The smell reached me before the village did.
Salt and fish and the green bite of drying algae, all of it carried on a wind that came off the bay and pushed through the carriage window. I closed my eyes and a knot in my chest loosened. I hadn't even realized I'd been holding it tight since King's Landing.
The road from Duskendale had taken three days, the same route we'd traveled south, the same hedgerows and the same stone markers and the same ruts that jolted the wheels and made Erik fuss in Mother's arms. Lord Gunthor had sent us off from the Dun Fort with a cask of Arbor gold and a promise to double his next order of Darkwood Powder, and Father had clasped his liege lord's arm and thanked him and climbed onto his cob and turned its head north without looking back.
I'd watched Duskendale's walls shrink behind us through the carriage's rear window until the road bent and the town vanished behind a rise, and then I turned forward and watched the road home open before us.
We'd parted from Jeyne at the Dun Fort gates. She stood with her parents and watched our carriage roll through, and her hand came up in a wave that she held until I couldn't see her anymore. The bracelet of woven leather sat warm on my wrist. I turned it once around my arm and touched the blue glass bead and thought of her grey eyes and her steady voice and the way she pressed her shoulder to mine when she sat beside me.
Now the road dropped toward the coast and the hedges thinned and the bay stretched out to the east, grey water under a white sky, and the shingle running in its long curve beneath the bluffs. The drying racks stood in their rows along the beach, and smoke rose from the salt sheds in thin ribbons that the wind bent and scattered. And then the palisade came into view, the banners of House Darkwood moving on the poles, dark green cloth with pale thread that caught what light there was. The hall's roof showed above the wall, and the sept's peaked cap beside it, and smoke from our chimney rose straight and steady.
Father reined his cob to a halt at the top of the slope and sat there for a moment, looking down at the village. Ser Alwyn stopped beside him, and Hobb brought his pony up on the other side with his spear across his saddle. Mother leaned to the carriage window and I leaned with her, and Erik squirmed between us and grabbed at the curtain and pulled.
"Home," Father said. The word carried back to the carriage on the wind.
Mother kissed Erik's head and straightened his wrappings and looked at me. She looked tired and fond.
"Thank the gods," she said. "I've had my fill of courts and politics."
The driver clicked his tongue and the cobs leaned into their straps and we went down the slope toward the gate. The wheels found the familiar ruts, the ones I knew by the way they jolted, and the sound of the iron rims on packed earth changed as we passed from road to lane and from lane to the hard ground before the palisade.
The gate was already open. Hobb must have sent a rider ahead, because men stood along the inside of the wall in their best shirts with their hair combed, and women had gathered by the hall's doors with children hoisted on their hips or tucked behind their skirts. Old Nan was there, leaning on her stick with her chin up and her eyes bright, and the scullion who swept the hall had his broom propped against the wall and his hands clasped in front of him.
The carriage rolled through the gate and stopped in the yard, and the driver called the halt and the cobs dropped their heads and blew. Father swung down from his mount and Ser Alwyn took the reins and led both horses toward the stable. Hobb dismounted with a grunt and his bad leg took the ground and he hissed through his teeth and straightened himself with both hands on his spear.
Ser Tolan came around to the carriage door and opened it and held out his hand. I took it and stepped down, and the packed earth of Velton's yard met my boots and the wind off the bay pushed my hair across my face and I swept it back and just stood there.
This was my ground – my hall and my people and my sea. The stench of King's Landing was already fading, replaced by the honest stink of fish and salt and the green smell of the drying racks. The sky above was wide and pale and clean, and the gulls turned in their circles over the bay and called to one another the way they always did.
And then a cheer went up from the yard.
It started with the men by the gate and rolled through the women at the doors and then the children took it up, high and shrill, and Hobb banged his spear butt on the ground twice and Old Nan raised her stick and shook it at the sky and cackled. The scullion whooped and then remembered himself and went red.
"Lady Amelia!" someone called, and then others took it up. "Lady Amelia! She’s with the Titan! The Titan of Velton!"
They pressed forward, each one wanting to be closer, and Father raised his hand and they stopped at a respectful distance and bobbed their heads and grinned and whispered to one another.
Jace Prowse was at the front, broad-shouldered and wind-burned, with Bess behind him and their two girls peeking around her skirts. He bowed low and came up beaming.
"M'lady," he said. "We heard about the tourney. The whole village heard. A rider came through from Duskendale four days past with the news and we've talked of nothing else since."
"The Titan beat a prince!" one of the girls squeaked from behind her mother's legs, and Bess hushed her and then gave up and smiled.
"He did," I said. "Ser Tolan fought with honor and brought glory to our house."
