Redemption of the Dragon

Act 2 – Prophesy or Conspiracy · Chapter 7: Flight

Selhorys did not wake to alarm.

That was the first lesson.

If a house wished to vanish, it did not shout. It did not throw gates open, send servants running with bundles, or let frightened horses scream beneath every window. It breathed once, quietly, and became something else.

By dawn, the manor had changed.

The bright awnings were gone from the inner court. The practice weapons had been stripped from the racks and wrapped in oilcloth. The books from the lower library were being packed into false-bottomed chests beneath bolts of common wool. Men who had served wine the night before now wore travel leathers beneath plain cloaks. Women who had carried laundry moved through the galleries with knives under their sleeves and ledgers tucked beneath their arms.

Tom stood in the courtyard with a sword at his hip and watched the Tears of Valyria dissolve themselves.

"They are good enough at running," Boro said.

He leaned against the dry fountain, boot planted awkwardly because the old wound in his leg had stiffened during the night. His pack sat at his feet. Someone had given him a better axe. He had inspected it, insulted the balance, and kept it.

"They would call it withdrawal," Jory said.

"Running with better boots."

Mera passed them carrying two bundles of arrows. "Running keeps you alive long enough to complain."

"So does killing the people chasing you."

"You may do both if you are talented."

Boro considered that. "Fair enough."

Across the yard, Cleyton argued with a grey-haired woman over which chests could be risked on the road. He had ink on one cheek and looked as if he had slept for less than an hour. Vissenya Rosedragon stood near the stable arch, speaking in low Valyrian to three riders. She had changed from the blood-streaked riding coat into dark travel clothes fitted close enough to move in and fine enough to suggest wealth if anyone looked only once. Her platinum hair was braided high and pinned beneath a hood. She looked less like a messenger now and more like a blade hidden in silk.

Aemon Vezos oversaw the courtyard from the steps.

He did not shout either.

He gave short commands, and men obeyed them before they seemed fully spoken. In the cold dawn light he looked younger than Tom had first thought and older at the same time. Mid-forties, mayhaps, though age sat lightly on him. There was no softness in his frame, no slowness in the way he turned when a groom brought up his horse. At his left hip hung the sword Tom had not seen clearly before.

The scabbard was black leather chased with gold.

The hilt was plain.

The blade, when Aemon drew it halfway to check the edge, was not.

Dark ripples moved through the steel like smoke trapped under ice.

Tom had heard men speak of Valyrian steel in the North with the same hushed greed they used for crowns and dragons. He had seen lordly swords from a distance, good castle-forged steel polished bright and proud. This was different. It did not shine so much as remember light.

Aemon noticed him looking.

"Yes," he said. "It is real."

Tom stepped closer. "I did not ask."

"Your eyes did."

"Does it have a name?"

"Not one I use in common company."

Boro, naturally, had limped close enough to hear. "That means yes."

"That means the answer is not for you."

"I dislike noble swords."

"Most noble swords would dislike you."

"Then they have taste."

Aemon slid the blade home. "The sword is older than my house's pride and considerably more useful."

"Your house?" Tom asked.

Aemon looked toward the gate where horses were being led out in pairs. "Minor nobility of Old Valyria. Too small to be invited to the first great sins, too proud to admit exclusion spared us. We had no dragons. No volcano holdings. No priestly blood rights. We owned vineyards, accountants, and a stubborn belief that proximity to power was almost the same as possessing it."

"And Vezos?"

"Old Valyrian. Sun."

"You do not seem sunny."

For a heartbeat Aemon only stared at him.

Then Vissenya, passing behind them with a sealed message tube, laughed once.

Aemon sighed. "I begin to see why Cleyton likes you."

"He likes being annoyed," Vissenya said.

"Then he has chosen excellent company."

Tom watched Aemon fasten his cloak. "If your family never used blood magic, why join the Tears?"

"Because my ancestors were near enough to power to know the smell of it burning flesh." Aemon's expression cooled. "And because minor houses survive by reading wind. Old Valyria's wind turned foul long before the Doom. Some of my line kept accounts for families who did practice blood rites. Numbers reveal what songs hide. Missing servants. Prisoners bought by weight. Children sent away before certain ceremonies. Livestock slaughtered when no feast followed. Men do not need dragons to understand evil if they are paid to record its appetite."

