Jacaerys Velaryon | Alpha | Birthright

The wind on the ledge smelled of sulphur and old ash, as it always did, but beneath it Jace could catch the dragon before he could see him, a heavy, ancient musk of hot bronze and stone that had soaked so deeply into the mountain that the rock itself seemed to breathe it back out.

He stood at the lip of the shelf with his hands clasped behind him, spine straight, the posture Rhaenyra's heir wore for an audience. It was habit more than choice. Below him the cavern mouth fell away in tiers of black stone to the floor of Vermithor's lair, where torches guttered in iron brackets and the Dragonkeepers stood in a loose, careful line with their hooks and their long chains, none of them looking up. None of them wanted to be seen looking at the prince. None of them wanted to be seen looking at what waited in the dark behind him either.

The candidate had been told to walk slowly. Jace could hear the Keepers' Valyrian carried up on the wind, low and repeated, an instruction spoken so often it had lost its meaning and become something closer to prayer. Slowly. Eyes down. Do not run. The man walked as if the ground might open under him. A ropemaker from Rosby, Jace had been told, broad in the shoulder, with a grandmother's tale of a silver haired lord and a kitchen girl behind his claim, and hands so callused he had held the torch they gave him without seeming to feel the heat of it.

Jace had read the man's name on a list that morning. He had forgotten it by noon. He found, standing here, that he could not recall it now, and that the forgetting felt like a small, cold mercy he had granted himself.

Let him fail.

The thought came clean and quick, before he could turn it aside, and his scent answered it. He felt the sharp bite of salt and smoke rise off his own skin and gritted his teeth against it, drawing the heat back in, pressing it down beneath collar and leather where it belonged. Nobody up here would remark on it. That did not make it any less shameful. He had wished a man dead in the space of a breath, a man who had done nothing but answer his queen's summons, and the wish had not felt like wickedness. It had felt like relief.

Below, the dark moved.

It began as sound, a slow, grinding exhale that shook dust from the cavern roof and set the chains trembling in the Keepers' fists. Then came the eye, a pool of molten amber opening in the black, vertical pupil narrowing on the small warm shape that had dared cross his threshold. Vermithor lifted his head from the stone. He did it without haste, the way an old king might lift his gaze from a sleeping court, and the bronze of his scales caught the torchlight and threw it back in slow, rippling waves along a body as long as a keep was wide.

Jace had seen dragons all his life. He had been carried into the sky on Vermax's back before he could properly hold a sword. Still, there was a kind of size that no familiarity dulled, that reached down past the reasoning mind to some older part of him and simply said prey. His shoulders squared. His hand had closed around the stone of the ledge without his leave.

The ropemaker stopped.

He was perhaps twenty paces from the great head. Even from above, Jace saw the moment the man understood what he had walked into, the small, terrible collapse of purpose in the set of his back. His torch dipped. His lips were moving, and it took Jace a moment to realise the man was speaking, softly, over and over, a handful of broken words that might have been please, or mother, or nothing at all.

Vermithor breathed in.

“Back,” Jace said, aloud, to no one, to the air. “Get back.”

The Keepers shouted. Chains rang. The ropemaker turned to run, which was the one thing he had been told not to do, and the dragon's jaws opened on a glow like a forge door thrown wide.

The fire did not roar. That was the thing Jace would remember. It came with a low, rushing sigh, almost gentle, and the cavern floor turned white and then gold and then simply ceased to be a place a man could stand. The heat reached the ledge a heartbeat later and struck him in the face like an open hand. He did not flinch, though every instinct he owned begged him to. Below, the scream rose thin and terrible and stopped far too soon.

When the light died back there was a shape on the stone. It might have been kindling. The Keepers were already hauling on their chains, shouting the old commands, driving the great head down and away, and Vermithor allowed it with the vast, indifferent patience of a creature who had not truly been provoked. A morsel had stepped where it should not. The matter was finished. He settled his chin back on the rock and closed his amber eye.

The smell came up on the wind. Jace had known it before, the particular foulness of burned meat beneath smoke, and his stomach turned before he could command it still.

Below, the Keepers were moving again. Another chain drawn taut. Another shouted order. Another dragon settling as though nothing of consequence had happened.

That was worse.

A man had been alive. Then a dragon had decided otherwise, and now there was only the business of what came after.

For one treacherous instant Jace saw grey water instead of black stone. Storm clouds. A smaller dragon beneath something impossibly vast. Arrax disappearing into the rain with Luke on his back, beyond anyone's reach, beyond anyone's help.

Luke.

He shut the thought away with a violence that left his jaw aching. Vermax, somewhere on the mountain's flank, had felt it. Jace knew it as surely as he knew his own pulse, a distant, restless pressure at the edge of his mind, a bond pulling taut like a line hauled hand over hand. He was not going to go to him yet. He was not going to leave this ledge until he had been seen to stay.

