Chapter Text
Maekar was a late bloomer.
Aerys had presented at fourteen. Rhaegel at fifteen. Baelor himself at thirteen, nearly two years before they had expected it, with a calmness the maesters said was the cleanest presentation they had ever seen in a Targaryen prince. Maekar was seventeen and nothing — two years past when he should have been an alpha, walking the halls of the Red Keep with the small permanent fury of a young man who could feel his brothers smelling each other across a supper table and could smell nothing himself, who had begun, in the last summer, to ride very hard at the practice yard for very long hours and come home with bruises and not speak.
It finally came that year, in the third week of the seventh month. Maekar had been in the practice yard at sunset. He had not finished his forms. He stopped, suddenly, midswing, with the wooden sword still in his hand, and turned his head as if he had heard a voice behind him.
Quentyn Ball had taken the sword out of his hand and walked Maekar across the yard with one hand on the back of his neck. Go to your mother, lad. Now. Run.
Maekar did not run. He walked, very slowly, the long way around through the godswood so no one would see his face, and presented himself at his mother’s solar.
Myriah had known before he opened his mouth. She rose from her cushions, crossed the room, and put her wrist against his cheek as a midwife checks a fever, and nodded once, satisfied.
She walked him to his room and gave the orders herself. Cool cloths. The unguent. Water with citron. The shutters fastened. She kissed his forehead. “The first night is bad, but I will make sure you have everything you need.”
“Mother, I want Baelor.”
Myriah was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, “I will fetch him.”
*~*
It was the maesters who said no.
They had come up from their tower. There were three of them. The oldest was Maester Ossifer, who had served Daeron’s father and grandfather and had a face like a folded glove. He spoke in the dry Citadel voice he used for difficulties.
“Your Grace. You cannot.”
Baelor was already at the door of Maekar’s chamber. He had come at a run; his hair was wet with sweat from training; he had not even taken off his cloak. He looked at Maester Ossifer as a man looks at a wall that has appeared between him and a thing he wants.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Your brother is in rut, Your Grace. You are an alpha. It is not — it cannot be done. Two alphas in a single chamber during a rut is not how the body is meant to —”
“He asked for me.”
“He is not in his right mind, Your Grace. He cannot be expected to know what —”
“He is seventeen. He has been waiting years for this. He knows precisely what he is asking for and he is asking for me.”
“Your Grace.” A septon stepped forward. He had been brought up from the Great Sept on a different errand and had stayed when he heard. He was a plump kind-faced man with rings on his fingers, and he meant well, but he was not Dornish. “Your Grace, the Faith — the Father in his wisdom — the bond between brothers is sacred and must not be — it would be a wronging, Your Grace, of the natural order. Two alphas. Brothers. The Stranger himself —”
“Don’t speak to me of the Stranger.”
“Your Grace —”
“He asked. For. Me.”
Myriah said, from behind him, very quietly: “Baelor.”
He turned. His mother was standing in the doorway. She looked at him as she had looked at him when he was small and on the edge of a tantrum: with patience, sympathy, and the small firm shake of the head she used when a thing could not be done.
“Mother.”
“Not tonight, my love.”
“Mother, he asked —”
“I know he asked but I will tell him. He will understand. Not tonight, Baelor.” She stepped closer so only he could hear. “Everyone is watching. Your father is king, my love, and his wife is a Dornish queen on a Westerosi throne, and we cannot give them this. Not where they can see.”
He stared at her.
In Sunspear, it would have been different. Two Dornish royals, even brothers, even both alphas — there might have been raised eyebrows, but there would not have been a maester at the door and a septon invoking the Stranger. There would have been wine sent up. There would have been understanding. But this was not Sunspear. This was the Red Keep, and Daeron’s throne was held together with patience and string and the slow careful years work of teaching the Seven Kingdoms to swallow their Dornish queen, and Myriah Martell had not survived several decades of it by being a fool.
Baelor did not argue. He did not raise his voice. He bowed, very slightly, to his mother.
“As you wish, Mother.” He walked back down the corridor, past the maesters who stepped aside for him, past the septon who tried to bless him and faltered when Baelor did not look at him, around the corner, down the stairs, into his own rooms, where his squire Aric was waiting with a towel and a cup of warm wine.
