A/N: Idk why but this one felt special. Hope everyone enjoys the chapter and let me know what you thought about he ending :D
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Year 300 AC
Kings Landing, The Crownlands
Arya stayed against him while the noon sun poured through the broken crown of the Dragonpit. Her cheek pressed his chest for a few more breaths before she drew back enough to look at him again, her grey eyes hard and bright under the grime. Boots scraped over flagstone and Aemon's attention shifted.
Thoros of Myr came toward them, no prayer or muttered word for his red god came with him now. His singed and filthy robe hung open at the throat, and the hair under his broken nose had more white in it than red. The man in Winterfell's hall had been wine-flushed and full of fire-talk while violet flame ran from Aemon's skin and half the room reached for steel. Here he only stopped before him and held out a cloak.
It had once been red, and a trace of that still lived in the weave where soot and old weather had spared it. Aemon took it as Thoros kept his eyes low.
Aemon drew it around his shoulders and even though it barely covered enough for decent folk, it would do for now. Arya looked the priest's cloak over from the blackened edges to the place where one shoulder had nearly burned away, then snorted through her nose.
"That rag has lived through near as much fire as you," she said. "It does a poor job of covering… everything."
A light burst of laughter tried to rise in him and died half-born. "Aye."
Nymeria lay on the warm stone a few yards off with her head on her paws and one gold eye open. She and Ghost had run together at Winterfell, and whatever the wolves had settled between them held true even after he came down out of fire. Her tail thumped once against the flagstones before stilling.
Below the hill, the city lay stifled in the midday sun. Faint commands drifted up from the lower yards, punctuated by the sudden bang of a nearby shutter.
Arya stood before him with Needle at her hip, and the dream he had carried from Dorne rose sharp and sudden. He should have let it lie a little longer, with soldiers below and enemies afoot in the Red Keep and a city balanced on rumor and fear, yet the dream had sat on his mind the entire flight to King's Landing.
"I dreamed of you," he said.
Arya arched a brow, silently demanding an explanation.
"An inn, burning. You were kneeling in the mud outside it." He kept his voice low in the tone for ugly facts laid before men who wanted softer words. "Lady Stark stood in the fire. Her eyes were calm, not fighting her… release."
"And you were reaching for her," he went on. "A boy with a bull's build had his arms locked around your waist."
She clasped Needle's pommel and her weight shifted onto the balls of her feet as she took her time answering. "She found Baelish," Arya said, "and after she cut his throat, the fire took her. She… chose her own end."
Aemon drew one breath and stepped forward. The moment he pulled her in, he felt Arya's shoulders coil to strike. She stayed rigid for a long time, likely the memory of watching her mother die playing in her mind. He could remember her fighting the smith to get back inside that burning inn. He held her a little closer, and after a while he felt her forehead settle against his chest.
He found it impossible to feel any true sadness for the final rest of Lady Stoneheart, for that vengeful ghost had been a nightmare to everyone she touched. Yet the sight of his sister finally allowing herself to be small and vulnerable was a pain far more difficult to endure than any of his own scars.
Jon pulled her closer and buried his face in the dark tangle of her hair as the wind howled through. The need for explanations had long since passed, burned away by the years they had spent apart.
Someone spoke at their backs, the voice scraped hoarse and barely raised. "I tried to get her out."
Aemon turned his head. The dark-haired young man still stood where he had halted after the climb, with a broad chest and shoulders, one cheek purpled and his split lip crusted dark. A hammer hung at his hip and sweat had dried white in the cloth of his shirt, though he looked at the ground between Aemon's feet instead of Aemon himself.
"I went back in," he said. "Could see her through the smoke. I caught hold of her arm. She would never come." He pushed the next words out with effort. "She looked at me and I knew what she wanted." His throat worked. "I think… I think she was glad to see 'Arry again."
Thoros shut his eyes for a moment, and the priest looked ready to sway clear off his feet, staying upright by habit alone. "She was," Thoros said quietly. "Whatever she had become by the end, when Arya walked through that door, I saw Catelyn Stark's face for the first time since she received the Kiss."
Aemon eased Arya free by inches and turned toward him fully. There he was, the boy from the dream, with bull shoulders, great hands, and the same arms that had locked around Arya infront of a burning inn. Aemon had marked his weapon, his build, and his distance from Arya when he first reached the hill, but now he took a closer look.