Because that was the duty, wasn't it? To be present. To witness what his mother's decree had bought, so that when he stood before her in council he could not be told he had turned his face from it. He had told himself as much on the stair. He had not told himself that some traitorous, shivering part of him was glad the first man had burned, glad that the dragons still remembered whom they answered to, glad that whatever a bastard's blood might prove, it had not proved it here.

His scent had gone hard and bitter again, salt and char and the tight, metallic edge of shame. He did not bother to force it down this time. He had not the strength.

Then he became aware that he was no longer alone on the ledge.

He had not heard footsteps over the wind and the Keepers' shouting, but something in the air beside him had shifted, a presence at his shoulder that did not announce itself. The place they stood in was too narrow, too high, too easy to fall from for anyone to have come by accident. Jace did not turn at once. His spine straightened another fraction, and the old, unbidden instinct moved through him, the small, subtle inclination of his body to place itself between whoever had arrived and the drop, between them and the fire below.

He kept his eyes on the cavern floor, where the Keepers were dragging a blackened sheet over what remained.

“You should not have seen that,” he said, and the words came out rougher than he intended, the polish of the prince worn thin beneath them. He drew a slow breath through his nose, tasting smoke and dragon and something else, something that was not the cavern's. “Or perhaps you should. I find I cannot decide.”

The wind tugged at his cloak. Below, the great bronze shape slept on.

“Tell me,” Jace said quietly. “When he walked out there, did you believe he would live?”

The Great Hall of Dragonstone had never been built for comfort, and tonight it held more people than it had in years. Long tables ran the length of the chamber beneath the carved stone beasts of the pillars, and the torchlight caught on them so that the dragons seemed to shift and settle above the feast. Salt fish and mutton and dark bread went down the boards in wooden trenchers, and the ale was Dornish and thin and poured freely, because Rhaenyra had decreed that hopefuls who might burn on the morrow should at least eat well tonight. She had not stayed to see it. A raven had come at dusk and she had gone up to the Chamber of the Painted Table with Mysaria at her heel, leaving the high table to her son.

Jace sat at its centre, and felt every eye in the hall touch him and slide away.

He had counted the room out of habit. Nobles of the lesser houses along the upper tables, stiff in their good wool. Dragonkeepers near the doors, eating standing, refusing to sit among those who would ask their charges for a rider. And below the salt the hopefuls, thick as gulls on a jetty, loud with the particular brightness of people who have survived a day they were not certain they would. Addam of Hull sat near the dais with his hands around his cup, very quiet, as though the gold of his new standing might crack if he leaned on it. Baela was at Jace's left, tearing bread with more force than bread deserved.

He was managing. That was the word he gave it. He cut his meat, he answered when addressed, and he kept his scent folded tight against his skin, salt and smoke banked low beneath leather and courtesy. Two failed claimings that morning, one dead and one crawling out with half his face raw. Every attempt that ended in ash loosened something in his chest, and every one that ended in a saddle wound it tighter, and he had learned to sit at a table between the two and let nothing show.

The laughter began at the lower benches, a swelling, ale warmed sound, and under it a voice pitched to carry without quite being meant for the dais.

“Well, I say the beasts have better sense than the lords do. Ask a dragon whose mother was married and whose was not, and see if he stops to check the septon's ledger before he decides to let you climb him.”

The hall did not go silent. It did something worse. It hitched, the way a horse hitches on a bad stone, and then the laughter came again, larger and less certain, men who had not yet decided whether the joke was safe glancing sideways to see how it was being received. Someone struck a table in approval. Someone else coughed into a fist.

Jace's knife stopped moving.

He did not look up at once. He set it down with great precision along the edge of his trencher, and he felt his scent break from its leash before he could catch it, sharp and sudden, the bite of brine and hot iron washing outward across the dais so that the Beta steward at his elbow stepped back half a pace without knowing he had done it. Beside him Baela's hands went still on the bread. He heard her breath change.

“Careful,” she murmured, not moving her lips. “Jace.”

He was being careful. He was being so careful that his jaw ached with it.

“Aye, but it's not a jest,” a heavier voice said, from somewhere nearer, thick with drink and pleased with itself. Jace knew it by now. He knew the man behind it too, the sort who found the moment a room was watching and could not help but fill it. “Truth is truth. Seasmoke never asked to see Addam's papers. Dragons look at a man and know or they don't. Why, they'll take a smith or a shipwright and have no more care for who sired him than you'd have for who sired your dinner.” A pause, an expectant grin audible in it. “Might be that's a comfort to some at the high table, eh? Having a dragon of your own, and no one able to tell you what you are.”

The room drew one long breath and held it.

It was not said cleanly. It was said sideways, wrapped in a laugh, the way such things always were, so that whoever bore it could be told they had mistaken a joke for an insult. Jace had heard the same words in the corridors of the Red Keep from mouths that took care never to be seen speaking. He had heard them in the silence after certain names. He had never before heard them said aloud at a table, over ale, to a room that laughed.

Somewhere far down the hall, at the edge of his vision, a face he could not have named was turned toward him with an expression he could not read.

He rose.

