent.
He saw them stop a group of young men—boys, really, no older than sixteen.
"You," the sergeant barked. "Why aren't you at the drill?"
"My mother is sick," one boy stammered. "I was getting water."
"The King needs spears, not nurses," the Gold Cloak said. He grabbed the boy by the collar and threw him toward his partner. "To the barracks. You'll learn to hold a pike today."
The boy struggled, but the partner cracked him across the face with a gauntleted hand. The boy went limp, and they dragged him away.
The city will fight, Siro realized. Not because they love the King, but because the King has a boot on their neck and a sword at their back.
He kept walking until he reached the public squares where the water fountains stood. This was his true objective.
The fountain in the Square of the Lamb was dry. The stone spout shaped like a fish's mouth was full of dust.
A group of women stood around it with empty buckets, their faces hard with anger.
"Where is the water?" Siro asked, feigning ignorance. "I'm parched."
"Gone," a woman spat. "Three days now. The pipes are dry."
"Is the river low?"
"River's full," the woman said, pointing toward the rush. "It's the pipes. Blocked. Or diverted."
"Who would divert water in a drought?" Siro asked.
The woman lowered her voice, looking around nervously. "The Wisdoms. The pyromancers."
Siro stiffened. "The Alchemists? Why?"
"They took the cisterns near the Dragonpit," the woman whispered. "My husband works the drainage. He says they sealed off the aqueducts. He says they're brewing something down there. Something that needs a lot of water to keep cool."
"What kind of something?"
"Don't know," she said, clutching her bucket. "But the smell... sometimes, at night, when the wind blows from the grates... it smells like old spices. Like oil and rot."
Siro nodded, slipping away from the crowd. Oil and rot. And heat.
He moved toward the lower levels of the city, toward the drainage outputs near the Blackwater Rush.
If the Alchemists were hoarding water, they were doing it for a reason. And if they were blocking the city's supply to do it, the scale must be massive.
The entrance to the main sewer outflow was barred with an iron grate, but the metal was old and rusted. Siro found a section where the bars had been bent outward—likely by smugglers or the desperate homeless.
He squeezed through the gap.
The smell inside hit him instantly. It wasn't just sewage. It was the sharp, chemical tang the woman had mentioned. It stung his eyes.
He waded through the muck. The water level was dangerously low. The flow was a trickle where it should have been a torrent.
Siro moved deeper, pulling a vinegar-soaked rag over his nose. He wasn't Master of Whispers yet, but he knew how to navigate the bowels of a city. He followed the tunnels upward, toward the slope of Aegon's High Hill.
He passed alcoves where entire families were living in the dark. They huddled around small fires made of dried dung, their faces pale and ghostly. They didn't look at him. They were too busy trying to exist.
Siro climbed a maintenance ladder, moving toward a junction that ran beneath the Guildhall of the Alchemists.
The air grew hotter here. The chemical smell grew stronger, tasting of pepper and sulfur.
He reached a section of the tunnel that had been recently worked on. New brickwork blocked an old passage. But there was a gap near the ceiling—a ventilation shaft that hadn't been fully sealed.
Siro climbed up the slippery stones. He peered through the gap.
It was too dark to see clearly. The room beyond was vast, a cellar of some kind.
He couldn't see jars. He couldn't see the "substance."
But he could hear.
He heard the sound of liquid sloshing. He heard the clink of glass against glass.
And he heard a voice. High, reedy, and echoing.
"...careful with the temperature. If it rises, we lose the whole batch."
"The water flow is insufficient, Wisdom," another voice replied. "The city is sucking the pipes dry."
"Then cut the city off completely," the first voice snapped. "The King's work takes precedence over peasant thirst. Seal the secondary valve."
Siro dropped back down into the sewage, his heart hammering against his ribs.
They were cutting off the water to the entire district to cool whatever they were making.
He waded back toward the exit, his mind racing. He didn't know what it was - not for certain. But he knew it didn't seem all good.
He knew the city was starving. He knew the Gold Cloaks were conscripting children. And he knew that beneath the streets, the King's wizards were brewing something so volatile it required the city's lifeblood to keep it from exploding.
He scrambled out of the grate and up the riverbank, gasping for fresh air.
He looked up at the Red Keep. It loomed over the slums, magnificent and terrible.