Black of hair, younger and sober with a blue stare and a jaw Aemon remembered from a visit to Winterfell, the boy carried the very shape of Robert Baratheon. The likeness jarred him, yet this was the lad who had pulled Arya from the fire, and gratitude came hard on the heels of old blood debts.
"What is your name?" Aemon asked.
The young man opened his mouth and cleared his throat. "I..."
"Gendry," Arya answered for him.
Aemon's eyes slid to her. She had moved while his attention was on the smith and settled at his shoulder. "He's my smith."
Gendry glanced at her then, fast and guarded, and looked away before Aemon could read whatever sat behind it. Arya said '*my'* as if half the realm could object and she would be ready to defend his honor.
Aemon looked back to Gendry, and blue eyes met his this time. That was good. Fear had its uses, but too much of it wasted men, and this one had sense enough to stand his ground, bruised and bloodied and half-starved perhaps, yet planted like an anvil. "Gendry," Aemon said. "You kept her breathing and for that you have my gratitude. Once things get settled, ask me anything and I shall do my best to see it become a reality."
The smith swallowed, and his split lip pulled with it. "Ay—I mean, yes, Your Grace."
Robert's face rose again in scraps. There was a boy at Winterfell laughing too loudly, a king too drunk, and a man Aemon had never met yet had carried all his life. Had the old gods been given to jests, there was one here with Rhaegar's son on a ruined hill, looking at Robert's. Aemon let the thought pass. Lineage could wait, for the dead would never care whose get a man was, and Arya stood alive because of him.
Below them, horns sounded from the city walls in short, hurried calls. Men were passing alarm from tower to tower, but no rush came up the hill. It must be disturbing for them to have a giant just disappear before them. He wondered what they were looking for now, what they were scrambling towards. The horns went on sounding.
He turned and started for the broken arch where the old road left the Dragonpit and sloped toward the city. Arya simply fell into step on his left, and behind them came Gendry's heavy tread and the softer drag of Thoros's boots.
Nymeria got up and fell in beside him. Her fur brushed his hand, and he rubbed the broad skull between her ears without thinking. For a few strides she leaned into his palm. Then she trotted ahead of them down the slope, tail level and head low.
They passed through the broken arch, where the old stones still held scorch marks from the riot that had destroyed the Dragonpit long ago. Aemon laid a hand on one as he went by, and thought of the Wall for half a breath. Everything failed in time, whether stone, ice, or men.
Sunlight struck the back of his neck as the city opened below them in roofs, alleys, smoke, and banners. The tiles he had shaken loose coming down lay broken across the road. Two Golden Company spearmen stood at the corner. One watched the road while his mate shaded his eyes and searched the sky above the pit.
Aemon moved at a brisk, unrelenting march that forced the men behind him to focus entirely on keeping up. The road fell away from the Dragonpit in a long curve as the city opened wider with every step. King's Landing had gone to ground with shutters fast against windows and doors barred and crossbeamed. A woman peering through a crack in warped planks saw the wolf first, then Aemon covered in only a cloak, and then the priest before she drew back so fast the board banged shut.
A particular sight took his attention for a moment as he saw what looked to be a baker lowering a little girl through the cellar hatch beside his shop. "I've got her," the woman on the steps said. He let go, and she drew the girl against her. "Did you see where it went?"
"No. By the time I could see again it was gone." He stood, still looking up the road.
"He's right here!" Arya shouted. She was pointing straight at Aemon, grinning from ear to ear. "That's my brother!"
Aemon swatted her hand down. "Would you mind?" The baker had turned to look at him. There he stood in the middle of the street, barefoot, holding a burnt cloak shut with one hand. Arya looked him over and made a valiant effort to keep a straight face.
"Shut this for me, will you?" the woman called. The baker lowered the hatch and waited until he heard her drop the bar. By the time Aemon glanced back, the man was climbing onto a cart for a better view of the hill.
He kept his pace and read the city for stores, bodies, lanes, and trouble yet to come. Burned houses gaped along the slope with their roofs fallen in and their beams black as coal. Three corpses lay in one gutter where the runoff had failed to carry them away, their bellies swollen and flies thick upon the faces. Visenya's Hill remained a blackened wasteland. Pale grass and stunted yellow weeds clawed through the soot, fighting for life in the salted earth where the Great Sept once stood.
Those men had been dead for days. Whatever had killed them, it had happened while Cersei still held the city. The surrender was supposed to have been peaceful, yet parts of King's Landing looked as if they had been sacked. The smell met them lower on the hill, carrying rank drains and the rot of dead flesh left too long in summer heat.