Harlen Moss pushed forward from the second row, his hat crushed in his hands the way it always was when he stood before anyone with a title. His boy Will stood beside him, tall now and straight-backed, walking on both legs without a limp. The same leg I'd healed half a lifetime ago bore his weight as well as the other.
"M'lady," Harlen said, and his voice cracked. "Welcome home. Seven bless you and keep you."
"And you, Harlen," I said. "How fares Will?"
"Strong as an ox and twice as stubborn," Harlen said, and clapped his son on the shoulder hard enough to make the boy sway. Will went red but stood his ground and ducked his head to me.
"M'lady," Will said.
Eddic Parren came next, the farmer whose wheat I'd saved from blight in what felt like another age. His wife stood beside him with their smallest child on her hip, the same girl who'd hidden her mouth in her mother's skirt and stared at me the first time Merlon and I walked his fields. She was bigger now, her cheeks round and pink, and she stared at me still but without the shyness.
"The wheat stands tall, m'lady," Eddic said. "Tallest we've ever seen. The heads are so heavy the stalks near bow with the weight. We'll have grain enough for winter and then some, if the weather holds."
"I'm glad to hear it," I said.
I moved through them one by one, and they came forward and bowed and spoke and I listened and answered and touched their hands when they offered them.
Father stood at the hall's doors and watched it all with his hands clasped behind his back. He had the look he wore when the petitioners had all gone home and the hall was quiet and the fire burned low and he sat in his chair and knew that his people were fed and his stores were full and his walls were whole.
Mother had already gone inside with Erik, and her voice came through the open doors, giving orders to the servants about water and clean linens and fresh rushes for the floors. She hadn't stopped giving orders since we left King's Landing, and I suspected she wouldn't stop until every trace of the road had been scrubbed from the hall and her chambers and every stitch of clothing we owned.
Maester Merlon stood in the yard with his satchel and his chain and his tablet. He looked at the crowd around me and then at the sea beyond the palisade and then at me, and made a small sound in his throat.
"It is good to be home," he said.
"It is," I agreed.
He tucked his tablet under his arm and went inside, his chain clicking with each step, and I heard him call for ink and a candle.
The crowd thinned by degrees as people drifted back to their work. The fishermen went down to the beach to check their nets. The women returned to their kitchens and gardens. The boys who'd wanted to squire for Tolan reappeared at a safe distance and watched him cross the yard, terrified and fascinated. And Hobb limped off to check the watch posts and grumbled about standards and the way men grew slack when the lord was away, though I suspected his men hadn't grown slack at all and Hobb just needed something to grumble about.
I stood alone in the yard for a moment. The wind came off the bay and pressed my cloak against my back and carried the cry of the gulls over the palisade. The banners flapped and settled and flapped again. The smoke from the chimney rose straight. The sea made its sound, steady and low, the same sound I'd fallen asleep to every night of my life before King's Landing.
No place like home, eh? Amy said.
“Indeed.”
King's Landing was a lot. The noise, the smell, the politics, the constant watching and being watched. You did well, though. Better than I expected.
"Better than you expected?"
I mean, I figured you'd accidentally heal at least three more people. You only healed one princess. That's pretty good.
I pressed my lips together and didn't answer her.
The afternoon wore on. I helped Mother unpack the chests and sort the clothes and hang the travel-stained cloaks by the fire to air. I held Erik while she bathed and changed, and he grabbed my braid and pulled until my eyes watered and then laughed at me, his mouth wide open and his eyes crinkled and his fat fists waving. I kissed his forehead and unwound my hair from his grip and gave him my finger to hold instead, and he squeezed it with that impossible strength and settled against my chest and looked up at me with eyes that were beginning to turn from murky blue to something warmer.
Father called for a simple supper and we ate in the hall with the doors open and the evening light coming in gold across the floor. Smoked fish and bread and boiled potatoes and a stew thick with onion and mutton that had been simmering since morning. The cooks had used Darkwood Powder, and the stew tasted better to me than anything the Red Keep's kitchens had set before us. Father said so aloud, and the cook in the kitchen must have heard him through the serving passage because a second bowl came out without being asked.
After supper, when Mother had taken Erik up to bed and Father sat with Merlon over the day's tallies and the hall had gone quiet, I slipped out through the yard gate and took the path toward the woods.
Ser Tolan fell into step behind me without a word. He knew where I was going. He'd walked this path with me a dozen times before we left for Duskendale, carrying the cart of meat and fish, watching the trees with his hand on his sword. He didn't watch the trees so hard now. He watched them enough.
