Chapter Text
The Red Keep was abuzz with a fury and ferocious energy that Jon Connington had rarely seen before. He awoke from his bed, broke his fast quickly, dressed and ventured out to find a castle practically vibrating with tension. Knights of every shape or size had been gathered to the castle, the servants racing around and the courtiers all but banished from the keep as the wave of militancy took hold.
Arthur Dayne was waiting in the courtyard, overseeing the men like the commander he was. His eyes lifted to Jon and there was a pained smile within them. “The word has come from the king,” he said, “time to march.”
“I suppose it is,” Jon came to stand beside him and for several moments they watched the many lines of armoured men. There would be more of them just outside the city, an entire army ready to bring death to Blackfyre now that word had broken that Tywin Lannister was dead.
The particulars of it were thus far unknown, but the Lannister host had fragmented with the old lion’s death. There were whispers of betrayal, treachery. Some suggested that a Faceless Man had been hired to slip into Tywin's tent and slit the old man's throat. Whatever the case, things had turned chaotic and brutal. Kevan Lannister did what he could to hold things together, but the spies had reported that almost a third of the Lannister army had scattered without the assurance of their cunning leader and turned to banditry on their retreat home. The Blackfyre boy, it seemed, was not enough to keep men inspired.
“How was the king?” Jon asked, watching Arthur’s face closely. “Has there been any improvement to his condition?”
Arthur winced, as if the memory were a rotten tooth. “It’s not good, Jon. His hands shake all the time, and his breathing, by the gods, just walking from one side of the chamber to the other seemed to have exhausted him.”
“Grief is a terrible thing...and His Grace has lost much these last few weeks.”
“This isn’t grief,” Arthur countered hotly. “This is...well, I would have said poison, but I don’t know a poison to be so wretched and yet keep the victim alive. It is as if he went to bed one night and awoke ten years older.”
In his hidden heart, that part of him that he could barely admit to himself, Jon thought that perhaps his Silver King was dying. He had known men and women to fall to the wasting sickness. He had even spoken to a maester about it and saw that even a few of Rhaegar’s ancestors had died of such a thing. Aegon Dragonbane, whose melancholy reminded Jon so much of Rhaegar's own, had fallen to the wretched illness. But the quickness of his decline...it made no sense, and in truth it frightened Jon.
“There is something we might need to discuss,” Arthur whispered. “The matter of succession...”
Jon inhaled sharply. “You know as well as I that he is set on Aegon’s line inheriting.”
“And if he dies next week, or tomorrow or this very night, should we honour that? We’re still at war, and even with Tywin Lannister dead, there is still a Blackfyre pretender out there with a dragon and an army of at least twenty thousand swords,” Arthur took a shaky breath. “We don’t need an unborn child and a long regency, we need a dragonrider to lead us.”
“Prince Aemon, then.”
Arthur tilted his head side to side. “Or Princess Rhaenys.”
Jon stared at him. “You know as well as I that the people of the Seven Kingdoms won’t accept that.”
“Aemon’s transition to power would be smoother,” the knight agreed, “but we must allow ourselves for the possibility that it does not happen. We have two dragons in reserve, not just the one.”
A chill went through his body as a new thought came to him. He glanced about, then leaned close. “What of the Queen?” his voice was a trembling whisper, “I do not know that she will accept being displaced, and if the child in her womb should be a boy...”
“The thought had occurred to me.” Arthur’s mouth drew thin. “Some enemies grow from within, weeds in our garden as it were.”
Connington knew that the conversation was a gruesome one, and felt soiled in entertaining it, but the world was in a dire state. There was evil everywhere, growing with each day and sanity was a dying ember in a cold night. Rhaegar is the world, and the world is sick...
“Before anything else...I feel that we must summon Aemon and Rhaenys back to the capitol,” he rubbed at his beard, wondering if the stress and grief had turned it greyer. “I am loyal to House Targaryen, and I would not act without their consultation.”
“Prince Aemon was last seen in the Dornish marches with a contingent of Martell spears,” Arthur said, “but it’s been a bloody mess trying to get word North. The snows and the storms have brought all news to a crawl, though it does seem the rebels there are being brought to heel.”
“Either way, we must needs bring them home so there can be a proper accounting for this realm’s future. And it would not hurt to have more dragons guarding the city.”
Arthur’s violet eyes fixed themselves on an invisible spot somewhere in the dirt ahead of them. He had always been handsome, and age had not dimmed that, but there was a sort of haunted cast over his features that made him seem otherworldly, like a celestial being fallen from one of the seven heavens who been sullied by proximity to the flaws and folly of humanity.
“Did you know the Kingsguard keep a record of all our past members?” his voice was as distant as his eyes. “The White Book, we call it. Unimaginative, I know, but it has meaning to us of the white cloak. I’ve read every page of it, studied my sworn brothers long since gone into the ground. Some are the greatest of heroes, like Aemon the Dragonknight or Ser Duncan the Tall, but many were weaklings and failures. Ryam Redwyne was a great knight but a poor hand, and Criston Cole...”
“The Kingmaker,” Jon interrupted, recalling some of that old history.
“Aye, I think of him often whenever I need to involve myself in these affairs. Is that we we’ll become, Jon? Kingmakers?” He shook his head. “I fear that possibility. This realm needs greater and more noble minds than the likes of us, but who else is there?”
Connington had no answers for him. He looked up and the sky was completely and perfectly white, which sank a stone of dread in his stomach. He longed for the days when they were young, when their troubles were their own and not a greater sign of the end times.
“Good morrow,” a high a feminine voice called, stirring the two men from their existential dread. They turned to see Queen Margaery approaching along with her oaf father.