It was not sudden. That was what the room would remember. He stood as a prince stands, back straight, hands flat on the board a moment before he lifted them, and the sound of the bench scraping stone was the loudest thing in the hall. His scent had gone from brine to something nearer the smell of a forge quenched in cold water, hard and bitter and undeniably an Alpha's, and he saw the nearest hopefuls lower their eyes without knowing why, the old animal habit of the body deferring before the mind consented.

Addam had gone very still. Baela's fingers had found the edge of his sleeve and closed there, a warning, an anchor, not quite a restraint.

Jace did not raise his voice. He had learned from his mother that the quieter it was, the farther it went.

“I have been thinking,” he said, “that it is a strange thing to sit beneath this mountain and be told what dragons do and do not care for. By men who have been permitted to stand in their presence for one day.” His eyes moved down the tables, unhurried, over the bright flushed faces and the cups halfway to mouths, and settled at last on the place the voices had come from. “I would hear it again. Properly. Without the ale to carry it.”

Nobody laughed now.

“Say it to me, and finish it,” he said, low, each word laid down like a stone. “Or tell me you did not find it as amusing as the rest.”

Vermax had been quiet all morning, and Jace had let himself mistake that for contentment.

He had come up the mountain path alone, which was itself a small rebellion. The steward had wanted to send two guards after him, and Jace had refused with a courtesy so thin the man had bowed and left without arguing. Above the last switchback the slope opened onto a shelf of black rock where the Dragonmont's shoulder leaned out over the sea, and Vermax lay there in the thin sun with his wings half furled and his chin on the stone, tasting the wind. The wind was doing what it always did on Dragonstone. It carried sulphur and salt and the faint sweetness of the fires the Keepers kept burning, and it carried all of it away.

Jace had come to be near him. That was all. He had spent the morning in council listening to his mother describe how many hopefuls the mountain might yet consume, and he had answered her in a voice so level that Baela had looked at him afterward as though he had shouted. He had walked out into the corridor with his jaw locked and his hands loose at his sides and had not stopped until the stone gave way to open air. The wish for it was simple. He wanted a warm, patient weight beneath his palm and one creature on the island who did not require him to be a prince.

Vermax lifted his head at the sound of his step, and the great green eye turned and softened. Jace felt it in his chest like a knot easing. He laid his hand against the warm ridge of the jaw, and the dragon exhaled a long slow breath that stirred his hair.

Then someone else reached the top of the path.

He did not hear them so much as feel the change, the way a room alters when a door opens behind you. Vermax's head came round before Jace's did. The eye that had been soft went narrow, and a sound started somewhere deep in the dragon's ribs, low enough that Jace felt it through his palm before he heard it, a grinding, thrumming note like a millstone beginning to turn.

“Easy,” Jace said, turning. “It is only...”

Vermax rose.

It happened faster than anything so large should have managed. The wings snapped open in a crack of leather that shook the loose scree from the ledge, and the tail swept the rock behind him with a scrape like a blade drawn down a wall. The jaw parted. A thread of smoke leaked from between the teeth, grey and curling, and beneath the rising noise of the dragon's breath Jace smelled his own scent turn. Salt went to iron. Smoke went to char. He had not felt it break, and that was the worst of it, the discovery that the thing he guarded most carefully had slipped its leash while his attention was elsewhere.

“Back!” The shout came from below the ledge, and then there were boots on the path, and two Dragonkeepers he knew by sight were scrambling up with their hooks held low and their faces gone pale. The elder one, a lean grey man named Tolland who had tended Vermax since he was no longer than a hound, planted himself at the path's mouth and flung out an arm. “Everyone back to the turn. Now. Do not run, do not turn your back, walk. My lord, hold him. Hold him, my prince.”

Jace was already moving. He put himself between the dragon and the path without deciding to, shoulders squared, hands open and low, the old reflex of his body reaching for the shape of a shield. It was a foolish thing. Vermax could have taken him off the ledge with a flick of one wing. But the dragon's head swung down to follow him, and the fire in the throat dimmed by a fraction, and Jace understood that he was being watched rather than threatened. Every movement he made was being weighed.

“Vermax.” He said it low and steady. Then, in High Valyrian, the words he had used since boyhood, the ones that meant look at me, I am here, I am not afraid. He did not feel entirely that last part. He said it anyway, and heard how thin it sounded against the hot wind of the dragon's breath.

The eye rolled toward the path again. The rumble climbed.

Think.

There were three possibilities and he made himself hold them one by one, as he would have laid out ships on a map. The first was that Vermax knew the newcomer, or disliked them, or had caught something in their manner that Jace had missed. Dragons were not fools. They read a stranger's gait and scent and fear, and they had opinions about all of them. The second was worse. Half the island smelled of dragons that morning, Vermithor's musk and Silverwing's sweeter, heavier scent clinging to every Keeper and hopeful who had passed through the lower caverns. If the newcomer carried another dragon's smell on their clothes or skin, Vermax might be answering a rival's ghost, and the territorial heat of a young male dragon was not a thing to be lightly soothed.

