Footsteps approached from afar—heavy and chaotic—mixed with the clatter of iron chains dragging across the ground and suppressed whimpering.
At the front was Aen, the law officer of the King's Landing prison, a bloated man in uniform. The moment he saw the prince, his face immediately filled with obsequious smiles as he hurried forward.
Behind him, ten jailers escorted seven or eight prisoners.
Every one of them was dressed in rags, their hands and feet shackled with heavy irons.
Their mouths were tightly gagged with strips of cloth, leaving them able to produce only hoarse gasps and muffled cries of despair.
"Your Highness!" The law officer spotted Aemond from afar and immediately jogged up, bowing deeply. "As ordered, this batch of condemned criminals has been delivered—for the dragon… ah, an extra meal."
His face was piled with smiles, yet his eyes dared not look directly at the massive creature crouched not far away, whose mere breath stirred waves of hot air.
Aemond knew this was a tradition passed down from ancient Valyria.
Condemned criminals were fed to dragons to cultivate the dragon's cruelty toward ordinary people, instilling the notion that humans were merely food.
Under such conditioning, even dragonkeepers, in the eyes of a great dragon, were nothing more than ants delivering meals. Once hunger struck, even those dragonkeepers who had tended the dragon their entire lives would be eaten.
This ancient tradition had not been abolished even during the reign of the Wise King—clearly a deliberate choice.
Vhagar gazed at this newly presented food, a low rumble issuing from her throat.
The prisoners, upon seeing the great dragon, struggled even more violently. A bald, burly man twisted frantically, smashing his head toward a nearby jailer.
Another, a thin young man, had his legs give out and collapsed to his knees, only to be dragged along roughly by the jailers. The stench of urine and filth spread through the air—someone had lost control.
"Quiet! All of you, behave yourselves!" the law officer barked sharply. He drew the hilt of his blade and slammed it hard against the shoulder of a struggling prisoner, producing a dull thud. "Being eaten by a dragon is your good fortune! Saves the trouble of the gallows—no need to bury your bones!"
One gagged prisoner shook his head desperately, muffled "mmph" sounds forcing their way from his throat, his eyes pleading like a dog about to be slaughtered.
The law officer snorted and kicked him. "Thinking about taking the black now? Too late! Gag him tighter!"
Aemond's face showed no expression. His violet eyes swept over the group of prisoners who were about to be buried in a dragon's belly.
He accepted the list handed over by the law officer. On it were hastily scrawled each prisoner's crimes—robbery and murder, rape, arson, assaulting guards…
All were capital offenses, none of them rare within the city of King's Landing.
His gaze calmly swept across each name and the brief descriptions of their crimes, until it came to a halt on the final entry.
"Tella," female, approximately twenty years old, from the Stormlands. Crimes: illegal hunting in the royal forest; resisting arrest and murdering three nobles (including Aegino, the second son of the Lord of Haystack Hall); assaulting law-enforcement soldiers.
A female condemned criminal was rare—especially when the charges involved nobility.
Aemond lifted his eyes.
She was far shorter than the men around her, likewise gagged with a strip of cloth. A head of dirty, dark-brown short hair clung to her forehead, obscuring her features.
Yet she stood straight. Her wrists, slender beneath the shackles, seemed to contain strength. Though forced to kneel by the soldiers, her body was taut, like a fully drawn bow, her gaze fixed hard on the ground.
When she noticed the prince's eyes upon her, she raised her head, her gaze sweeping past the law officer, past Aemond, and finally landing on Vhagar. Her pupils constricted sharply, but she quickly forced herself to lower her eyes again.
She was wounded; dark, dried blood could be seen on her tattered clothes.
Vhagar seemed to be growing impatient with these appetizers, letting out a low, irritable growl.
Aemond pointed at the female prisoner. "Her. The details of her crimes."
The law officer immediately leaned in, lowering his voice. "Your Highness, this woman is a tough one."
"She was poaching deer in the royal forest when she was discovered by Aegino, the son of the Lord of Haystack Hall, and his two friends."
"That she-wolf fought back, seized one man's sword, and stabbed all three to death on the spot!"
"Good gods—that was three nobles."
"She knew she'd caused a disaster. She fled all the way here, somehow made it to King's Landing, and even tried to sneak aboard a ship to escape. But the royal fleet recognized her as a wanted fugitive."
The female prisoner seemed to understand the law officer's words. Her bound body trembled violently. She lifted her head, and through the tangled strands of her hair, those dark eyes looked straight at Aemond for the first time.
Aemond met her gaze for a moment, then looked away and nodded to the law officer, signaling that he understood.
"Your Highness, shall we—" The law officer rubbed his hands together, preparing to order the prisoners driven toward a position more convenient for Vhagar to feed.
"Wait." Aemond spoke suddenly.
His gaze settled once more on the female prisoner. "Let her speak."