Aemon's eyes scoured the city as he walked, spotting a thin girl who sat with her back against a wall and chewed on something that might once have been leather. Arya watched her until the road bent and the child slipped from sight. Gendry's gaze went farther east toward Flea Bottom, where whole rows of hovels had fallen in on themselves. His big hands balled once and opened again. A hammer served against a helm or a skull or a chain link heated in the forge, but it served nothing against hunger.
A sept stood open on the next street over with half its leaded panes gone, and from its steps a gaunt septon cried of judgment, dragons, lions, and the Stranger come at last for all their sins. His voice carried up the lane and broke against shuttered houses. A dozen thin faces watched him from doorways, and that was the danger — hungry men listened hard when any fool promised meaning.
As they went deeper, hooves struck stone in a fast clatter. A knot of riders came out from a side lane in green cloaks over mail with Tyrell roses worked in gold on the breast. The one in front reined hard enough to make his courser dance sideways and swung down before the beast had fully settled. The Tyrell lord crossed the road toward them at once, boots ringing on the stones and one hand still on his sword belt from habit rather than threat.
He saw Arya first. "Lady Arya," he said, breath still quick from the ride. "The dragon — did it leave the hill? Is it still in the pit?"
He spared Aemon half a glance, the sort a man gives any ragged stranger found near a crisis. That was fair enough. A dragon the size of Balerion disappearing over a city packed with wildfire jars would have sharpened any lord.
Arya gave him the flat look she saved for fools, liars, and people who asked the wrong question. "You're asking the wrong person, Ser Garlan," Arya said, tilting her head toward Aemon.
That turned him. The knight took in the cloak fit for a beggar, the bare calves below its ragged hem, and at last Aemon's face.
Aemon knew his eyes bled red whenever the Valyrian blood ran hot. He was entirely used to the terror it caused and the way ordinary men would pale, step back, and mutter frantic prayers to whatever gods they kept. Garlan did none of those things. The knight simply stood his ground and studied the sudden shift in color, assessing the strange sight as if inspecting an unfamiliar weapon drawn on a battlefield.
Here was a man half dressed in a burned priest's cloak with Arya at his side, coming from the Dragonpit where a dragon not seen in over a century just disappeared in a flash. Aemon could see the lord fitting one piece against another, and wondered how much Jaime had told them.
Aemon spared him the rest of the road. "Ser Garlan," he said. "Your men kept this city from tearing itself apart. I came to make sure that holds."
The knight betrayed little more than a brief stiffening of his posture, holding his peace to hear what followed.
Aemon went on. "My name is Aemon Targaryen."
The Tyrell lord studied him. "Targaryen," he said. "There is already a Targaryen in the Red Keep."
"Yes," Aemon said. "Targaryens seem to keep sprouting out of thin air now a days in Westeros it seems." He let the lord take that. When he spoke again he let Garlan hear a little of the voice he had used to call for Arya. "If you are wondering about the dragon on the hill, you are looking at him."
Garlan drew breath to answer, then stalled, wordless for a moment. "That was you...? Calling for Lady Arya?" he asked. Aemon nodded. The knight looked from him to Arya and back again. "How?"
"Not now." Aemon looked past him to the shuttered houses and the bodies in the gutter. "Open the granaries. Bring the wagons I saw outside, inside the walls. Feed these people before sundown."
Garlan blinked in disbelief, thrown by the turn. Aemon knew that look from his own bannermen and the way they always balked when he pivoted from dragons and dead men to the exact weight of a grain shipment. Lords loved the glory of war yet remained completely ignorant of the miserable logistics required to keep an army fed.
"The wildfire crews eat from those stores," Garlan said. "Men hauling jars of green death need steady hands, and steady hands need full bellies. If I pull grain for the city before—"
"The city starves." He thought of the girl on the hill road chewing on what had looked like a scrap of leather. "Your soldiers can chew hard bread for a day. These people have had Cersei for years."
For half a beat Garlan said nothing before he turned his head. "Ser Harlan, ride to the King's Gate and the Mud Gate. Every grain wagon comes in at once. Break seal on the stores in the Tyrell camp. Bread first, then oats, then salt fish if any remains. I want bakers roused."
The knight he named wheeled his horse about and spurred off without question. Garlan either knew how bad it was already or had eyes enough to learn quickly.
Aemon asked, "What happened here?"