They will fight, Siro thought, watching a banner of the three-headed dragon snap in the wind. They will fight because they are trapped.
He began the long limp back to his safehouse. He had to send a runner. Robert needed to know. The city wasn't just a fortress to be besieged. It was a pressure cooker, and Aerys had just welded the lid shut.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 21: Infiltrating the Crown
Scene 2: The Spider
Location: The Street of Silk / The Mud Gate.
Time: Three days later.
King's Landing was a city of secrets, but some secrets were louder than others.
Siro sat on a rooftop overlooking the Street of Silk. It was raining—a cold, miserable drizzle that slicked the slate tiles and turned the streets below into rivers of muck. He was wrapped in a cloak the color of wet soot, blending perfectly with the chimney stack behind him.
He wasn't watching the brothels for pleasure. He was watching the flow of information.
Robert had asked him to find the cracks in the armor. To do that, Siro first had to understand the armor. And the armor of King's Landing wasn't made of steel; it was made of whispers.
He had spent the last three days mapping the invisible veins of the city. He had seen the Gold Cloaks taking bribes. He had seen the Pyromancers hoarding water. But today, he was hunting the most dangerous predator in the capital.
The Spider.
Siro shifted his weight carefully, keeping his profile low. He had his eyes fixed on a specific alleyway between a high-end brothel called The Silken Peacock and a wine sink.
At exactly noon, a beggar boy sat down in the alley. He looked like any other street urchin—dirty face, rags, picking at a scab on his knee. He held out a wooden bowl, muttering for coppers.
Five minutes later, a man exited the brothel. He was a merchant, judging by his velvet doublet, likely a supplier of linens or spices. He looked around nervously, then tossed a coin into the boy's bowl.
But he didn't just walk away. He paused. He muttered something low, barely moving his lips.
The boy didn't nod. He didn't look up. He just kept picking at his scab.
The merchant hurried away.
Ten minutes later, the boy stood up. He didn't count his coins. He walked to the back of the alley, slipped through a gap in the fence, and vanished into the labyrinth of Flea Bottom.
Siro moved.
He didn't follow on the ground. The ground was where the eyes were. He stayed on the roofs, leaping across the narrow gaps between the tenements, his soft-soled boots making no sound on the wet tiles.
He tracked the boy from above. He watched the "little bird" flit through the city, passing messages not by hand, but by presence.
The boy stopped at a well near the base of Aegon's High Hill. He placed a small stone on the rim of the well, then walked away.
Moments later, a washerwoman approached the well. She picked up the stone, dropped it in her pocket, and filled her bucket. She walked up the hill, toward the servant's entrance of the Red Keep.
A chain, Siro realized. A living chain.
The beggar hears the rumor. The beggar signals the washerwoman. The washerwoman takes it into the castle.
Siro followed the chain all the way to the Lion's Gate. He couldn't enter the Red Keep—that was suicide—but he could watch the output.
He found a perch on the ruins of an old sept that overlooked the Hook. From here, he could see the garden walls of the Keep.
He saw him.
Varys.
The Master of Whispers was walking in the lower gardens, smelling a rose. He was dressed in soft lilac silk, moving with a gliding, effeminate grace that made him look harmless. He was powdered, perfumed, and soft.
But Siro saw the truth.
A child—no older than eight, with the tongue cut out, if the rumors were true—ran out from the hedges. The child tugged on Varys's sleeve and handed him a small scroll of parchment.
Varys read it. He smiled. He patted the child on the head and gave him a sweetmeat from his pocket.
Then Varys burned the parchment in a nearby brazier.
Siro shivered. It was efficient. It was terrifying. The Spider didn't need spies in every room; he just needed the children. Who notices a child playing in the corner? Who stops talking when a servant refills their wine?
Varys had weaponized the invisible people.
If I try to build a network here, he will find me, Siro realized. His web is too thick. I can't out-spy the Spider.
Siro pulled back from the edge. He couldn't beat Varys at the game of whispers. Not yet.
But Robert didn't need whispers. Robert needed a door.
If the eyes are everywhere, Siro thought, then I must go where there are no eyes.
He descended from the rooftops and made his way toward the river.
The walls of King's Landing were formidable. The seven gates were heavily guarded. The Gold Cloaks were corrupt, but they were numerous. Bribing a gate captain was risky; one slip, and Varys would know within the hour.