And the third...

He did not look at the third. He knew it was there. He felt it in the tightness of his own jaw, in the hard beat at his throat, in the sharpness of the smell rising off his own skin like a flag raised over a fortress. He had come up here angry. He had come up here grieving, if he was honest, and unwilling to be honest, and Vermax had lain beside him in the sun and drunk in every unspoken thing. Then a stranger had stepped into the wind, and Jace's whole body had tensed at the intrusion. His dragon had merely done what his hands had wanted to do.

Behind him, on the path, someone whispered. He could not hear the words, only the hush and rustle of a small crowd gathering at the turn, drawn by the noise and held back by the Keepers' outstretched arms. A dozen faces, perhaps more. A prince on a ledge with his hands out, and a dragon nearly twice the height of the hall doors trembling at the end of a leash no one could see.

The heat rose to his face. It was not shame precisely, or not only. It was the clear, cold understanding of what everyone below was learning. There was no hiding from that creature. Whatever Jace kept off his face and out of his voice, Vermax wore it openly, in smoke and scale and teeth, for anyone with eyes to read.

He drew a slow breath and let it out through his nose. Then another. He unclenched his hands one finger at a time, as though he were taking apart a lock. He made his shoulders drop, made his scent loosen, and he felt the effort of it in every muscle from neck to spine. Against the edge of his awareness the dragon's mind shifted, an uncertain, wary pressure, a great animal turning its head to listen.

“There,” he murmured. “There. Nothing is wrong. Nothing here is wrong.”

It was a lie, and Vermax knew it, and yet the rumble dropped by a note.

Jace did not take his eyes from the dragon. He spoke over his shoulder to the one who had climbed the path, keeping his voice low and even, unwilling to startle either of them. It was the most princely tone he owned, and he hated how much of it had to be borrowed.

“Do not come closer yet. Stay exactly where you are, and tell me,” he said, “whether you have been near the lower caverns this morning.”

The argument had ended the way all of them ended now, with his mother saying his name in the tone she reserved for a son rather than an heir, and Jace understanding that nothing he said afterward would be weighed as counsel.

He had not slammed the door. He was proud of that, in a hollow way. He had bowed, precisely, and said Your Grace, and walked out of the Chamber of the Painted Table with his spine like a drawn blade, past the Kingsguard who kept their eyes on the far wall and the servant who suddenly found a great deal to do with a candle. He had made it as far as the second stair before his hands began to shake.

Now the corridor stretched ahead of him, long and low and lit at intervals by iron torches that leaned the shadows of the carved dragons across the walls. Dragonstone's passages had been cut for a people who expected to be seen walking them. The stone was black and polished by centuries of passing feet, and it held sound the way a shell holds the sea. His own footsteps came back to him too quickly, too hard, and he made himself slow them.

Chambers. Water. Door shut. That was the whole of the plan. He held to it as he might have held to a rail in a storm.

It was not going well. He knew that without needing to look, because the air in front of him had thickened with his scent. Salt and hot iron and the bitter edge of smoke rolled off his skin in slow, heavy waves, filling the narrow passage so completely that he could taste it at the back of his own throat. He had spent nineteen years learning to keep that smell folded close, a private thing worn beneath leather and courtesy. Rhaenyra could fill a council chamber with hers and no one would dare mark it. When Jace's slipped, people looked at him as though he had shouted.

Someone will smell this from the far end of the hall.

He pressed the back of his wrist hard against his mouth and breathed through it, once, twice, trying to draw the heat inward. It did not answer. The words from the council chamber were still moving in him like a tide he could not turn. Ulf White is not the first man to want more than he was given, Jacaerys. As though he did not know. As though he had not lain awake counting them, the smith and the shipwright and the ropemaker, every name a small hard question about what a dragon proved and who was permitted to be proved by it.

He had told her they would not stay loyal. She had told him that fear was not counsel. He had said that at least his fear was honest. That, he thought, had been the moment the room turned.

The torch beside him popped and sent a scatter of sparks against the wall. Jace stopped walking. He stood with one hand flat against the cold stone and his head bowed, listening to his own pulse, and it was only then, in the small unguarded quiet, that he became aware of another scent threading through his own.

It was faint and it was not his. It came from behind him along the corridor, carried on the draught that slid in from the seaward windows, and it reached him in pieces before it resolved. Something soft under something sharp. Warm, and unmistakably an Omega's, alive and near and moving.

Jace's whole body reacted before his mind had finished naming it.

His shoulders came up. His head lifted. The bitter iron in his own scent stuttered and broke, and a different note rose beneath it before he could suppress it, warmer and heavier, unmistakably responsive. His attention fixed on the approaching footsteps with an intensity the situation did not remotely warrant. He felt his hands unclench. He felt the muscles of his back turn, half a degree, already angling him toward the sound of footsteps, already placing him between whoever walked there and the empty end of the passage where nothing at all was threatening anyone.

Stop it.