Garlan's mouth went thin. "Bread riots days before the surrender. Goldcloaks killed seventeen in the crush. After that came Lyseni freeriders and sellswords, looser than any kennel. Women went missing. Boys as well. Men found in alleys with their throats opened for boots, rings, scraps of meat. Cersei answered pleas from the street with 'eat rats.'" His eyes moved over the corpses farther down the road. "Most of what you saw from the hill belongs to her. The surrender cost little by comparison."
Aemon stored every word — seventeen dead in bread riots, Lyseni loose in the streets, a queen telling smallfolk to gnaw vermin. Justice could wait a few hours, but hunger could not, and wildfire least of all. "How much of the green fire is out?" he asked.
"Some of the Red Keep cellars stand empty now," Garlan said. "Others remain packed. Men work with sand, hooks, and wagons. It's slow work. If one jar slips, half a street goes to ash. Ser Jaime gave us more sites than the crown's own servants knew. We still treat every vault in this city like a trap."
"Any fresh sites?"
"None yet. I trust that answer about as far as I can throw a horse."
So did Aemon, and he nodded once. "Keep the work going. Double the teams where you can. Any pyromancer who balks loses his tongue after he speaks his last location."
Garlan studied him again, hearing the North in the words or something else. "I can see why Ser Jaime crossed half the realm for you."
Aemon let that pass. "I need clothes, boots, and horses. And then take me to the Red Keep."
"Is the fire the rea—nevermind. You shall have them." Garlan glanced at the ruined cloak, then with the ghost of a soldier's courtesy chose to look back at Aemon's face. "And food, if you have time for it."
Time was the old enemy again. "Send bread as you send the horses," Aemon said. "For them first." He tipped his chin toward Arya, Gendry, and Thoros.
Arya gave him a sideways look at that, one part annoyance and one part relief. Gendry looked as if he might argue on stubbornness alone, but Thoros said nothing. The priest looked tired enough to sleep where he stood.
Garlan turned to his men again and began giving orders in quick clipped phrases. One rider went for mounts, another for clothing, and a third toward the camp for bread. The lane around them had started to stir by inches. A shutter cracked open above a dyer's shop, and two children peered from under a cart, saw Nymeria, and vanished under it again.
Aemon stood in the middle of the road in a borrowed cloak. The city watched through cracks in wood and cloth while grain wagons began to roll. He glanced at the rider bringing clothes.
"Before we ride," Aemon said, "You should know the fate of your younger brother. Loras lives."
Garlan stopped dead in his tracks. He had taken the dragon in hand better than most men would have, but this struck deeper. "Loras?" he rasped, his voice cracking on the single word. "When did you meet him? Where is he?"
"Euron took him near the seas of Dorne. Chained him, tortured him and kept him on the Silence." Aemon kept his voice low, for men heard ugliness better that way. "Daenerys pulled him free at Sunspear but the scars are still there. Those won't be easy to be rid off."
"But he lives," Aemon said. "For this hour, that matters most." He watched Garlan take that. "Daenerys flies him home to Highgarden. She means to put him in your grandmother's care and bring the Reach into the war before the Wall fails."
The rider reached them and held out the bundle in both hands, but Garlan ignored it. "I must thank… Princess Daenerys?" he asked.
"Queen Daenerys, for now."
That won a sound close to a snort from Arya, and Gendry's split mouth twitched.
Aemon went on. "He wanted to ride from Sunspear with his burns still fresh. Ser Barristan had to talk him down, and Daenerys gave the last word. If you know your brother, you know the truth of that."
Garlan shut his eyes a moment. When he opened them, grief, relief, and plain old fury had all found a place to stand. "I do know him." His hand came up to scrub across his mouth and then fell away. "What of Euron?"
"Missing. Dead. Not a threat right now."
Garlan turned his face toward the southern road. Two children watched him from the mouth of an alley, bold enough now to come out where he could see them, but he had eyes only for the road. Aemon knew something of that feeling. He had flown from Dorne with Arya on his mind the whole way, and for all the good it had done him to know she lived, he had wanted his own arms around her. Highgarden must have seemed a long way off to Garlan. Whatever the Reach made of Daenerys and her claim, she had brought his little brother home alive.
"Thank you," Garlan said.
Aemon gave a nod and let that rest. A man could only take so many blows in a street before his guard failed him, and Garlan had work still.
The man cleared his throat and lifted the bundle again. "My lord?" Aemon could see good dark wool beneath the folded shirt, plainly cut, without a lick of embroidery.
Garlan blinked back to the lane. "Aye. Give them here."