Siro needed a physical breach.
He spent the afternoon walking the perimeter of the Blackwater Rush. The river was the city's lifeline, but it was also its toilet.
He found the Mud Gate. It was chaos. Refugees were trying to get in; merchants were trying to get out. The guards were beating people back with the shafts of their spears.
"Turn back!" a captain shouted. "City is closed to non-residents!"
Siro watched a family of Riverlands refugees wailing as they were turned away. The father tried to offer a silver coin. The guard took the coin and shoved the man into the mud anyway.
No entry there, Siro noted.
He moved west, following the walls until they met the river.
Here, the ground was marshy. The smell was atrocious—the output of the tanners and the dyers.
Siro waded into the reeds. The water came up to his waist. It was cold and thick with sludge.
He was looking for the storm drains.
King's Landing was built on hills. When it rained, the water had to go somewhere.
He found a grate half-submerged in the muck. It was thick iron, rusted but solid. He pulled on it. It didn't budge.
Dead end.
He moved further down the bank. The sun was setting, casting long, bloody shadows across the water.
He found a second outlet near the Fishmarket. This one was larger—a brick archway that spewed effluent into the river. There was no grate.
Siro stepped inside.
The tunnel was slick with algae. The air was heavy with foul smell. Rats—live ones, the size of small dogs—scuttled along the ledges, chittering in the darkness.
Siro lit a small lantern, shielding the light with his cloak.
He walked deeper. The tunnel curved upward, following the slope of the city streets above.
He checked the ceiling. Every fifty yards, there was a ventilation shaft leading up to the street. Most were barred. Some were too narrow for a man.
But then he found it.
A section of the tunnel where the brickwork had collapsed, revealing an old, forgotten cellar.
Siro climbed up the rubble. He squeezed through the hole.
He found himself in a dusty, dark room. It smelled of sawdust and old wine. He saw barrels stacked against the walls.
He moved to the door and listened. Silence.
He picked the lock—a simple iron mechanism—and cracked the door open.
He was in the basement of a warehouse. He crept up the stairs.
He peeked out onto the street.
He was in the Fishmarket, inside the walls.
Siro smiled in the darkness. He had found a mouse hole. It wasn't big enough for an army, but it was big enough for a strike team. Big enough for a dozen men to slip in, slit the throats of the gate guards, and open the Mud Gate from the inside.
But he wasn't done. Robert had said, "Check the gutters."
Siro went back down. He returned to the river.
He spent the rest of the night checking every inch of the waterfront. He found three more potential entry points: a smuggler's cove near the Hook (too guarded), a broken section of wall near the Tourney Grounds (too exposed), and the sewer outlet he had used earlier.
By dawn, he was exhausted. He was covered in filth. He smelled like the city's bowels.
But he had the map.
He sat on the riverbank, hidden in the reeds, washing the worst of the muck from his hands.
He looked up at the Red Keep again.
Varys was up there, spinning his webs. Varys knew what the High Lords were whispering. Varys knew who was sleeping with whom.
But Varys didn't know about the loose brick in the warehouse basement. Varys didn't know about the rusted grate near the Pisswater Bend.
Varys watched the people. Siro watched the stone.
You collect rumors, Spider, Siro thought, wringing out his cloak. I collect doors.
He stood up, his knee aching. He had the intel on the starvation. He had the intel on the Alchemists. And now, he had the way in.
But as he prepared to leave the reed bed, a sound drifted across the water. The sound of oars. Heavy, rhythmic oars.
Siro froze, crouching back into the mud. He wasn't done yet.
[End of Scene]
Chapter 21: Infiltrating the Crown
Scene 3: The Fire
Location: Beneath the Hill of Rhaenys (The Dragonpit).
Time: Late Night, same day.
The river was behind him. The escape route was marked in his mind. But Siro couldn't leave yet.
The itch in his brain wouldn't stop.
The water, Siro thought, crouching in the shadows of Flea Bottom, looking up toward the ruined dome of the Dragonpit against the moonlit sky. Where is the water?
The refugees said the pipes were dry. The washerwomen said the Alchemists had seized the cisterns.
