The stink got us before we reached the gate.
It came rolling down the road in a warm and wet wall that sat on the tongue and made the eyes water and turned my stomach over once before I caught it with my sleeve. Tolan's nostrils went white at the edges but he rode straight on through, and the horse underneath us shook its head and snorted twice and planted its hooves on the cobblestones as if considering whether to go any further. I didn't blame the animal.
"You'll get used to it," Tolan said over his shoulder.
"People keep telling me that," I said. "It hasn't happened yet."
We came through the Gate of the Gods into the midday press and the noise of it folded over us all at once. Carts grinding and men shouting and women haggling and children running between legs with baskets on their heads, and somewhere above it all a woman leaned from an upper window and poured out a pail of something I didn't want to think about onto a man standing beneath her. He swore at the sky and she was already gone. A dog trotted past with half a fish hanging from its jaw and a look on its face that said it'd earned every bite.
We'd come here with nothing to do. That was the whole point. I had nowhere to be and nobody to see and for the first time in as long as I could remember the day was mine and I could fill it however I liked, and that feeling sat on me strangely, light and warm.
"Where do we begin?" Tolan asked.
"Everywhere," I said.
We found a stable near the gate and left the horse with a boy who had a gap where his front tooth should've been and ears that stuck out from his head wide enough to catch the wind. Tolan gave him three coppers and promised two more when we came back for the animal, and the boy's whole face lit up and he led the horse inside with so much care you'd think it was a lord's destrier instead of a brown gelding with dust in its mane.
The bakers' quarter hit differently. We turned down the Street of Flour and the city's rot gave way to bread and warm yeast and something sweet and golden that filled the air so thick I could taste it. Women stood in doorways with trays of rolls and seed cakes and twisted pastries glazed with honey that caught the light and shone. I bought two of the honey twists and handed one back to Tolan without asking if he wanted it because he always wanted food, and we walked and ate.
Around the next corner we found a puppet show.
A crowd had packed itself into a small square around a wooden booth draped with painted cloth, and two carved figures bobbed and clacked on their strings above the curtain's edge. The puppeteer had given them voices. The lord was deep and stupid and the steward was high and sharp, and the two of them chased each other around the little stage in a fight about turnip prices that got worse and worse until the lord drew a tiny wooden sword and swung it and missed and hit the side of the booth instead, and every child in the front row screamed with laughter and a few of the adults too.
We wandered south after that. Through the Coppersmith's Way where the sound of hammers on metal rang out from a dozen open workshops and the air tasted of hot iron. Through a lane where the cobblestones had given up and sunk into the mud and every step was a gamble. Past a little sept where a septa stood on the front steps reading from the Seven-Pointed Star to a handful of people who looked more interested in the shade than the sermon.
In the square before the sept a woman was dancing.
She had dark skin and dark hair and she wore scarves layered in red and gold and orange that moved when she moved, cloth and body tangling together. A boy sat cross-legged beside her with a drum in his lap and his hands going quick on the skin, and the rhythm he made pulled people toward it from every corner of the square without them seeming to know it. She danced barefoot on the cobblestones and her feet struck the stone in fast and intricate patterns and her arms went up and came down and her body turned and all of it looked easy, which meant it was very hard.
I watched until the end. The woman bowed and the boy put down his drum and walked a cup around the crowd. I dropped in a copper. She caught my eye and touched her hand to her chest and smiled, and her palm was callused from the stone.
Afternoon came on slow and warm and golden. We bought stewed lentils from a man near the harbor and sat on a low wall to eat them, our legs hanging over the edge and the Blackwater Rush spreading out below us where it ran brown and wide into the grey of the bay. Ships sat at anchor in long rows, tar-hulled and rigged and swaying, and fishing boats worked the shallows near the shore and hauled up nets that caught the light when they broke the surface.
I finished my bowl and set it down and leaned back on my hands and looked up at the sky as a dragon came from the east.
It banked over the harbor in a long slow turn, enormous, silvery-grey scales flashing white where the sun hit them. The wingbeat was slow and heavy and each stroke covered a distance that didn't make sense for a living thing. The wingspan darkened the harbor mouth. The shadow ran across the water and across the decks of three ships, and men on those ships stopped what they were doing and looked up and shielded their eyes.
"Seasmoke," said a fisherman sitting on the wall a few feet from us. "Or, at least, I think that’s him."
The dragon turned its neck and I saw the eyes, pale and bright and searching the water below. The hind legs tucked up against the belly and the tail stretched behind it in a long sweeping line, and the wing membranes caught the sunlight and went translucent at the edges, veined all through with dark branching lines.