The order came too late and did nothing. Instinct did not obey princes. He had known it since he was fourteen and had first understood what the unspoken thing was that his body did in a room with an omega in it. He turned his face away from the corridor, toward the wall, and closed his eyes for one mortifying moment.

The footsteps had slowed. He could hear that now, the rhythm faltering and then stopping, some distance off, as whoever it was took in what the air was telling them. It was no great mystery what it said. He could feel how it must read, the anger he had not managed to bank and beneath it the softer, stupider thing that had risen unasked, all of it hung in the passage like banners at a tourney. The heir to the Iron Throne, standing against a wall in the dark, scenting up the hallway like an unbroken boy.

There was no court here. No Keepers, no steward, no lords along the benches waiting to see how he wore his temper. The corridor was empty of anyone whose good opinion he needed, and still his body would not stop performing. His spine was straight. His chin was level. His hand had lifted from the wall to smooth the front of his doublet, an absurd, automatic gesture, as though he might tidy himself into a prince again by force of habit alone.

They saw. They must have.

He drew a breath that shook slightly at its edge and let it go. Then he did the only thing his training had left him with, which was to turn and meet it. He did it slowly, and the mask came down over his face piece by piece, a courteous mouth, a level gaze, the practised patience of a man who was quite certain there was nothing here to remark on.

His scent gave the lie to every part of it. He could not help that. He kept his voice low and steady all the same.

"Forgive me," Jace said. "I did not hear you come." He heard how formal it sounded, how brittle, and pressed on regardless. "The passages carry sound strangely at this hour. I was on my way to my chambers." A pause, in which the words sat insufficient between them, and the bitter, charred edge of his own scent gave the lie to every one of them. He swallowed and tried again, quieter. "You need not stand there as though you had walked in on something. It is only a corridor."

It was not a convincing thing to say with the air the way it was. He knew that. He lifted his eyes anyway, and made himself add, more carefully than he had said anything all day, "Were you looking for someone? Or has the hour simply caught you as it has me?"

The Painted Table had been carved into the shape of Westeros by a Conqueror who trusted maps more than men, and Jace had spent so many hours bent over it that he could have walked the coastline blind. He knew where the black stone of the Gullet narrowed. He knew which tiny lacquered ships stood for Driftmark's fleet and which for the Hightower galleys creeping up from Oldtown, and he knew, because he had rehearsed it on the stair, exactly how he meant to ask for the command.

He had not needed to ask.

“Lord Corlys expects word from Dragonstone by the end of the week,” Rhaenyra said, one hand resting on the painted edge of the Narrow Sea. “His captains are restless. They want to see a dragon over their decks and a Targaryen at their council fires, and they want to be told the queen has not forgotten them.” She lifted her eyes. Violet, level, and utterly without apology. “I have chosen who will tell them.”

Jace had already straightened. He felt it happen, the small settling of his shoulders, the breath drawn in readiness for a duty that was his by name and blood. Driftmark was his grandfather's seat. The Velaryon banners were his banners. He had sat at that hall's high table as a boy with sea spray on his cheek, and no one in the Gullet would need to be told who he was.

“You will go together,” said Rhaenyra.

It took him a moment to understand that she was not looking at him alone.

She was looking past his shoulder, at the one who stood a pace behind him near the door, and the words that followed came in the even, deliberate cadence of a decision made long before this room had been filled. “Jacaerys will bring the name and blood of Driftmark. You will bring your judgement. Neither of you answers to the other. Whatever is decided on the Gullet is decided between you, and reported to me as one voice.”

The silence that followed was very small and very complete.

Jace kept his face still. He had had weeks of practice. He had stood in this same room and told his mother, in his most reasonable voice, that he was no longer a boy to be kept out of the war, that he had ridden and sailed and bled for her cause and asked only to be weighed by his deeds. She had listened. She had said, at the time, that she heard him. And now she had answered him in the one way he could not argue without proving himself the very thing he had denied.

Neither answers to the other.

He could not object. That was the trap, and he admired it, in the cold sidelong way one admires a well set snare while standing in it. To protest would be to say that he had wanted a subordinate and not a partner, and to say it before the Sea Snake's own kin, in front of Mysaria's patient, watching stillness, would cost him more than any command was worth.

“As my queen wishes,” Jace said.

It came out level. The bitterness was all in his scent, and he felt it rising even as he said the words, the sharp salt of it turning to iron, the smoke of him rolling off his skin in a slow, unmistakable current. He drew it back. It came reluctantly, like a hound called from a scent, and settled against his ribs still snarling. Across the table, Rhaenyra's nostrils flared very slightly. She said nothing. She did not need to. The heat of her own scent, older and steadier than his, pressed briefly against the edge of his composure, a reminder of exactly who sat at the head of this room.

“Good,” she said. "Then you will leave at dawn. Mysaria has the names of Corlys's captains. Go and read them."

It was a dismissal, and he took it as one. He bowed, and turned, and only then allowed himself to look at the other Alpha properly.