The shirt of clean plain linen was too broad in the shoulders, and the officer's breeches were serviceable dark wool. Aemon took them without comment. The boots fit well enough, though the left one pinched at the heel. He handed the priest's cloak back to Thoros, and Arya turned her back while Aemon pulled on the breeches and shirt in the shelter of two Tyrell horses. He shoved his feet into the boots, stamped once to settle them, and took the plain dark cloak Garlan offered last.
"No crown?" Arya said.
Aemon fastened the clasp. "I left it in my other breeches." That earned him the ghost of a smile, small and quick before it was gone.
Garlan's men had brought four horses. Garlan mounted and wheeled his courser toward the Red Keep. "Ride close, Your Grace. My men will clear the road."
Aemon turned his gelding uphill and looked back at the Dragonpit before he faced the city and put heels to the horse. Ash still greyed the earth there, though grass and little yellow flowers had pushed up through it, poor soil making poor blossoms.
The Golden Company men stepped aside as Garlan's green cloaks came on. The streets were unnervingly quiet. Aemon saw no looted cellars and heard no screams from the alleyways, stark proof that Connington kept his vanguard on a brutal leash. Keeping bored soldiers from tearing a city apart took real authority and proved this invading prince brought more with him than just a famous name.
Near Cobbler's Square, two bound gold cloaks sat under guard with dried blood at their mouths and swelling around one eye. They were Cersei's men paying for Cersei's orders.
The Red Keep rose ahead, red walls over the city like dried blood on old snow, its gates standing open with men formed in ranks before them. There were too many helms to count in a glance, spears upright, black and gold and the three-headed dragon of another line than his own. So they had chosen ceremony.
Aemon slowed his horse as they came into the yard. An older boy in black plate stood before the gatehouse with silver-gold hair bright under the sun, a sword at his hip and men at every shoulder. An older lord flanked him on the right with one gloved hand resting on his pommel, while on the left stood a soft round man in pale silk with plump hands tucked in sleeves and a face smooth as a pudding. That was the Spider, if Jaime's reports had the right of it. Jaime stood a little ahead of them all where he could be seen, and behind him a knight in Lannister colors held a sword across both palms.
A lean man with a sellsword's walk lingered near a wagon piled with sand and hooks and heavy gloves, the cut over one eye gone dark with old bruising. They were wildfire crews, and the work had kept moving.
Garlan rode beside Aemon until they were abreast of the waiting prince. Only then did he rein in. Aemon swung down from the saddle and let a Tyrell man take the reins. Arya hit the ground lightly a second later, while Gendry and Thoros came behind. Nymeria padded at Aemon's left knee and bared teeth at the nearest spear line until three men remembered to breathe.
The boy in black plate opened his mouth, and Aemon walked past him. "Ser Jaime." That landed where he wanted it to. He heard steel shift in scabbards and the older lord's boot scrape stone, but he kept his eyes on Lannister.
Jaime looked thinner than he had at Winterfell and more lined about his face, with dirt at the hem of his tunic and his beard gone rough. He met Aemon's eyes and went to one knee at once. The movement came clumsy with one good hand bracing on stone while the golden one hovered useless, but he made it clean enough. "Your Grace."
The knight behind Jaime stepped forward and held out a sword across both palms.
"Widow's Wail," Jaime said from one knee. "The other half of Ice. I return it House Stark."
Aemon took it in both hands. The steel was lighter than it looked and warm, as Valyrian steel always was. Red ran through the dark ripples where Ned Stark's greatsword still lived in the metal, broken and remade but not gone.
Lowering the blade, Aemon studied the man who had carried out his grim orders within the walls, the brutal weight of that task carved directly into his haggard features. "You carried a heavier burden than this sword," Aemon said quietly. "But that does not absolve you of all your sins."
Jaime lowered his head, a man settling under a weight he had already chosen to carry. "I understand, Your Grace."
Aemon turned to Arya and held out the blade hilt first.
Arya stared at it with confusion written on her face. "That is Valyrian steel," she exclaimed. "Jon... are you sure?"
"It's home now," Aemon said. "Half of Father's sword. Needle will serve you against any man alive. It will do nothing against what is coming from the north. This will."
Her fingers tightened on Needle's grip, and for a breath he thought she might refuse. Then her hand came up and closed around the hilt of Widow's Wail. "It's lighter than Needle," she said, turning it once.
"And sharper too, so be careful. Remember to always—"
"Stick them with the pointy end."
His hand came up before he thought about it and mussed her hair the way he had the day he gave her Needle. Arya went still under his palm for half a breath before she swatted his hand away. "I'm not nine anymore," she said, her voice gone rough at the edges.