Jon gave a stiff bow, while Arthur went to a knee before the girl-queen bid him to rise. She smiled at them and it was a comely sight, though it brought Jon nothing but unease. How much had she overhead? They were speaking quietly, but he had the feeling that she might have been watching them for a while.
“My Queen,” he said, mechanically. “How goes your day?”
“Well,” she answered, “better now that I see all these brave men getting ready for battle and two able commanders overseeing them. It brings me joy to know that the realm is being guarded by such brave and valiant warriors.”
Was that a veiled insult? Jon had long since last the part of his mind that could discern such things. Grief and fear had eroded it away. He was still chewing on the comment when Arthur saved him. “Has there been word from your brothers, my queen? Ser Garlan and Ser Willas might well be called upon in the days to come.”
“Oh, they have greater matters,” Lord Mace said, suddenly. “With the defeat of Oldtown and the disarray there...”
Keeping your precious boys away from the fight against Blackfyre. It was a struggle for Jon to keep a scowl off his face.
“But we will, of course send warriors to join you on the campaign west,” Margaery said, smoothly. “The scourge of the Blackfyres must be squashed.”
There facade of sweetness and congeniality had never left the little queen’s voice, but Jon felt that he had a notion of what was being done. He, Arthur, and Stannis Baratheon would be sent west with the army, and the Tyrells would essentially hold King’s Landing while Rhaegar remained in his sickbed. He thought it likely that they wished for both sides to exhaust each other while much of their own remained fresh at Oldtown. A simple play, but one that would leave House Tyrell the dominant power in the Seven Kingdoms.
He could see that Arthur was uneasy about it as well, though the Sword of the Morning held his composure. What can we do? He could not think and by every god he felt exhausted by this tangle that the court had become.
There was a screech that made the world tremble, the familiar cry of Urraxes the Silver. It seemed to herald a shift, and Jon felt his attention back to the Red Keep. All eyes followed his, watching as the great doors opened and several of Arthur’s sworn brothers spilled out, forming a wall of white cloth and pale steel. In their centre was...
“Rhaegar!”
The King looked less like a man and more of a horrid scarecrow dressed in the garb of a dragonrider. His skin was sallow, stretched over his skull like parchment. The circles under his eyes had turned a dead and final black while the eyes themselves stared from their sockets with fevered, exhausted intelligence. He moved with trembling, twitching jerks, clutching tightly to the arm of the Red Woman Melisandre.
Everyone was silent, and Queen Margaery had brought a hand to her mouth in naked shock. Mace Tyrell opened and closed his mouth like a suffocating fish and Jon knew his own face must have been transformed into one of horror and heartbreak. Only Arthur held onto his stoicism, having been one of the few to tend to the king.
“B-beloved,” Margaery croaked. “You....gods, you ought to be abed.”
Rhaegar was breathing heavily by the time he approached, but the exhausted smile he showed them seemed to have a spark of the man he once was. “I believe I have slept enough.”
“You’re in your riding leathers.” It wasn’t a question and the look Arthur gave was grim.
Jon felt his heart racing with terror and shock. He looked from the knight to the king. “Surely you don’t mean to fly.”
“I must, old friend,” Rhaegar shuddered and coughed so violently that it seemed he might collapse. Eventually, he regained himself and stood a little straighter. “The army will need me and Urraxes if we mean to finish Blackfyre and his own dragon.”
Margaery took a hesitant step forward, stopping just short of touching her husband. “You can’t do that,” she whispered, “the winds, the cold, the strain.... it’ll kill you before you even get there.”
“No, I will live long enough to see Blackfyre dead,” there was a horrible certainty in his voice that was at odds with the frailty of the face that had spoken it. “This is how it must be.”
Jon looked at Melisandre, ready to snarl at her for having put his Silver King up to such a mad quest. Yet when his eyes found hers, he saw nothing but defeat and tears. By the Seven, he realised, she doesn’t want him to go either...
“You must, all of you, trust me on this matter.” Rhaegar straightened up, and some measure of his old nobility returned to him. “I will take flight again and I will destroy our foes. We will create a kingdom that our children will be proud to live in. I may not be there to see it, but I swear by every god that I will forge it for you.”
It was a struggle for Jon to contain the tears that rose up within him, but he managed it. How he wished for so long to have been able to tell Rhaegar that he loved him more than any other, that in his heart he had sworn eternal vows of loyalty. But he couldn’t, for that was not the world in which they lived.
Taking a breath, he threw his mind to more practical matters. “I will ready the men,” he croaked, “Stannis Baratheon has the Stormlords waiting for us just outside the city walls and-”
Rhaegar’s hand came down on Jon’s shoulder, and it was warmer than flesh had any right to be. He could feel it right through his tunic. “No, Jon.” He smiled again and eyes seemed to glisten in the sunlight. “You’re not coming with me this time.”
Outrage boiled in his heart. “What, no, I need to-”
“I don’t doubt your skill or courage,” Rhaegar said, gently. “But you are also the only man alive I trust to remain here and ensure that my kingdom remains intact. You’re the only one who can protect my children in the years to come. That’s why I named you Hand, that’s why I always chosen you. It could only be you.”
He wanted to argue the point, ached to do so. But Rhaegar’s purple eyes seemed to pierce right into his soul as if they two were looking at each other in the truest sense. The tears came and ran hot down his cheeks.
“Your Grace, I...”
“I know, Jon.”
Rhaegar’s hand left his shoulder, and the world felt infinitely colder because of it. Arthur and the rest of the Kingsguard fell in place around their sire, and to Jon it seemed as though they were figures from some Essosi portrait, mythic and noble.
Rhaegar looked to the sky and somewhere Urraxes cried out again. “Destiny awaits...”