It was a strange sensation, being measured. He was not used to it. In most rooms he had stood in, the question of who held authority had answered itself before he crossed the threshold, and he had grown comfortable in the answer without noticing how much of his ease depended on it. Now he found himself aware of everything at once. The distance between them, which was not quite far enough. The angle of the door, and which of them would reach it first. The faint, distinct edge of another Alpha's scent in the close air, not aggressive, not yielding, simply present, and every instinct he owned bristling at the sheer fact of it.

He stepped toward the door. He was a fraction faster than courtesy required. He caught himself doing it, and slowed, and hated that he had needed to.

In the passage beyond, the torches burned steady along the black stone, and the guards at the stair kept their eyes carefully forward. Jace stopped where the corridor bent, close enough to the wall to be private, and turned so that the light fell across his face and not theirs. He was aware of that too. He was aware of standing a little too straight.

“I will say this now, so that it need not be said on a deck in front of Corlys's captains,” he said, and his voice was courteous and low and had a blade laid flat along it. “The Gullet is Velaryon water. Those men know my face and they know my grandfather's word, and they will look to me first whether either of us wishes it or not. I do not say it to slight you. I say it so that we begin knowing where the difficulties lie.”

He held their gaze a moment longer than was comfortable. Then, because his mother's voice was still in his head and pride would not let him leave the matter so unfinished, he added, more quietly, “I am told we speak with one voice. So tell me how you would have us begin.”

The cheer had reached the castle before the rider did.

Jace heard it from the seaward terrace, a great ragged swell of voices rolling down from the dragonmount stair and breaking against the black walls, and for a moment he did not understand what he was hearing. Then the shadow passed overhead. It came in low over the curtain wall with its wings spread wide and the last of the sunset sliding along its scales, and something rode it that was small and upright and holding on with a stillness Jace knew from the inside. He had worn that stillness on Vermax at seven years old. It was the look of someone who has not yet allowed themselves to believe it.

It took them.

He had known it would happen eventually. He had told himself so on every stair and in every council, the way a man tells himself the tide will come in. Knowing had changed nothing about how it felt to watch.

The steward found him at the terrace door and said what he had been sent to say. The queen wished the prince to be among the first to receive the new rider in the yard. It was fitting. It was expected. The steward's eyes stayed carefully on the middle distance while he spoke, and Jace understood that his own scent had already made the steward's decision about where to look.

He drew it in. Salt, iron, the bitter char of him, folded tight against his ribs and pressed flat beneath leather and courtesy. It took longer than it should have.

The lower yard had filled by the time he reached it. Half the castle seemed to have poured down from its corridors, lords of the lesser houses in their good wool, Keepers with soot to the elbow, servants who had abandoned their trays on the nearest ledge. The crowd parted for him without being asked. That, at least, had not changed. Ahead, where the flagstones met the ash strewn approach to the pit, the new rider stood with a ring of Dragonkeepers at a respectful distance, the hems of their clothes scorched, their hands not quite steady, the smell of dragon and cinder clinging to them like a second cloak. Above the wall, the great shape coiled on the rim of the mountain and watched them with a vast, luminous, proprietary eye.

Nobody was looking at the dragon. That was the first thing Jace noticed. Everyone was looking at the rider, and the looks had changed. It was a strange thing to witness, a person becoming something else in the space of an afternoon. Yesterday the crowd would have passed them in a corridor without a glance. Now Lord Staunton, who had refused to sit at the same table as the hopefuls, was bending at the waist with an expression of warm, practised delight.

“Astonishing,” he was saying, to no one and to everyone. “But one should not be astonished, should one? A dragon does not err. They know their own.”

“The blood must run strong,” said the woman beside him, a Celtigar cousin whose name Jace kept losing. “To draw it like that. No hesitation at all, I am told.”

“It quite settles it, does it not?” Staunton went on, warming to the theme. “All those questions about who might be worthy. Well, here is the answer written in scale and fire. Whatever the smallfolk say, whatever the septons say, the beasts see straight through to the bone. There is no cheating a dragon.”

A murmur of assent ran through the little knot around him. Jace felt it land somewhere beneath his breastbone like a stone dropped into a well.

No cheating a dragon.

It was the very thing he had told himself for nineteen years. It was the answer, the last and best answer, to every whisper about dark hair and brown eyes and a Strong shadow behind a Velaryon name. Vermax knew him. Vermax had chosen him, and a dragon could not be lied to about blood. He had built himself on that certainty as on a cliff, and here were half the lords of Dragonstone repeating it aloud with delighted faces, and it sounded, in their mouths, like a knife being turned to point the other way.

Because if a dragon could not be lied to, then it did not matter who had wed whom. It did not matter what a septon wrote in a ledger, or what a queen had sworn before her court, or which man had stood beside a cradle. The dragon would say what the blood said, and it would say it to anyone who walked into its lair. To a prince. To a smith. To a stranger with soot on their sleeves and no name yet worth the writing.