That answer stayed with Tom longer than he wanted.

The city gates were still opening when they left.

They did not go as one company. That would have drawn every eye from the river to the towers. The Tears split themselves into merchants, hired guards, a mourning party, two spice carts, a family of supposed cousins from Volantis, and a priestly escort for a shrine relic that was actually a chest full of old Valyrian tablets. Tom rode with Jory, Cleyton, Vissenya, Aemon, Ser Kemal, Boro, Mera, Tall Spear, Darro, Salla, and a dozen others who looked enough like guards to make questions expensive.

Selhorys fell behind them in pale walls, river light, and dust.

Tom did not look back until Jory did.

"You think we will see it again?" Tom asked.

Jory watched the road behind them. "I try not to make promises on behalf of cities."

"Wise."

"Late."

The first day was heat and caution.

They followed a road southeast at first, then turned onto a lesser track that wound through orchards, irrigation ditches, and fields where slaves bent beneath the sun while overseers watched from shade. Vissenya rode ahead twice and returned by different paths each time. Aemon's riders changed cloaks at midday. Cleyton kept a hood low over his face and complained whenever dust touched the book satchel strapped across his chest, which meant he complained often.

Tom rode badly.

He had ridden before, in the way men rode when there were more horses than carts and someone shouted to mount. That was not the same as spending a whole day on a nervous gelding while trying not to look like a man recently trained more for killing than travel. By evening his thighs ached in places Kemal had somehow missed.

Boro enjoyed this greatly.

"You walk like a prince with saddle sores," he said when they stopped beneath a stand of tamarisk trees.

"How would you know how a prince walks?"

"Badly, I assume."

Mera dropped her bedroll beside a root. "All men walk badly when they think someone is watching."

"Not me," Boro said.

"You limp."

"That is not walking badly. That is walking with history."

Vissenya joined them with a waterskin in one hand. "If you three are finished educating the road, there is work."

Boro looked up at her. "You always command?"

"Only when I know better."

"Often?"

"Usually."

He grunted. "Still like this one."

Vissenya's smile showed teeth. "That will pass."

It did not pass quickly.

That night, after the horses were watered and the cooking fires were kept small enough to be insults to hunger, Tom found Vissenya standing beyond the outer watch line, looking back toward the dark smudge of Selhorys.

He should not have approached without making noise.

He knew that because her knife was at his ribs before he finished the second step.

Tom froze.

"You walk heavily when you think," she said.

"I will try to think quieter."

She lowered the knife. "Do."

They stood together beneath a sky too wide and warm to belong to the North. Insects clicked in the grass. Somewhere behind them Boro was arguing with Darro over whether Norvoshi beer deserved to be called beer if it tasted like punishment.

"Cleyton says you are a councilor," Tom said.

"Cleyton says many things."

"Is this one true?"

"Yes."

"Aemon runs Elyria."

"Yes."

"You do not run a chapter."

She glanced at him. "You are collecting facts."

"People keep knowing mine. I am trying the habit."

That earned him a small look of approval, or mayhaps amusement. With Vissenya it was hard to separate the two.

"I do not keep one house," she said. "I go where doors must open. Volantis, Lys, Myr, Qohor when the air is especially unpleasant. I know merchants who think they own me favors, priests who believe I am less dangerous than I am, courtesans who hear more statecraft than magistrates, and three Volantene noblewomen who would rather die than admit they helped the Tears move messages under their husbands' noses."

"Spy, then."

"Spy. Liaison. Knife. Pretty guest. Mourning cousin. Whatever the work requires."

"And your family?"

Vissenya looked back toward the road. For the first time since Tom had met her, some of the bright edge left her.

"Old Valyrian," she said. "Older than many lines that later called themselves dragonlords. Mine fled before blood became fashion. They saw where the first rites were leading and left behind land, name rights, and enough pride to choke on. They married carefully, hid better, survived more often than they deserved."

"Like mine, Cleyton says."

"Perhaps."

"Do you believe that?"

"I believe Cleyton has a gift for finding dangerous truths and stepping on them barefoot."

Tom almost smiled. "That is not an answer."

"No. It is a warning."

The second day, they saw riders behind them.

Not close. Not red. Not enough to prove pursuit.