Varys would look at this and see a political play—perhaps the Alchemists were blackmailing the city for coin, or Aerys was punishing a district for disloyalty. That was how the Spider thought. He thought in terms of leverage, favors, and secrets whispered behind fans.
But Siro didn't think like a politician. He thought like a quartermaster. He thought like a man who knew that you can't feed an army on speeches, and you can't cool a forge with threats.
If you divert a city's water supply, Siro reasoned, moving through the twisted alleys toward the hill, you aren't doing it for leverage. You are doing it for something else- baby dragon?.
Something up there was hot. Something up there needed to be kept stable.
He reached the perimeter of the Dragonpit. The ruin was a blackened shell, a monument to the death of the dragons. The great dome had collapsed long ago, but the cellars—the vast, cavernous vaults where the Targaryens had once chained their beasts—remained deep in the earth.
The area was cordoned off. Gold Cloaks stood guard, but they looked uneasy. They stood too far from the entrance, shifting their weight, glancing back at the dark arches as if they expected a ghost to walk out.
Siro didn't test the guards. He circled the hill, moving through the weeds and the rubble of the old dome.
He was looking for the intake.
If they had diverted the aqueduct, there had to be a junction point.
He found it on the north slope. A heavy iron maintenance hatch, half-buried in nettles. It was padlocked, but the lock was new. The iron was bright, untouched by rust.
Siro pulled his tools—a slender pick and a tension wrench. He worked by touch in the darkness. Click.
The lock fell open.
He lifted the hatch. A blast of air hit him. It wasn't the smell of sewage this time. It was the smell of a heavy thunderstorm—ozone, sulfur, and something sickly sweet, like rotting fruit and lamp oil.
Siro dropped into the hole.
He landed on a stone walkway. He was in the old service tunnels of the Dragonpit.
He lit his hooded lantern, keeping the shutter almost closed, allowing only a sliver of light to escape.
The tunnel was dry. The floor was dusty. But running along the center of the floor was a massive lead pipe—the main artery of the district's water supply.
Siro touched the pipe. It was cold. It was vibrating.
He followed it.
He walked for twenty minutes, winding deeper into the hill. The air grew warmer. The sweet, chemical smell grew stronger until he could taste it on the back of his tongue like copper.
Then, the tunnel opened up.
Siro extinguished his light instantly. He didn't need it anymore.
The room ahead was glowing.
He crept to the edge of a balcony overlooking one of the lower vaults—a space big enough to hold Balerion the Black Dread.
But there were no dragons here.
Instead, there was an industry of death.
The floor of the vault was occupied by hundreds of men in the distinct, roughspun robes of the Alchemists' Guild. They moved with a terrified, frantic energy.
In the center of the room stood massive glass vats, boiling and bubbling. The diverted water pipes were hooked up to copper cooling jackets wrapped around the vats. Steam hissed from the joints, filling the ceiling with a green-tinged fog.
They were brewing Wildfire.
Siro had heard of the substance, of course. Everyone had. The "Substance." The "Jade Fire."
But the stories said the Alchemists made it in small jars. Little clay pots for magic tricks or court displays.
This wasn't a pot shop. This was a manufactory.
Siro lay flat on his stomach, peering over the edge. He watched as the Wisdoms—the senior pyromancers—decanted the glowing green liquid from the vats into clay jars.
Thousands of jars.
They were stacking them on pallets. But they weren't just stacking them for storage.
Siro squinted, his eyes adjusting to the eerie emerald light that washed out all the shadows.
He saw masons working alongside the pyromancers. They were drilling holes into the stonework of the vault. They were placing the jars into the walls. They were packing them with sand.
They aren't storing it, Siro realized, a cold horror gripping his heart. They are installing it.
He watched a team of acolytes load a cart with sand-packed jars. A Wisdom shouted at them, his voice echoing in the vast chamber.
"To the Flea Bottom Gate! And mind the bumps, you clumsy fools! If one jar breaks, you'll burn before you can scream!"
"And the Red Keep?" another Wisdom asked, marking a checklist with a quill.
"The cellar beneath the Throne Room is full," the first Wisdom replied. "The King sleeps atop the mountain now. We are moving on to the Great Sept of Baelor."
Siro felt like he couldn't breathe. The air in the vault was sucking the oxygen out of his lungs.
He looked at the operation with the eyes of a spectator.