“It does put certain rumours to rest,” murmured someone behind him, pitched for a friend and carried farther than intended. “Blood will out, as they say. The right sort and the wrong sort alike.”

“Hush,” said the friend, without much conviction.

Jace did not turn. He kept his eyes on the new rider, and his face did exactly what he told it to, and beneath the leather of his doublet his pulse beat hard enough to feel in his teeth. The bitter edge of his scent tried to rise. He held it down with something close to violence.

It was not the claiming that stung. He wanted very much to be clear with himself about that. He did not resent that the dragon had chosen. He had watched enough men burn in that pit to know what it cost to be chosen at all, and he could not begrudge a person who had walked into the dark and come out alive. What stung was the sound of the yard, the bright, greedy chatter of people discovering that a dragon was a kind of proof, and beginning at once to argue over what it proved. Whose blood. Whose worth. Who, exactly, had been lying to them all this time.

A few paces away, Lord Staunton laughed at something and glanced, very briefly, toward Jace. It was the swift, sidelong flick of a man checking whether a remark had been overheard. He smiled, and inclined his head, and Jace inclined his own in return with a courtesy so exact it could have been struck on a coin.

Do it properly.

He walked forward. The crowd fell back to let him through, and the murmuring thinned toward silence in his wake, and he felt every eye on his back like a hand. Above the wall, the dragon shifted on the rim of the mountain, and a low sound rolled down the stone, part breath and part something older. The rider looked up as he approached, and whatever was in their face, wariness or wonder or a raw, unguarded exhaustion, Jace made himself meet it without turning away.

He stopped an appropriate distance off. He squared his shoulders, and clasped his hands behind him, and let the prince come down over his face like a visor.

“In the name of Queen Rhaenyra, First of Her Name, and of House Targaryen,” he said, and his voice carried cleanly across the yard, even and formal and betraying nothing. “I bid you welcome to her service. You have done what many have died attempting, and Dragonstone honours it.”

The words were correct. Every one of them was correct. He let them settle, and then, because the silence had grown attentive around him and he could feel the whole yard waiting to see what the heir would do, he unclasped his hand and held it out.

“Tell me your name,” Jace said, lower now, meant for them alone. "I would rather learn it from you than from the gossip."

Rhaenyra had given the order the way she gave all her orders now, without heat and without room. Fly with them. Tell me what you see. She had not asked whether he wished to. She had not needed to, and Jace had understood, standing before her with his hands clasped behind him, that the choice of him was itself a kind of message. Who better to judge a new rider than the one who had most reason to judge them harshly? If he passed them, no one could say it was kindness.

So he stood in the great cavern in the grey hour before dawn, where the torches burned low in their iron brackets and the mountain breathed its slow, warm breath around him, and waited.

The Dragonkeepers had cleared the floor without being told. They stood along the far wall with their hooks grounded and their eyes lowered, watching without appearing to, and Jace could feel the weight of their attention the way one feels a draught. Word had gone round the castle by supper the night before. The prince would fly with the new rider. Some wagered on how it would end. He had heard that from Baela, who had told him with a look that dared him to be offended, and he had not given her the satisfaction.

Vermax shifted at his back, claws scraping black stone, a low restless sound rolling in his throat that the cavern gathered up and threw back from the vaulted dark. Jace did not need to turn. The bond ran through him like a second pulse, eager and impatient, a young dragon who could smell open sky through the great mouth of the cave and did not understand why anyone would stand about while it waited. He laid a hand against the warm curve of the neck and felt the restlessness ease a fraction beneath his palm. It was a small mercy, and he took it.

Far across the cavern the opening showed as a wide pale wound in the rock, the sea beyond it the colour of slate. Past it, out along the coast, lay the eastern point and the tide race that fought itself white beyond it. He had flown that stretch a hundred times. He knew what the wind did there. He knew what it did to those who did not respect it.

This is not about what they are. He had said it to himself on the stair, and again in the yard, and it had not yet become true simply because he kept saying it. It is about whether they can hold a line.

The salt and smoke of him was already trying to rise. He drew it in and pressed it flat beneath leather and courtesy, and it went with a reluctance that told him how tightly he was wound. The cavern did not help. Stone held scent the way it held heat, and the air was heavy with dragon musk and old ash, so that his own smell had nowhere to hide and nothing to be lost beneath. Nothing about this morning was ordinary, and everything about it had to look as though it were. He was a prince conducting an assessment. He was the queen's heir, doing as he was bid. That was all anyone here would see, if he did it properly.

He turned at last.

There was a quiet between the two of them that Jace found he did not want to examine. He looked at it for exactly as long as courtesy allowed, and then he looked at the rider's face, and made his own give nothing.

“The coast to the Gullet mouth, and back,” he said, and his voice came out level and carried well beneath the vaulted stone. “Keep to my left and a little behind. If I signal, you follow. If I do not, you hold your line. There is a tide race off the eastern point, and the wind there does not forgive mistakes.” He let that settle, then added, more quietly, because it was the truth and he found he could not leave it out, “Nor do I, in the air. Not for anyone.”