And then it dove.
The wings folded back and the whole body came down fast, forelimbs reaching and jaws opening wide, and it hit the water with a sound that punched through the air and threw spray fifty feet high and sent a wave rolling at the harbor wall that rocked every boat within reach and set the fishermen grabbing for their rails and cursing and spitting. It came up a heartbeat later with something huge and silver thrashing in its teeth, a fish longer than a horse, and it beat its wings twice and climbed back into the sky and banked toward the Dragonpit on Rhaenys's Hill with seawater pouring from its belly.
I'd stopped breathing at some point. I started again all at once and the gasp was loud enough that the fisherman glanced over.
"First time seeing them hunt?" he said.
"That close, yes," I managed.
He nodded, satisfied, the way people get when they know something you don't. "You get used to it. We all did. Though the splash still ruins a good net now and again, and good luck getting the crown to pay you back for that."
Did you see that, Amy said. The shoulder girdle. Completely different from birds. The wing membranes have active tension control, more like a bat, but the skeleton underneath is closer to a theropod. And the eyes weren't tracking that fish visually. There's infrared sensitivity in there, or something like it. The pupil dilation was all wrong for visible-spectrum hunting.
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from answering out loud and stood up and brushed myself off.
"I want to see more," I said to Tolan.
He raised an eyebrow. "Of the dragons?"
"Of everything."
So we climbed. We worked our way up through the city's levels and found fire-eaters performing in the square outside the Guildhall of the Alchemists, three men and a woman in leather vests who swallowed torches and breathed fire up past the rooftops. They carried smooth burn scars on their arms and shoulders that caught the light when they moved. The woman was the best of them by a long stretch, and she filled her cheeks and held it and tilted her head back and sent a column of flame straight up into the darkening sky, and the crowd around her roared and stamped their feet and she didn't flinch.
We watched a storyteller on the Street of Seeds. An old man with a grey beard and a voice that rumbled in his chest, sitting on an overturned barrel with a ring of children around him on the cobblestones. He was telling them about the Dance of the Andals in Old Andalos, and he told it as if he'd been there himself, as if he'd stood on the hills and watched the longships come with their seven-pointed banners snapping in the wind, and the children sat with their mouths hanging open and forgot about the apples in their hands.
Near the docks we stumbled onto a fighting ring. Rope and sawdust and men swinging staves at each other for coin, dockworkers and sailors mostly, thick-armed and sweating and throwing more muscle than skill. A small woman with cropped hair and arms like a blacksmith stepped in and beat three of them in a row and collected her money from the table and drank the ale the crowd bought her and belched and went back into the ring and beat a fourth man who was twice her size and had been running his mouth about how easy this was going to be.
Tolan stood watching her with open admiration, which was something I'd almost never seen from him.
"She's good," he said. "She reads her opponent's weight before he commits to a step. You can't learn that in a training yard."
"You sound impressed, ser."
"I am," he said. He watched her for another two bouts before we moved on.
We ate supper at an inn near the bottom of Aegon's Hill, a big sprawling place with a common room that could seat sixty and a kitchen that poured the smell of roasting meat into the street. The roast was pork with a crust that crackled between the teeth, served with root vegetables and a thick brown gravy that I was fairly certain had Darkwood Powder in it. I ate until I couldn't eat any more. Tolan ate three servings and then a fourth, and the serving girl stared at his stack of empty plates and then at his face and then at the plates again and walked away shaking her head.
A boy sat on a stool by the hearth and played a wooden flute. He was seven or eight and his fingers fumbled every other note and his face was screwed up tight with the effort of it. It might've been the Bear and the Maiden Fair. It might've been something he'd made up on the spot. When he finished, the whole common room clapped, and the boy went red all the way to his ears and launched straight into another piece that was even harder and even less recognizable, and nobody told him to stop.
I sat with my water and listened and felt something settle in me. Contentment, I suppose, though the word didn't quite cover it. I'd spent the day walking through a city where nobody knew my name and nobody knew what I could do and nobody wanted anything from me except the occasional copper for their trouble. That was enough. That was, quite frankly, more than enough.
You're happy, Amy said. That’s what this feeling is called.
I am, I told her.
We slept upstairs in a room with a window that looked up the hill toward the Red Keep. I lay on the straw tick and watched the torches on the keep's walls flicker against the sky, and the city talked to itself below me in shouts and wheels and dogs barking and the murmur of people going about their evenings, thousands and thousands of them all at once, and Tolan's breathing went deep and regular within minutes. I listened to all of it and let it carry me under.