Baelor took the towel. He dried his hair. He gave the wine back without drinking it
“I am not hungry tonight, Aric. Send the supper away.”
That was Tuesday.
*~*
By Wednesday, the household knew the Prince of Dragonstone had not eaten recently.
By Thursday, when he had taken nothing but water at three meals running, the Keep had began to panic.
*~*
They sent Aerys on the third day.
It was Myriah’s strategic choice. Aerys had not been close to Baelor as boys — Aerys had always been off in his books, separate, not unkind but not present. Which was why Aerys was sent. He could be relied upon to argue from logic, from text, from the higher mysteries. He would not weep. He would not invoke their mother. He would come in with a scroll in his hand and treat it as a problem to be solved, and Myriah Martell, who knew her sons, had calculated that this was the kind of conversation Baelor was least equipped to dismiss.
She was correct, as usual. It was hard to dismiss Aerys.
Baelor had been at midday meal when Aerys came. Been at, not eaten; he had walked to the small dining solar where his family took their daily meals together, sat down in his usual seat to his father’s right, allowed a plate to be put in front of him, and not lifted his fork. He drank water. He had been pleasant. He asked Aerys about his current reading. He asked Rhaegel about a song Rhaegel was composing. He asked his mother whether she had heard from her sister. He did not eat. After an hour he had thanked the servants, kissed his mother’s hand, and walked back to his solar, where he was now reading state correspondence that he was not, in any meaningful sense, reading.
Aerys came in without knocking. He shut the door.
“Brother.”
“Brother.”
“I have come to reason with you.”
“I expected you would.”
“Mother sent me.”
“Of course, she did.”
“I told her it was unlikely to work.”
“As usual, you are correct.”
“I told her also that I would come anyway, because she asked, and because I love you, and because the alternative was Rhaegel, and Rhaegel would weep and make us all miserable. So here I am. Pour me a cup of wine.”
Baelor poured the wine. Aerys sat down across from him. He was twenty-one, thin and pale, with the long Targaryen face Baelor had not got.
“I have,” Aerys said, “considered the matter.”
Baelor couldn’t help but smile. “Have you?”
“At length. Through the night. I will not bore you with the Faith or the Citadel or the dynastic. I will speak of one thing only. You are the heir, Baelor. Within twenty years you will be king. Within ten, perhaps. The realm needs you. There is no one else. I cannot. I would not, if I could; you know I would not. Rhaegel cannot. Maekar might in time, but Maekar is seventeen and a soldier. It is you. The realm cannot afford for it to not be you. So eat, brother.”
“No.”
“Baelor.”
“No.”
Aerys drank his wine. He set the cup down. He folded his hands. He looked at his brother across the table — his elder brother, his beautiful elder brother with the dark Dornish hair and the face the realm had decided it loved — and he said, more quietly:
“You will die for him.”
“If they make me, yes.”
“You will die for him and the realm will lose its king. For one rut. For one rut of one brother who in a few more days will be himself again and will be furious with you for having starved over him.”
“Yes.”
Aerys was silent for a while. Then, in a different voice — the small private voice he used perhaps four times a year — he said: “Brother. Is it really like that? Truly? It is not habit, or fondness, or the old bite, or any of the things you might tell yourself? It is — that?”
“Yes.”
“You would die.”
“Gladly.”
“For Maekar.”
“Absolutely.”
Aerys looked into his cup. He was quiet for a long time. Then, almost to himself: “I have read of this. In the older texts. The high Valyrian, before the doom. It is supposed to be very rare. They had a word for it. I do not remember the word. I will look it up.”
“Thank you, Aerys.”
“Do not thank me. I have not done anything here.”
He stood and smoothed his robe. He looked down at his brother — at the untouched plate of bread and cheese on the side table, at Baelor’s hands folded calmly on the desk, at his face, which was already, on the third day, beginning to do the saint-thing, the cheekbones a little too sharp, the eyes a little too deep.
“I will tell Mother,” Aerys said, “that I argued with you for an hour and could not move you.”
“You made a mighty effort though.”
“If you do die, I will see to it. The realm. The throne. I will not let it fall while I live. I will hate every day. But I will not let it fall.”