He stepped back toward Vermax and took hold of the saddle strap, and felt the dragon's heat rise through the leather into his palm. The Keepers had drawn their chains clear of the cavern floor. Far off, through the great mouth of the mountain, the wind was beginning to stir.

“Mount up,” Jace said.

The dragonmount held its heat long after the sun had gone. Black stone drank it in and gave it back in slow pulses, a low mineral warmth that clung to skin and cloth alike. Further in, where the public yard thinned into older passages and the Keepers seldom walked after dark, the air thickened with ash and old scale and the lingering musk of beasts large enough to make the mountain itself a nest.

Jace had not meant to bring them this far.

That was the first lie. He had meant it the moment his hand closed on their wrist in the outer corridor, the moment the last of Vermax’s flight still hummed in his blood and the salt of the sea had not yet dried from his hair. He had come down from the sky with the wind still in him and found them in the yard, and whatever careful distance he had kept through the day had simply failed. Now the passage narrowed to a shelf of stone behind a buttress, out of the torchline, and he had them against the wall with his body caging theirs, one forearm braced beside their head, the other hand splayed at their waist as if the rock itself might try to take them back.

"Quiet," he said, and the word came out low, almost swallowed by the dark. "You will stay quiet."

His mouth was close enough that the shape of it moved against their temple. He did not kiss them. He breathed them in instead, slow and unashamed, nose dragging along the line of their hair to the warm skin beneath their ear. Sea salt and smoke and leather rose off him in a dense, living heat, sharpened by the hours on Vermax’s back, dragon musk soaked into his collar and the hollow of his throat until he smelled less like a prince and more like the thing he had just left in the sky. When he exhaled, that scent poured over them in a warm, claiming wash.

His hips pressed in.

It was not a thrust so much as a grind, a slow roll of his body into theirs that pinned them to the stone and let them feel exactly how little control he had kept. Thick, already hard, the length of him a blunt insistence through leather, dragging up in a deliberate line that made his breath catch against their skin. He did it again, slower, as if mapping the fit, and a sound left him that he cut off between his teeth.

"If you make a noise they will hear it," he muttered. "Not the Keepers. The pit. Sound carries in here the way heat does." A pause, his mouth open against the hinge of their jaw, tasting. "There are dragons sleeping on the other side of this rock. You do not want one of them curious."

His scent had gone sharp with want and with the leftover wildness of flight. He could feel it leaving him in pulses, marking the air, marking them, salt and char and the darker animal note an Alpha put down when instinct had already chosen. He hated how little he could fold it back. He did not stop.

The hand at their waist slid, not hurried, thumb finding the edge of cloth and the heat beneath it. He pressed his palm flat there and held, possessive without yet taking more, while his other arm kept them caged against the wall. His thigh shifted between theirs, a firm, unthinking claim of space, and he ground in again, the friction dragging a rawer breath out of him.

"I have thought of this since I left the saddle," he said, quieter still, words meant only for the hollow of their throat. "That is the truth of it. I came down and you were there and I could not walk past you like a man who still owns himself." His nose brushed the place where their pulse moved. He inhaled as if the answer might be written in their skin. "You smell like you belong against me. Do you understand how dangerous that is in a place like this?"

Another grind, deeper. His knot had not swollen, not yet, but the thick base of him was a promise through the layers, a pressure that made his hips stutter once before he mastered them. He turned his face into their neck and scented them properly then, open mouthed, dragging his jaw along their skin in a slow, marking pass that left his own scent painted over theirs. His teeth grazed, did not bite.

"Stay still." It was almost a plea dressed as a command. "If you move like that I will forget why I pulled you out of sight."

Somewhere deeper in the mountain a dragon shifted in its sleep. Stone answered with a distant, grinding sigh. Dust whispered down from a seam above them. Jace went rigid for a heartbeat, every line of him taut, listening, his body still locked to theirs as if he could hide them with sheer closeness. When the sound faded he let out a breath that shook.

"See." His voice had roughened. "Even that. They hear what they wish to hear."

He did not step back. If anything he pressed closer, forehead to the stone beside their head, hips working in a restrained rhythm that was all friction and no relief. The leather of his riding clothes was still damp with sea air. When he moved, that smell rose between them, salt and dragon heat and the clean animal sweat of a man who had been in the sky an hour ago and had not yet come all the way down.

"I should take you to a bed," he said against their hair. "I should do this properly. Doors. Time. My name said where no one else can hear it." His hand tightened at their waist. "Instead I have you on black rock like a thief, and I cannot make myself stop."

He kissed the corner of their mouth then, not deep, a heated, glancing thing that asked without taking. His next words came against their lips.

"Tell me you want this here. Quietly. Or tell me to let you go before I put my mouth where I have been thinking of putting it."

His hips stilled on the last grind, held there, hard and unmistakable, waiting on their answer in the dark while the mountain breathed around them and some vast, sleeping thing turned over in the stone.

.