A dragon woke me.
We were eating porridge the next morning, thick and sweet with cream and honey, and a shadow crossed the window and the room went dark and the bowls on the table rattled. I shoved back my chair and was at the door before Tolan could swallow his mouthful.
Caraxes was climbing off Rhaenys's Hill in a tight red spiral, neck whipping the air, long and lean and built more like a serpent than a beast. His scales were a deep red that went nearly black in the shadow of his own wings. He climbed fast, faster than something that big had any right to climb, and every wingbeat sent a concussive thrum through the streets that I felt in my ribs and in my teeth.
Prince Daemon sat on his back. I couldn't see much at that distance, but I could see the armor and the silver hair catching the morning light.
Caraxes banked south and the sun hit his underwing and lit it up like stained glass, the membrane glowing scarlet with the light behind it. I saw the teeth in profile, rows and rows of them, pale and curved and longer than daggers, and the steam that rose from his nostrils in ribbons that the wind tore apart and scattered.
Then he was gone over the rooftops heading for the bay, and the sun came back, and the men in the street who'd stopped to stare picked up their things and went on, because for them this was ordinary.
I want one so badly, Amy said.
That made two of us.
“What I would give to ride one of those,” Tolan muttered.
That made three of us.
The second day I gave myself over to the city with a hunger that surprised me. We walked Rhaenys's Hill and stood in the shadow of the Dragonpit itself, that enormous domed fortress with its dark stone stained by decades of dragonsmoke and its bronze doors standing tall enough for the biggest beast inside to walk through without ducking. Masons had scaffolding up along one stretch of the outer wall where the mortar had worn thin with weather and age, and guards in Targaryen livery stood at every entrance, and the smell that came drifting out from inside was unlike anything I'd ever encountered. Dry and hot and burning, sitting in the back of the throat, tasting of sulfur and hot iron.
That's them, Amy said. That smell is the dragons. Metabolic byproducts of whatever furnace they've got running inside them. I reaaaaally wanna see their insides.
That made two of us.
We found a juggler on the Street of Sisters who kept seven knives in the air and caught every one by the handle without looking, hands moving in a rhythm so precise the blades seemed to orbit him. When he was done he bowed and spread his fingers and the knives vanished into sheaths hidden all over his person so fast I couldn't track a single one.
We watched acrobats from Myr performing on the plaza in front of the sept on Visenya's Hill, their bodies bending and folding in ways that made me want to reach out and feel what their joints and tendons were doing, which I managed not to do. One woman stood on another woman's shoulders, and a third climbed both of them and stood on the topmost pair of upraised hands, and all three held it without a tremor while the crowd below them forgot to breathe.
We ate fried squid in a cookshop by the harbor, dusted with coarse salt and served with a sauce of ground peppers that lit my tongue on fire and, to my genuine satisfaction, made Tolan's eyes water. It was the first time since Amy'd worked on him that anything had gotten through.
"My lady," he said, coughing and hammering his fist against his chest, "forgive me, but I believe they've put dragonfire in this sauce."
I didn’t think anyone would need resistance against hot sauce.
On the third morning I woke up and lay there looking at the ceiling and knew it was time.
"Today," I said to Tolan over breakfast.
He nodded and finished his porridge and his bread and his bacon and his second bowl of porridge and his eggs, and then he stood up and buckled on his sword and smoothed his cloak and ran his fingers through his hair, which was the closest thing to combing it he ever did.
We walked up Aegon's Hill together. The streets got cleaner and wider as we climbed and the buildings shifted from timber to dressed stone and the Red Keep grew above us, its red walls warm in the morning light and its towers rising against a sky so clear and blue it hurt to look at. The Targaryen banners hung slack in the still air, black dragons on red cloth, and they stirred only when a draft came through the battlements and died again.
The main gate stood open. Two guards in full plate flanked it with halberds polished so bright the blades threw lines of light across the flagstones. The dragon sigil sat on their surcoats in gold thread. They watched us come with the flat attention of men who'd been standing there too long to expect anything interesting.
I walked up to the nearer one and pulled my hood back.
"Good morrow," I said. "I am Lady Amelia Darkwood of Velton, daughter of Lord Forrest Darkwood, vassal of Lord Gunthor Darklyn of Duskendale. This is Ser Tolan of Velton, my sworn shield. I'm here at Princess Rhaenyra's invitation."
The guard looked at me. He looked at Tolan. He looked back at me, and his eyes went from my plain travel cloak to my dusty boots to my sunburned face, and whatever he saw there settled his expression into careful blankness.