He saw the distribution. They weren't just placing bombs randomly. They were targeting the structural weak points of the city. The gates. The Sept. The foundations of the major holdfasts.
This wasn't a defense strategy. A defense strategy is about holding walls to keep an enemy out.
This was a demolition order.
Siro pulled back from the edge, his hands trembling. He had to be sure. He needed to see the mechanism.
He crawled along the walkway, finding a side passage that led down to the storage tiers. He found a niche where the jars were being prepared for transport.
He saw a pyromancer fitting a wax seal to a jar. But before he sealed it, he placed a small, intricate glass tube into the neck.
Siro recognized the design. It was a pressure trigger. If the jar was smashed, the glass would break, the air would hit the substance, and the fire would bloom.
Siro slumped against the cold stone wall.
Varys didn't know.
The thought hit him with the force of a warhammer.
Varys, the Spider, the man who knew what the High Septon ate for breakfast and which knight was sleeping with which scullery maid... he didn't know this.
Because Varys's birds were children. They were beggars. They were washerwomen.
A child sees a jar of green liquid and thinks "potion." A washerwoman hears "burn them all" and thinks it's the ravings of a mad old man. A beggar sees a cart of sand and thinks "construction."
They didn't understand logistics. They didn't understand that the pipes were dry because the fire was thirsty.
Varys looked at the web of people. He looked at the relationships, the blackmail, the soft power.
But Siro looked at the stone. He looked at the pipes. He looked at the structural integrity of a city.
The Spider does not see the fire beneath his feet.
Varys was playing a game of cyvasse, maneuvering pieces for influence. He didn't realize that his opponent—the Mad King—had already doused the board in oil and was holding a torch.
Aerys wasn't planning to win the war. He was planning to take the game with him.
If Robert marches on this city, Siro thought, the bile rising in his throat, if he breaches the gates...
It wouldn't be a conquest. It would be a massacre.
One trebuchet stone hitting the wrong wall. One battering ram smashing the wrong gate. One fire arrow landing in the wrong cellar.
One jar breaks. The fire spreads. The next jar breaks.
Siro closed his eyes and saw it. He saw the green fire erupting from the sewers. He saw the streets of Flea Bottom turning into rivers of jade flame. He saw the Great Sept of Baelor exploding, showering the city in molten stone. He saw the skin melting off the bones of half a million people—men, women, children, spies, lords, beggars.
All burned. All equal in the ash.
The city was not a prize. It was a sacrificial pyre.
Siro forced himself to stand. His legs felt weak, but his mind was crystal clear.
He had come to King's Landing to find a way in. He had found it.
But now, he carried a secret heavier than any army.
He retraced his steps. Back through the hot tunnels. Back past the vibrating pipes. Back up the ladder to the cool night air of the surface.
He scrambled out of the hatch and locked it behind him. He covered it with nettles, hiding the entrance to hell.
He stood on the Hill of Rhaenys, looking out over the sleeping capital.
From the outside, it looked peaceful. The moonlight reflected off the Blackwater Bay. The Red Keep stood strong and proud against the stars.
It was a lie.
The city was a corpse. A hollow shell stuffed with kindling, waiting for a single spark.
Siro pulled his cloak tight around him. He didn't look back at the Keep. He didn't look back at the slums.
He began to walk.
He walked past the Dragonpit, down the Shadowblack Lane, toward the Old Gate. He had the map of the warehouse basement in his head. He had the knowledge of the weak points.
But as he slipped out of the city, using a bribe on a sleepy guard he had identified two days ago, Siro felt a profound shift in his soul.
He had always thought of war as soldiers fighting soldiers. Sword against shield. Courage against skill.
But this... this wasn't war. This was madness.
He thought of Robert Baratheon. He thought of the man who ate hardtack in the rain. The man who filtered the water. The man who wanted to build something new.
He has to know, Siro thought, his pace quickening as his boots hit the dirt of the Kingsroad, heading North.
He thinks he is coming to kill a Dragon.
I have to tell him he is walking into a volcano.
The spy vanished into the night, leaving the city to its sleep.
Behind him, King's Landing slumbered on, ignorant of the green veins pulsing beneath its streets, waiting for the heartbeat of a Mad King to stop... so the fire could begin.
[End of Chapter 21]