“I know you wouldn’t.” Baelor smiled softly before looking finding at his brother. “Aerys.”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
Aerys’s mouth twitched. It was as close as Aerys came, in that decade of his life, to a smile.
“I know,” he said. “Maybe eat your supper then, brother.”
“No.”
“I had to ask.”
*~*
He passed out on the fourth morning.
It was at breakfast. A plate had been set in front of him. There was honeyed porridge on it and stewed fruit and a small fresh roll. He drank water from his cup and did not touch the porridge. He had complimented his mother on her gown.
Then, between one breath and the next, he set down his cup, said forgive me, very quietly, then slid sideways off the bench onto the floor.
He went down soft. He did not strike the table. His father shouted. His mother was on her knees beside him before the servants had finished moving, and Aerys had her elbow, and Rhaegel was pressed against the wall with both hands over his mouth, and the maesters came at a run.
Baelor came back to himself within the minute. He blinked up at the ceiling of the small dining room and at his mother’s face above him. He said, mildly, “Forgive me, Mother. I rose too quickly.”
“Be quiet, my love.”
“I am all right.”
“Be quiet.”
They carried him to his rooms. They put him on his bed. Maester Ossifer was sent for; felt his pulse and listened to his heart and pulled back his eyelid. “The prince is perfectly composed, Your Grace. He is only starving.”
Myriah Martell looked at Maester Ossifer.
She said, very quietly: “Then perhaps —”
“Your Grace,” Maester Ossifer said, gently — for he was an old man and a Citadel man and he had been speaking to queens for fifty years and he knew what was about to be asked of him — “Your Grace. Forgive me. I cannot.”
“Maester.”
“No, Your Grace. Hear me. The prince is the heir to the Iron Throne. The Citadel will not in good conscience permit two alphas — I have spoken to my brothers in the Tower. I have spoken to the Most Devout. We are agreed. If the prince eats, the prince eats. If he does not — Your Grace, with the deepest grief — we will not be the reason this house breaks the order of things. The Citadel cannot be the wedge the realm splits on. I am sorry, Your Grace. The answer is no.”
The septon, behind the maester, had begun to say something about the Stranger. Myriah looked at him. The septon shut his mouth.
She said, in a voice that was very even: “Get out, both of you.”
“Your Grace —”
“Out. Out of my son’s chamber. Out of this corridor. Out of my sight.”
Myriah closed the door. She came to the bed and knelt beside it.
She bent, placing her forehead against his — as Dornish mothers had been doing with their grown sons for a thousand years, since before the Rhoynar came, since before the Andals — and she breathed against him and he breathed against her, and they stayed like that for a long quiet minute.
She said, against his hair: “I cannot get him to you, my love. Not today. Not tomorrow. The maesters and the septons are agreed. The Citadel will break with us if we force it. I would do it anyway, for you, but it would cost your father, and your father will die of it before his time, and the realm will pay, and it will be many years before any of us can put any of it back together. I am asking you to bear it. I am asking you to eat. Some bread. A spoon of broth. Anything. Anything. Until I can find another way.”
He did not answer.
She straightened. She kissed his forehead. “Do not — do not die in this room. Do not let me find you not breathing in this bed. I am asking you. As your mother. Do not.”
“I will do my best, Mother.”
She left.
He lay on his bed. The afternoon went past the window. Aric came in with a tray of broth and bread. The broth went cold. The bread sat. Baelor lay with his eyes on the ceiling and counted the slow beats of his own pulse, which were not slow because they were strong but slow because they were tired. He thought, distantly, about Maekar. He thought about Maekar’s voice on Tuesday night, calling. He thought he could hear it through three corridors and a closed door.
He thought he might, after all, die in this room.
He closed his eyes.
He drifted somewhere short of sleep, with the ceiling beams above him and Maekar’s voice in his ears that wasn’t really Maekar’s voice, and he was there for some hours, while the light outside the window went from gold to deep blue to dark.
Then the door opened.
He thought, at first, it was his mother.
The footstep was wrong; his mother’s footstep was light and quick, and this one was a little uneven as if they were possibly dancing. Baelor did not, all the same, open his eyes. There had been people in and out of his chamber for hours and he was tired of being looked at.
Someone sat down on the edge of his bed.