"An invitation from the princess," he said.
"Yes."
"And you've a letter, my lady? A sealed summons? Any document at all with the princess's mark or the Hand's seal?"
My cheeks went hot. "I don't."
One eyebrow moved, barely. "You've come to the Red Keep without letters, without a retinue, without banners or livery, dressed as common travelers, and you'd have me believe Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen invited you to call on her."
"I know how it sounds," I said.
"Do you," he said. He glanced at the other guard, who was doing something with his halberd grip that was meant to hide the look on his face and didn't quite manage it. The first guard drew a long breath through his nose. "My lady, if that's what you are, I can't let you through without documentation or someone from the household to vouch for you. There are a great many people in this city who'd like to walk through these gates, and not all of them mean well by the princess."
"I assure you, I am who I say I am."
"And I assure you every third beggar in Flea Bottom has a tale about being a lord's son down on his luck. The gates don't open on stories, my lady. They open on seals and writs and faces the household knows."
He wasn't cruel about it. He was doing his job and doing it well, and I couldn't fault him for any of it. That didn't help with the heat in my face.
Tolan shifted beside me and the guard's eyes snapped to the movement, cataloguing the sword and the stance and the width of the shoulders all at once.
"I am Ser Tolan of Velton," Tolan said. "I fought in the tourney not three months ago. I won the melee and the jousts both. I rode against Ser Criston Cole of the Kingsguard and against Prince Daemon Targaryen."
The second guard tilted his head. "The Titan?"
"They call me that," Tolan said, and the reluctance in his voice was real enough that the guard looked him over more carefully, the height and the build and the way he stood.
"You've a look about you," the second guard allowed. "But the Titan could be any big man willing to claim the name. We've turned away three already this week. One was a baker from the Street of Flour, six and a half feet tall and drunk off his arse and very insistent about the whole thing."
"I'm not a baker," Tolan said.
"That's what the last one said too."
The first guard held up his hand. "My lady, ser. I'll send word up to the princess's household. If she confirms who you are, you'll be admitted straightaway. Until then, there's an antechamber beside the gate with a bench and shade."
The antechamber had a vaulted stone ceiling and an arrow slit for a window and a wooden bench worn smooth by what I could only assume was a very long history of people's backsides.
"Well," he said.
"Don't."
"I said nothing, my lady."
He's absolutely laughing at you.
I drank my water and stared at the wall across from me. Six days I'd walked from Velton. Across fields and through forests and past bandits and over fords and through every kind of weather the Crownlands could throw at us, and the gate of the Red Keep had stopped me colder than all of it combined.
Twenty minutes went by. Maybe thirty. The light through the arrow slit shifted as the sun climbed and the bench got harder under me and I'd started thinking seriously about whether to give up and come back tomorrow with a proper letter when the door opened.
The guard stepped in, and he looked different. The blankness was gone from his face. He held the door wide and stepped to one side and dipped his chin.
Rhaenyra came through the doorway.
She wore a riding dress, dark red, cut close and falling straight to her boots, and her silver-gold hair was pulled back in a knot at the base of her skull. Her cheeks were flushed and bright with exertion. A streak of what looked like ash sat on the inside of her left wrist.
She saw me and her eyes went wide.
"Lady Amelia," she said, and the surprise in her voice was the real kind. She turned her head and saw Tolan getting to his feet and her eyes went wider. "And Ser Tolan. The Titan himself."
She looked at me. She looked past me at the empty room and the bench and the two cups of water and nobody else.
"You came alone," she said.
"With Ser Tolan," I said.
"You came with one knight." She said it slowly. "To King's Landing. From Velton. Without writing to me first. Without a guard or a carriage or, I'm told, even a letter of introduction."
I looked down at my boots. There was a lot of road dust on them. More than I'd noticed before.
"I wanted to explore," I said. "The roads and the countryside and the towns between here and home. And I wanted to see King's Landing properly, the real parts."
Rhaenyra looked at me for a long time.
Then she laughed.
It filled the antechamber and bounced off the ceiling and rang in the stone. She pressed her hand over her mouth and it didn't help at all and she gave up and laughed with her whole body, shoulders shaking and eyes going bright and wet, and the ash on her wrist smeared across her cheek when she wiped at her face. The guards in the corridor looked at each other. Tolan stood with his hands clasped behind his back and let the corner of his mouth curl.
Rhaenyra caught her breath and steadied herself and looked at me, and her eyes were wet and warm and completely delighted.
"Of course you did," she said.