"No," Aemon said. "You are not."
Arya bent her head over the sword. Her hair fell across her face where he'd mussed it, and for once she let it be. By the time she looked up, Widow's Wail was in its sheath and her hand rested on the pommel.
"You said you were returning that sword to House Stark," the boy in black plate said to Jaime. He looked from the blade at Arya's hip to the man beside her. "She called him Jon. Is that who you've bent the knee to? Ned Stark's bastard?"
"It is true he was raised by Ned Stark," Jaime said, still on one knee. "But his name is Aemon Targaryen."
Jaime got to his feet. "Addam, come here a moment." The knight who had brought the sword stepped up beside him. "Your Grace, may I present Ser Addam Marbrand. He held the garrison in my name."
Addam bowed. Jaime glanced over at the wagon. "You too, Bronn. His Grace ought to know who's been shifting those bloody jars." The sellsword came over, wiping his hands on his breeches. "Bronn of the Blackwater, Your Grace. He kept the wildfire work moving when better men found reasons not to."
Bronn shrugged when he turned to the man. "Someone had to get it done. Just hope there's a reward somewhere in it..."
"The wildfire work keeps this city standing," Aemon said. "That will be remembered."
Bronn looked at him as if checking whether the words had coin behind them. Whatever he found was enough to shut his mouth, which was likely a rare thing. Aemon turned at last to the youth in black plate. *So this was Aegon.*
He had silver-gold hair and purple eyes, a prince's armor and a prince's schooling. The coloring was right, but the rest missed the mark. Aemon knew his own face well enough to scrutinize the heavy jaw and the wide set of the boy's eyes, seeking some flicker of recognition, yet he found only the cold features of a stranger. Aegon maintained a rigid, unyielding front, a necessary display of strength that kept the streets from burning.
Bran had named a Lord Connington at the boy's right hand, a man who had loved Rhaegar and followed his memory across the Narrow Sea. Everything the boy's face was not sat written in Aemon's own, and Connington knew it. Connington's eyes moved past him, past Arya, and settled on Gendry. His gloved hand tightened on the pommel as if ready to strike but thought better and let go of it.
Aegon's chin came up. "What do you want of me?"
Aemon respected the total lack of courtly venom. He studied the man, assessing his next move like an enemy across a battlefield. "Tell me something first," Aemon said. "What do you remember of King's Landing?"
The gathered shifted, and Aegon blinked in confusion. "I was an infant when we fled," the boy said. "I have no memories of King's Landing. Lord Connington and my tutors raised me in Pentos, under Magister Illyrio's protection."
"Illyrio's protection," Aemon repeated, letting the name sway. "And what did Varys tell you of the night you were taken from the Red Keep?"
Aegon's chin lifted a fraction. "That a loyal man swapped me for another babe before the Sack. That Ser Amory Lorch and Gregor Clegane killed the other child in my place, and my mother, and my sister." His voice held steady through all of it, though his hands had closed at his sides by the end.
Aemon watched Aegon's expression through every word. The anger when he spoke of Elia and Rhaenys sat in the muscles of his face and the tendons of his neck, places a man could not govern on command. Either the man before him was the finest mummer Varys had ever trained or he believed every word he had been fed.
Aemon turned to the soft man in pale silk. Though he had never seen the Spider, half the realm's whispers described the same fat, perfumed creature with hands always hidden, and the man before him fit the description. "You must be Lord Varys," Aemon said.
The soft man unfolded his hands from his sleeves and offered a bow that managed to be deep without bending far. "Your Grace honors me. I have served the realm from the shadows for many years, and it is a profound relief to welcome a true dragon back to these walls. If I may say, your father would have—"
"You claim you saved my brother Aegon from the Sack."
The courtly smile vanished as the eunuch pressed his lips shut in silence. Every ear in the yard bent toward him.
"You say you took him across the Narrow Sea while another child died in his place. Tell me, Lord Varys. My sister Rhaenys lived in the same keep, behind the same walls, under the same guard. Why did you leave her there?"
Varys bowed his head in faux obedience. "Your Grace, had I possessed the power to save both children, I would have done so."
Unmoved by the show of obedience, Aemon held his ground. "You possessed power enough for a babe swap. Power enough for ships, false names, wet nurses, hidden rooms, and years of lies."
"Princess Rhaenys was older. She knew faces, names, chambers. Her absence would have been marked at once. The prince was an infant. He could be carried in blankets."