The someone was very quiet. The someone did not speak for a long time. The someone smelled, faintly, of pine — Rhaegel had been in the godswood; Rhaegel was always in the godswood — and faintly of the small Dornish soap their mother kept in his rooms, and faintly of cold rain, because a storm had come in the afternoon and was beating against the shutters of Baelor’s chamber.
After a long while a small hand came and rested against Baelor’s wrist.
“Baelor,” said Rhaegel’s voice. Very quietly. “Are you awake?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Can you open your eyes?”
He opened his eyes.
Rhaegel was sitting on the edge of his bed. He was nineteen and beautiful with the long face and the violent eyes and the black hair — and he had come in alone. Gormon was not behind him. Rhaegel never went anywhere alone anymore; Baelor had assigned the patient knight to his younger brother two years ago; Gormon was always behind him. The fact that he had come without him was something.
His face was perfectly composed.
That was the second thing.
Rhaegel’s face was almost never composed. Rhaegel’s face moved like the seasons; happiness and sorrow and small private confusion came shifted clearly across his features. The maesters had decided this was part of his madness. The maesters were wrong about a great many things concerning Rhaegel. His face moved that way because he felt many things and could not pretend otherwise. But Rhaegel’s face, just now, was not moving. It was set, as a stonemason sets a stone. It was the face of a brother who had come on a piece of business and had, on the way over, decided what he was going to say.
“Baelor, you are going to die.”
It was said so simply.
“Yes,” Baelor said. “If I am not allowed to go to him.”
“And they will not let you go to him.”
Rhaegel was quiet for a long moment. His small hand was still on Baelor’s wrist. His thumb pressed, slowly, in the centre of Baelor’s palm — the old Dornish thing their mother did. Baelor’s pulse, under it, was very slow.
“There is a way.”
Baelor opened his eyes more fully.
“The western tower of the Red Keep. The one that has Maekar’s chamber on the seventh floor. The window of the chamber faces north. Below the window is the parapet of the lower battlement. You can climb to it. I have looked. I have walked all around the keep this afternoon, from below, and I have looked. The stones are dressed but they are not smooth — the lower three storeys are old, and the seams are wide. A man with strong hands could climb. A man with strong hands and a tall reach could go up the corner buttress and across the south face to the third storey, and there is a band of carved stone there, the dragons, and you could rest there a moment, and from the dragons you can reach the window of the empty chamber on the fourth floor — it is empty, I checked, no one sleeps there — and you can pull yourself in through that window. From the empty chamber you can take the inner stair to the seventh floor, and the seventh floor has only the one guard on Maekar’s door, and once you are inside the chamber the guard cannot stop you. He cannot break the door down to drag you out. He will not. By the time the maesters come, you will be inside, and the door will be barred, and they will not break a barred door of a prince of the realm with another prince of the realm inside it. They will shout and you will not answer and Mother will make sure they do not break the door, and when Maekar is himself again you will come out, and the thing will be done.”
He said it all in one long breath. He was watching Baelor’s face.
Baelor looked at his brother. “I do not know if I can climb a tower in this thunderstorm. I have not eaten in four days. I think I will fall.”
“Then eat now. I will be your lookout, the captain of the gold cloaks does his rounds at the half-hour and the third quarter and the hour. The watchmen on the wall above can see the south face of the tower but not the corner buttress; the angle is wrong; I have stood there, I have looked. I will stand at the foot of the buttress with Gormon. Gormon will not tell. I have spoken to Gormon. Gormon is mine. He has been mine for two years and he loves me and he will lie for me; he has lied for me before, about smaller things, and he will lie for me about this. I will stand at the foot of the buttress and Gormon will stand at the corner of the keep and we will watch the watch, and when the watchman has just passed I will give you the call — I will whistle, like the Dornish nightingale, three notes — and you will go up. We will watch for you the whole time you are climbing. If the watch comes back early we will give the second call, the warning call, two notes, and you will freeze on the wall and the rain will hide you, and we will draw the watch off; Gormon will fall down very visibly drunk in the courtyard and the watch will go to him, and you will keep climbing. We have thought of all of it. It will work.”
“Rhaegel.”
“I have thought about it for a day, brother. Since yesterday morning. Since I saw you not eat at the table and I have thought about nothing else. It will work. But it will only work if you eat.”
Baelor’s eyes watered slightly.