The evening light came low through the branches and turned the leaves to pale gold. The path was soft underfoot, packed by wheels and feet over the months of coming and going. Wrens and finches chattered in the canopy above, settling for the night. A rabbit bolted across the path ahead of us and vanished into the undergrowth.
We reached the clearing where the oaks grew wide and the grass lay thick. The light was dim here, the last of the sun coming through the upper branches in thin shafts.
I stopped at the clearing's edge and waited.
Tolan stopped behind me, fifteen paces back, and set his hand on his belt and let his eyes move over the trees.
The clearing held still for a breath, and the wind stirred the upper branches, and a leaf came down in a slow spiral and landed on the grass.
And then the shadows at the far edge gathered and moved.
He came out between the oaks in a slow rolling walk, one great foot placed before the other, his body low and his wings tucked tight against his flanks. The last of the sunlight caught his eyes and they burned with a steady brightness. His feathers were so dark they made the shadows beneath the trees look pale.
He'd grown, in the breadth of his chest and the reach of his talons and the way the oak branches above him were no longer high enough for him to walk beneath without ducking his head. He'd put on bulk in the weeks we were gone, thick through the shoulders and deep through the keel, and his beak had lengthened and the curve of it sat heavy on his face. When he set his feet and raised himself to his full height, his head cleared the lowest branches and the oak beside him groaned as his shoulder brushed the trunk. And his feathers carried the oily sheen I'd bred into them, the waterproofing that let him hunt the bay, and they gleamed faintly where the sunlight struck them.
He saw me and stopped.
His head turned, and one bright eye found me across the clearing and held me there, and he went very still.
I walked toward him across the grass.
"Hello, Dusk," I said.
He cooed. Of course, coo doesn't really do it justice. It started low in his chest, a vibration I felt in my feet through the ground, and it climbed through his throat and came out as a rolling, thundering sound that shook the leaves from the branches above and sent the wrens scattering. It filled the clearing and pushed at the trees and came back in echoes that layered over one another.
He surged forward. The ground shook under his weight and his talons tore furrows in the grass and he came across the clearing in four massive strides. I braced myself and spread my arms.
His head came down and his beak pressed into my chest and he pushed me backward two steps, and then his neck curved around me and the feathers of his throat lay against my back and he held me there, warm and enclosed, and that sound rumbled through him and into me and rattled my ribs.
I wrapped my arms around his neck as far as they would reach, which wasn't far, and pressed my face into the feathers beneath his jaw. They were warm and smooth and smelled of pine resin and salt wind and something else, something thick and animal that was purely his.
"I missed you," I told him, and my voice came out thicker than I intended.
He cooed again, softer this time. His wing-fingers twitched beneath the folded wing and one of them reached out and touched my shoulder, careful and precise, the taloned tip resting there for a moment before it withdrew.
I pulled back and looked up at him. His eye watched me, round and bright, and his head tilted from one side to the other in the way he'd always done since he was small enough to sit on my wrist. Of course, back then the motion moved a head the size of a walnut. Now it moved a skull larger than a man's torso.
"You've been eating well," I said, and ran my hand along the ridge of his beak. The surface was hard and smooth, the keratin thick and ridged along the curve of it. "Very well, from the look of you."
Dusk opened his beak in a wide yawn that showed the full length of his tongue, coiled in the back of his throat with the hard spike at its tip tucked against the roof of his mouth. He clicked his beak shut and shook his head once and settled his weight back on his haunches and looked at me. He looked smug.
I scratched the soft place beneath his jaw and he leaned into my hand with all his considerable weight, and I had to brace my legs to keep from being pushed over. The coo deepened to a vibration that traveled up my arm and into my chest.
"I went to King's Landing," I told him, because I'd always talked to him and he'd always listened, even when my words meant nothing to him but the sound of my voice. "I saw the Red Keep and the great sept on Visenya's Hill and the Dragonpit on Rhaenys's Hill. I ate too much and slept too little. Ser Tolan won the melee and the jousts and put Prince Daemon Targaryen himself on his back in front of twenty thousand people, and they call him the Titan now, and boys in the yard want to squire for him."
Dusk tilted his head and narrowed his eye and made a sharp, short bark in his throat.
"I met a princess," I said, quieter. "She wept in a garden and I healed a cut on her arm because I couldn't help myself, and now she knows what I am, and she's promised to keep my secret. I believe her. I hope I'm right."
Dusk pulled his head back and looked at me with both eyes. His pupils widened in the fading light, black pools in a ring of gold.
"And I saw dragons," I said. “I wish I could’ve touched and understood them… but I’m patient. Mayhaps, Princess Rhaenyra will allow me to touch her dragon.”