Enough that no one slept well.

On the third day, the road bent through broken country where low hills rose out of scrub and old stone walls marked fields no one had farmed for years. The Tears chose a dry streambed for their camp, hidden from the road by thorn and rock. No fires were lit. Food was hard bread, olives, and cheese eaten in the dark.

Aemon and Vissenya argued softly near the horses.

Tom was not trying to listen.

He listened anyway.

"Baelys should have been told sooner," Vissenya said.

"Baelys is halfway to Slaver's Bay," Aemon answered. "A raven would have had to become a miracle."

"He will say we concealed it."

"He says many things when displeased."

"He is displeased often now."

Cleyton, sitting on a stone with his knees drawn up and his chain hidden beneath his cloak, said, "That is a gentle phrasing."

Tom shifted where he sat beside Jory.

Jory did not look at him. He had also heard.

"Baelys?" Tom asked.

The three councilors went quiet.

Boro, lying on his back nearby with an axe across his chest, said, "Good enough. New mysterious name. We were low."

Aemon looked at Tom through the dark. "Baelys is first among us."

"Leader?"

"The Tears dislike the word."

"That means yes," Mera said.

Vissenya sat on an upturned saddle. "De facto, yes. There are several councilors. Some run cities, some lines of spies, some vaults, some schools of old knowledge. Baelys does not command all of us by law, but when he speaks, most listen."

"Why?"

"Because he is usually right," Cleyton said.

Aemon's mouth tightened. "Because he makes rightness feel inevitable."

Vissenya looked down at her hands. "He is firm in everything. Thought. Purpose. Anger. Mercy, when he can still bear it. Mid-thirties, but already men twice his age step aside when he enters a room. He is clever, hard to frighten, and very difficult to defeat with a blade."

"You like him," Tom said.

"Yes," she said.

Cleyton added, "And we worry about him."

Aemon walked to the edge of the dry streambed and looked out over the dark hills. The moon caught the silver in his hair and made him look carved from something old and cold.

"Baelys was watching Young Griff," he said.

Tom frowned. "Who?"

"A boy moving under a false name with careful guards and too much importance," Cleyton said. "Some believe him to be a hidden Targaryen prince. Some believe Blackfyre blood is more likely."

"Blackfyre?"

"A dead branch that refuses to understand death," Aemon said.

Cleyton gave him a look. "A cadet line of House Targaryen, born of legitimized bastardy and rebellion. Dragons without dragons. Claimants without a throne. Wounds men turned into banners."

"And Baelys followed him?"

"Observed him," Vissenya said. "Measured the men around him. The plans. The lies. The hunger."

"Then he shifted east," Cleyton said. "Daenerys Targaryen became impossible to ignore."

Tom knew that name. Everyone knew that name now, at least in pieces. A young queen across the world. Dragons returned. Cities burning or freed, depending on who told the tale. Slaver's Bay trembling beneath a girl with a name old enough to make men kneel to memory.

"He went to her?" Tom asked.

"He is on his way," Vissenya said. "To watch. To judge. To decide whether the dragon queen is a threat, a victim, a weapon, or all three."

"The Tears oppose Targaryens," Jory said.

It was not quite a question.

Cleyton rubbed at his tired eyes. "We oppose blood magic. We oppose the chains by which Valyria bound dragons and called bondage kinship. We oppose prophecy that turns people into tools for hungry powers. House Targaryen carries all of that like heirloom silver."

"Yet Baelys admires her," Aemon said.

Vissenya's head turned sharply. "You do not know that."

"His reports changed."

"They became more careful."

"They became warmer."

Cleyton looked miserable because he agreed and hated agreeing. "At first he wrote of danger. Of old Valyria reborn in miniature. Of slaves calling a dragon queen mother while fire made arguments easier than governance. Lately he writes of strength. Resolve. The discipline to take cities with nothing but a name, three dragons, and impossible will."

"Perhaps he admires that," Vissenya said. "Admiration is not surrender."

"With Baelys, it can become a road," Aemon said.

Tom heard something beneath the words then. Not politics. Fear shaped by friendship.

"You think he will join her?"

"No," Aemon said.

Cleyton said nothing.

Vissenya looked away.

That was answer enough.

The fourth day brought rain.