"So you made the decision."
"I chose what I could preserve."
"As I recall from the stories, the children were in the same wing that day. You saved one and left the other for Lorch."
Varys drew a careful breath. "The Sack was chaos, Your Grace. Choices were made in seconds, not hours. I saved the child I could reach."
Aemon caught Aegon glancing toward Varys. The boy studied the eunuch with a sudden, creeping caution, looking at his oldest counselor as if he had just realized the man was holding a blade.
"A girl child mattered less to you," Aemon said.
"To the realm," Varys said. "A daughter, however precious, could rally fewer swords than a son."
"Fewer swords." Aemon's voice had not risen. "So because a girl of three could rally fewer swords, Ser Amory Lorch was free to drag her from under her father's bed and put his blade through her half a hundred times." He watched Varys's face. "Was that calculation yours alone, or did Illyrio help you with the sums?"
For a fleeting instant the eunuch had no ready answer, the slip in his practiced composure gone almost before it showed.
"When you look at that boy," Aemon said, "do you see a prince you saved? Or a piece you placed?"
Varys folded his hands as the smoothness resettled on his face, and when he spoke his voice carried a sorrow too practiced to trust. "War forces griefs upon us all, Your Grace. Children die, cities burn, and men of duty seize what little good they may from ruin. I spared one life. That is my answer. I grieve for Princess Rhaenys. Her death was monstrous. Yet grief alters nothing."
"You spared one life," Aemon said, his voice staying even, almost quiet. "Tell me about the other babe. You told Aegon a loyal man put another child in his place before the Sack. Whose child was he, Varys? Whose child did you put in my brother's cradle? You had to find him somewhere. You had to get him past the guards and into my borther's room."
"Would it ease your grief to know his name, Your Grace?"
"It might have eased his mother's to know what became of him. How long before the Sack did you have that child ready? Was there still time to send someone for my sister?"
"Enough." Connington's voice cut across the yard. He had stepped forward with his gloved hand tight on his pommel, and for the first time the old lord spoke directly to Aemon. "A prudent servant prepares for the worst. That is what spymasters do. I raised that boy myself, and I did it because I looked into his face and saw Rhaegar's son."
"You looked into his face and saw what you wanted to see," Aemon said. "Varys knew of your love for my sire. He counted on it."
"I gave twenty years of my life to that boy," Connington snapped, frustration flashing plain across his features. "My name. My lands. My health... I did not do it because a eunuch told me to. I did it because I loved your father, and I believed I was keeping his son alive."
"Then Varys used the best of you," Aemon said. "And that is worse than if he had used the worst."
To purchase Pentoshi magisters and keep hidden manses took more than a sudden whim. How long had Varys been at it? Aemon looked past Connington. Several of the men behind him were watching Varys. He was pleased to see these questions take hold in thier minds. If the eunuch had found time to put another child in Aegon's cradle, how little time could he have had for Rhaenys? Let him answer that in front of them.
Varys spread his hands one last time. His voice had found its footing again, smooth and measured when he spoke. "Your Grace, I understand your grief. I share it. But the realm needed a prince, and I delivered—"
"LIAR."
The word tore out of him with the dragon in it, and in the same breath his boot drove into Varys's knee from the side and the bone cracked like a dry branch. The eunuch folded before the sound of the voice had finished shaking the stones, silk and courtesy and twenty years of whispers collapsing into a man screaming on the flagstones with one leg bent wrong beneath him.
Those watching took a moment to catch up. Horses jerked against their reins and the men flinched backwards. A few men at the back looked up for wings. Those nearest Varys had their eyes on Aemon. Aegon's hand flew to his sword. Red washed across Aemon's sight for a breath, and violet burned at the edges.
Those around him, even Arya, had gone deathly quiet. Varys lay screaming at Aemon's feet, his hands clamped around his ruined knee. Aemon drew a slow breath, then another. As the red began to clear from his sight, he could see how grey the eunuch's face had gone.
Aemon turned toward Jaime. "Take him," he commanded. "Put him in the cells."
Jaime moved at once without looking toward Aegon for leave. "As you command."
Bronn moved with him, quicker than any lord. Between them they hauled Varys up by the arms. The broken leg dragged useless behind as his boot scraped over stone.
Aemon watched Connington, whose gaze followed Varys toward the gate and then returned to he and held. His sword had stayed sheathed, and no word had left his mouth in the spider's defense. Twenty years of old grudges sat in that silence, and Connington let them stay.