He did not let them go further than the filling.
When Baelor could speak he said: “Why?”
Rhaegel looked at him. He thought about the question, properly, as Rhaegel thought about all questions.
“Because I dreamed it. I dreamed last night that you were dead in this bed. I dreamed Mother was on the floor beside the bed and she was tearing her hair and Father was standing in the doorway and could not come in. I dreamed Aerys was sitting at your desk crying without making a sound. I dreamed Maekar was in his chamber and he did not know you were dead yet and he was calling for you and the rut was breaking and he was beginning to be himself again and someone was about to go and tell him. I woke up. I cried for an hour. Gormon held me. Then I said to Gormon, Gormon, my brother is going to die because they will not let him sit with our other brother, and that is not going to happen, that is not going to be the world I live in, and Gormon said, no, my prince, that is not going to happen, and I got up and I started walking the keep. That is why.”
He paused.
“And also,” he said, in a smaller voice, “because you bit and claimed him in that pool in Dorne when I was eight, and I saw, and I told the maester yesterday morning when he asked me, and the maester said Prince Rhaegel, you must understand, and I said it counted, maester, I was there, I saw, and he said it did not count, and I said it counted and he said it did not and I stopped listening because he was being unkind. He has been yours ever since, and yesterday morning I let a man tell me to my face in our own keep that he wasn’t, and I went out and I cried in the godswood for an hour.”
“I am sorry I made you cry.” Baelor said as he sat up.
He did it slowly. The room did not, this time, go grey at the edges; it had been doing that all day, but Rhaegel’s hand was still on his wrist and it steadied him. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. He looked at the side table where the cold broth and the dry bread had been sitting for several hours.
“Bring me the broth, love.”
He ate slowly, as their mother had told him to eat, a spoonful at a time. He drank the cup of watered wine that came with it. He ate three pieces of the bread. He kept it down. He ate, after the bread, half the apple Aric had left on the tray, and a small piece of cheese.
His hands stopped shaking by the cheese.
His vision steadied by the wine.
When he was done he looked at his brother.
“Rhaegel.”
“Yes?”
“Tell me again. The buttress. The dragons. The empty chamber on the fourth floor. Tell me again.”
Rhaegel told him again. He drew it on the bedclothes with his finger — a small careful diagram of the western tower, stone by stone, where the seams were wide enough for a hand and where they were not, where the watch could see and where it could not, where the rain would come down off the parapet and where it would run free of it. He had thought of all of it. He had even thought, he said, of where to leave a folded piece of dry cloth at the foot of the buttress so Baelor could wipe his hands every storey, because wet hands on wet stone were a worse problem than hands warmed only by climbing.
When Rhaegel was done, Baelor reached out and took his brother’s small hand in his own — his own hand still a little weak, the bones close to the surface, but warmer than it had been in three days — and he kissed the knuckles. He did it slowly. He did it as one knight kissed another knight’s hand at the end of a long campaign.
“ I love you. I have loved you since you were a small thing climbing into my bed when there was thunder. I have not said it enough so I am saying it now. I love you, Rhaegel. You have just saved my life.”
Rhaegel kissed Baelor’s forehead, as he kissed everyone’s forehead, with the easy unembarrassed affection of a creature who had never learned shame.
“Finish your food and we will go.”
“Of course.”
*~*
He dressed quietly: his oldest leathers, an under-tunic he could move in, no cloak — a cloak would only weigh him down wet — and his soft-soled boots. He had wrapped his hands in linen. The linen would come off before the climb, but the hands wanted warming.
He opened his door and there was no one in the corridor.
He went down by the back stairs, along the inner wall, by the kitchen courtyard and the small herb garden and the door behind the laundry, where Gormon was waiting. Gormon — strong and steady Gormon, with rain in his beard and his cloak pulled forward over his face — did not say a word. He pointed across the courtyard to the corner of the keep.
Rhaegel was at the foot of the corner buttress.
He was very small. He was in a dark cloak with the hood up. He was barefoot. He had taken his boots off, Baelor saw later, because boots on wet flagstones made a sound, and he had not wanted to make a sound. His feet were probably cold. He was holding, against his body, a folded square of dry cloth, which he handed to Baelor without speaking.