The law officer froze. "Your Highness, this… this lowborn woman will have nothing decent to say. She may offend you—"
"Let her speak," Aemond repeated.
The law officer dared not say another word and quickly signaled to one of the jailers.
The jailer stepped forward and tore the strip of cloth from the female prisoner's mouth.
"Cough! Pah!" The female prisoner coughed violently a few times, spat out a mouthful of blood-tinged saliva, then sucked in several sharp breaths of air carrying a sulfurous smell.
Her voice was hoarse, yet unusually clear, bearing the distinctive accent of the Stormlands: "He's lying!"
She glared at the law officer, then turned to Aemond, speaking rapidly and with agitation. "I did hunt deer. The royal forest belongs to the Crown—I accept the punishment!"
"Whipping, losing a hand—I'll accept it all!"
"But those nobles… they weren't trying to teach me a lesson!"
An unnatural flush spread across her cheeks with rage. "They forced me to the ground and tore at my clothes!"
"That Aegino… he was on top of me, saying he'd use his fine sword to teach a wild girl like me what the mercy of a noble lord was!"
Her body began to tremble, from humiliation and fury alike. "I bit him—it was self-defense! I seized the sword to stay alive!"
"All three of them had weapons. I had no choice!"
"It wasn't murder. It was self-defense!"
When she finished, her chest heaved violently. She stared hard at Aemond, as if trying to find a shred of hope in his violet eyes—if only the slightest hint of understanding.
Silence fell around them, broken only by the impatient scraping of Vhagar's claws against the ground.
The law officer's face darkened. He opened his mouth to argue, but seeing the prince still silent, he dared not speak.
Aemond looked at her for several seconds.
Then he spoke. "It sounds like you're a capable hunter."
He pointed toward the other five or six condemned prisoners, still gagged and shaking with terror.
"I grant you a pardon."
"Kill them."
"You are free."
The law officer fell silent.
After all, he had taken the Lord of Haystack Hall's coin. The lord wanted the wild woman who had killed his son to die in a dragon's jaws, leaving not even bones behind.
Tella went rigid.
She looked at those prisoners—bound and gagged, yet with the same fear and panic in their eyes—then back at Aemond's expressionless face.
This was a chance to live.
Struggle flashed through her dark eyes, but in the end, the instinct to survive overwhelmed everything else.
The feral resolve she had shown while fighting beasts in the forest, while fleeing for her life under a noble hunt, surfaced on her face.
"Fine," she said.
Aemond gave a slight nod.
At a signal from the law officer's eyes, the jailers unlocked the shackles on Tella's hands and feet, though they remained wary, encircling her with swords drawn.
At the same time, the remaining five or six prisoners were shoved onto a relatively open stretch of sand and gravel, still bound hand and foot, their mouths gagged.
What followed was brutal and primitive.
Bloody and chaotic.
Though the prisoners were unable to mount any effective resistance, their desperate struggles and their numbers still caused Tella no small amount of trouble.
She was no knight, with no elegant swordsmanship. Her way of fighting belonged to the forest and the wild—efficient and lethal.
Using stones picked up from the ground…
In the end, when the last prisoner stopped convulsing beneath the tightening of her forearm around his neck, she herself was nearly spent. She gasped for breath, her dark eyes fixed straight on Aemond.
Aemond watched in silence the entire time, his face devoid of any expression, until the final man fell.
He signaled to the law officer. "Let her go."
The law officer hesitated for a moment, but still obeyed the prince's command, ordering the jailers to clear a path.
Tella struggled to her feet and staggered.
To everyone's surprise, the woman who had just clawed back her life did not immediately run toward freedom. Instead, she dragged her battered body forward a few steps, then dropped with a thud, kneeling straight down before Aemond.
Her forehead pressed against the cold, blood-smeared ground.
"Prince…" Her voice trembled from exhaustion and emotion. "I… I have nowhere to go. The Lord of Haystack Hall will not spare me either."
She lifted her head, blood and dirt smeared across her face. "You gave me a chance to live—not just today. My life is yours."
"I beg you… let me serve you. I can hunt, I can track, I can use a bow, I can fight. I am useful…"
She understood clearly that she had been spared only on a whim.
But once she left this dragon's lair, what awaited her outside might well be another, even more humiliating death.
Seeing the choice this woman made, Aemond felt a measure of approval. He liked intelligent people.
With some training, placing her at Helaena's side might not be a bad idea.
After a brief pause, Aemond spoke. "Stand up."
Tella's body shuddered. She obeyed, rising with difficulty, her head lowered.
He turned to his attendant, Gared. "Find a maester to tend her wounds and get her a set of clean clothes. Then take her to… the riverside estate."
He recalled the property his father had once granted him.
Gared bowed and accepted the order.
Aemond did not look at Tella again. He turned and walked toward Vhagar. The old dragon was clearly growing impatient with these freshly killed offerings.
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