Aegon stepped forward. "You cannot do this," he said, and even now he kept his chin high. "He is my counselor."
Feeling how they all had shifted with that single act of violence, Aemon looked at Aegon. "Your counselor lied to you," Aemon said. "He built your life on a dead child's name."
Aegon's expression stiffened. He looked toward Varys, who had now reached the gatehouse half carried and half dragged, and then back to Aemon. "You have no proof of that."
"He told you a loyal man saved you before the Sack. He told me he saved the child he could reach. Then he stood here in front of you and told us what made one child worth more to him than the other. A son would rally more swords." Aemon held the boy's eyes. "Illyrio paid for the men who taught you. Connington raised you, and I believe he did it for love of my father. But who told either of them whose son you were? I am asking you to look at what you just heard, and decide whether it was the truth."
Aegon's hand had left his sword hilt to hang empty at his side. For a moment Aemon thought the boy might fold, but instead he straightened. "I have more than Varys's word," Aegon said. "Every lord here watched me take this city without putting it to the torch. I fed the people Cersei starved. I kept the peace when lesser men would have loosed their swords. That is what I have done. You arrived an hour ago and broke a man's bones in my courtyard. Tell me which of us has earned the benefit of doubt."
A murmur rippled through the watching men. Aegon was backed into a corner, but Aemon could see he had dug his heels into the dirt and was ready to meet any challenge.
"You have done well here," Aemon said. "I mean that. But where is your proof of blood, now that the man who provided it cannot speak without screaming? Me on the other hand…" The draconic edge crept back into his voice. "I NEED NO PROOF."
The silence that followed was more telling than any argument Aegon could have made. Aegon looked truly shattered. Whatever Varys had done, Aemon believed the boy had crossed the sea in good faith. He'd crossed the sea for the home they'd been driven from. Everything he knew of his mother and sister had come from the same men who'd sent him back to claim it. What if the first lie he'd ever heard had been his own name? Grooming a child to die for a lie felt like an entirely new and miserable kind of butchery.
"I do not think you knew," Aemon said quietly. "And for that I am sorry."
Staring at him, Aegon said, "You pity me."
"I was raised under a false name too," Aemon said. "I know what it costs when the truth comes."
The boy's face lost its hold for the space of a single breath as something childlike surfaced beneath the armor and the training. Aemon recognized the look from his own worst nights at Winterfell when the word *bastard* had sat on him like a stone he could not shift.
"Careful, lad," Connington said, barely above a breath.
Aegon ignored it. "I came west for my father's seat," he said. "I came home. I did what I was raised to do. If everything I was told is a lie, then I am owed an answer, and I will not take yours alone."
"You will have your answer," Aemon said. "Come to Harrenhal. The lords of Westeros will gather there, and everything Varys built will be laid open before them. You will hear the truth alongside every lord in the realm, and you can judge it for yourself."
Aegon watched him for a long breath. Whatever he searched for in Aemon's face, he found enough to give one short nod. "Very well."
The grand illusion was gone. Aegon simply braced himself and faced the disaster with quiet steel. Aemon finally understood Connington's two-decade crusade.
Aemon turned and walked for the gate. Connington stood in his path, and he half expected him to speak or bar the way or draw steel for the boy he had raised, but instead he moved aside. Aemon noted the rigid line of his jaw and the white-knuckled grip on his sword hilt as Connington stalked past him and left only a tense silence in his wake.
Arya fell into step at once, close on his left, and Nymeria padded through the gate beside them. Behind her, grey shapes from the outer streets slipped through shadow and sun alike. No one barred them.
The Red Keep closed around them in corridors of red stone and torchlight. A steward saw Nymeria first and dropped a stack of linens where he stood. Two Tyrell guards at a crossing pressed their backs to the wall, and a serving girl ducked through a side door and pulled it shut behind her.
The doors stood open at the end of a long corridor, and the hall beyond them stretched vast and dim into dust and grey light. The Iron Throne sat at the far end, an ugly sight against the wall, a thousand swords fused into something no sane man would choose to sit on.
At the doors Arya stopped with Nymeria at her side. "Are you sure?" she asked him.
"Yes," Aemon replied. "Yes, I am."
He crossed the hall alone, his boots ringing on the same stone Aerys had trod, and Robert after him. Only that morning the silver-haired man had called this place his own. As Aemon climbed the steps, the swords fanned out above him, their edges dulled by centuries but their points still keen. Aemon turned and sat on the Iron Throne. The blades pressed against him and found nothing they could break.
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