Baelor took it. He tucked it into his belt and didn’t know if it would actually helped but couldn’t refuse his brother’s kindness.
He took his boots off. He set them down. He pulled the linen off his hands. He laid one palm against the stone of the buttress and felt for the seam. The seam was where Rhaegel had said it was. The next was where Rhaegel had said it was.
The rain came down but all Baelor could see was the light in the seventh story window.
After a moment Rhaegel pursed his lips. He whistled. Three small notes. The Dornish nightingale, as their mother had taught them all to recognize when they were small in the orange grove of the Water Gardens.
The watch had just passed.
Baelor went up.
His hands were stronger than he had expected. His arms remembered. His shoulders, broad through the seasons of swordwork, did the work they were trained to. He found the seam he had been told to find. He pushed up to the next. The wet stone was cold but not slick; the older stones were rough enough. Up to the band of carved dragons at the third storey, where he rested for a count of ten with his cheek against a stone wing — they were old gentle dragons, friendlier than any of the new ones — and wiped his hands on the dry cloth that was tucked into his belt. Across the south face, the long traverse, where the watchman on the wall above could not see for the angle. Up to the empty chamber’s window on the fourth floor, which Rhaegel had checked, which was unlatched as Rhaegel had said. Over the sill, in, dropping onto the stone floor of the empty chamber where no one slept, gasping for breath — but quietly, with his fist pressed against his mouth.
He stood for a moment in the empty chamber and listened.
There was no sound.
He found the inner stair. He went up several steps at a time— very softly, his bare feet making no noise — past the fifth floor, past the sixth, to the seventh.
The seventh-floor corridor was lit. There was one guard at Maekar’s door. The guard was sitting on a stool, half-dozing, with his halberd between his knees. The man was, Baelor saw at once, the kind of guard the maesters posted when they thought a thing was settled and there would not be a problem — which was also why the moment the guard saw Baelor the guard’s face went, in one heartbeat, from drowsy to absolutely pale.
Baelor stopped on the landing.
He looked at the guard who looked at him. The man had clearly been told that the Prince of Dragonstone was, on no account, to enter this chamber. He had also clearly been told that the Prince of Dragonstone had spent four days starving. The guard was looking at the Prince of Dragonstone now: barefoot, in a wet under-tunic, with rain still in his hair, blood on three of his knuckles, his collarbones plain through his shirt — and entirely, perfectly, calmly composed.
The guard stood up.
He did not raise his halberd.
He bowed and stood aside.
He was, Baelor realized, a Dornishman. One of his mother’s men. One of the small careful network the queen had been keeping in this keep for years, the men she had put quietly into positions where one day they might, if asked, do the thing she could not herself ask for. The guard had only been in a corridor where his queen’s eldest son would, if he came, be going to her youngest, and the guard had — without any signal from anyone — done what he understood his queen would have wanted.
Baelor laid his hand briefly on the guard’s shoulder as he passed.
He pushed open the door and went in.
*~*
The room smelled of his brother in a way that nearly took him to his knees.
He had been smelling Maekar his whole life — Maekar in the practice yard, Maekar at supper, Maekar fresh from a bath, Maekar in the godswood at autumn, Maekar in his sleep when they had shared a chamber as boys. He had never smelled this. This was Maekar with the seventeen years of waiting come down on him at once, an alpha in the fourth night of his first rut: hot and copper and dark and full of the deep low summons that Baelor’s body had been refusing, denying, starving down for days, and that he could not, now, refuse anymore.
Maekar was on the bed.
He was not asleep. He was not awake either, not in any clean sense; the body had stopped fighting and started simply being, and his eyes were open and dark and not quite focused, and he was on his side facing the door, because he had been waiting for it to open.
When he saw who it was, he made a sound.
It was not a word. It was not even a name. It was a small broken animal sound, the sound of a creature that has been calling for something for days and has just heard the answer, and Baelor was across the room before he knew he had crossed it, on his knees beside the bed, his hands — gentle, slow — on his brother’s face.
“I’m here.”
“You are late, you —”
“I know. They wouldn’t let me but I’m here now and I love you so very much.”
He pressed his forehead to his brother’s and breathed deeply before crawling into bed with him. He would break his brother’s rut and deal with the consequences later. All he cared about now was bringing Maekar peace.