Warm at first, then hard. It turned dust to paste, softened tracks, and made the horses miserable. The Tears used it. They rode through gullies and along stony ground, split again, doubled back, crossed a stream twice, and left false signs on a road leading east. Vissenya seemed to know every ruined watchtower and shepherd path between Selhorys and the deeper Disputed Lands. Aemon grew quieter the farther they went, one hand often resting near the hilt of his old sword. Cleyton's book satchel was wrapped in waxed cloth and guarded more carefully than some men guarded children.

Tom began to feel the pursuit before he saw it.

Not magic.

He told himself that.

Tracks disappeared too cleanly. Birds rose from scrub behind them when no one should have been there. One of Vissenya's outriders failed to return by midday. At dusk, Salla found a strip of red cloth caught on a thorn beside a track the Tears had not used.

By the fifth morning, no one pretended.

"They are close," Kemal said.

They stood in a shallow valley of yellow grass and dark rock, with a narrow pass ahead and broken ridges to either side. The rain had ended before dawn, leaving the air clear and cruelly bright. The horses stamped and tossed their heads. Men checked bowstrings. Mera tied her hair back with a strip of leather. Boro rolled his shoulders and winced only when he thought no one saw.

"How many?" Tom asked.

Vissenya came down from the ridge with mud on her boots and anger in her eyes. "Too many."

"Numbers," Aemon said.

"Three times us, at least. More if the second line has caught up. Red priests. Hired spears. Fanatics. Some Myrish temple guards. They are not trying to hide now."

Cleyton swallowed. "They mean to pin us before the pass."

"Yes."

Aemon looked at the ridges, the pass, the valley mouth behind them. "Then we make them pay for certainty."

Orders followed.

Not shouted. Given.

The Tears moved with the efficiency Tom had seen in Selhorys. Horses pulled behind a spur of rock. Archers climbed the left ridge. Salla and the Lysene brothers vanished among scrub with knives and short bows. Kemal placed Jory and Tall Spear near the narrowest mouth of the pass. Boro took the center because no one had the sense to keep him out of it. Mera chose a line of stones where anyone trying to flank would meet short blades and regret.

Aemon drew his sword.

Valyrian steel whispered from the scabbard.

The sound lifted the hair on Tom's arms.

Vissenya drew her curved blade and a dagger.

Cleyton stayed near the horses, pale but armed with a short sword he held like a man who understood theory better than practice.

"Stay close," Jory told Tom.

"You too."

"I am not the one priests see in fires."

"No. You are the one who keeps following him."

Jory's mouth tightened. "Aye."

The red priests came with song.

That was worse than shouting.

Voices rose from the valley mouth, many voices, roughened by travel and faith. The words were Valyrian at first, then Myrish, then something older or simply uglier. Men in red cloaks walked behind shieldmen. Hired spears spread to either side. Fanatics with flame-painted faces came barefoot through wet grass, smiling as if pain were proof of invitation. Three priests walked near the center, rubies at their throats dark in the morning light.

One lifted a hand.

"Tom," he called in the Common Tongue.

The sound of his name struck the valley and seemed to find every stone.

Boro spat. "Rude."

The priest stepped forward. He was broad for a priest, with a shaved head and a beard oiled into a point. "Come willingly, and those with you may yet live."

"Generous," Mera said.

Aemon answered before Tom could. "You are far from your temple."

"All flame is his temple."

"Then your god has poor taste in roads."

The priest's eyes moved to Aemon's blade and narrowed. "Old steel in faithless hands."

"Old steel has standards."

The priest smiled.

Then the arrows came.

Not from the Tears.

From the red line.

They had hidden bowmen in the scrub beyond the valley mouth. The first volley hissed over shields and struck two Tears before anyone could curse. One man fell from the left ridge. A horse screamed behind the rocks. Cleyton dropped flat as an arrow snapped into stone above his head.

"Shields!" Kemal roared.

The valley broke.

The red soldiers advanced behind round shields, spears leveled. Fanatics ran ahead of them, careless of arrows, some carrying jars that smoked at the mouth. One shattered against a rock and burst into greasy flame that clung to wet grass. Heat rolled across the ground. The smell was foul, oil and pitch and something sweet underneath.

Tom lifted his shield.

The first man reached him fast.

Too fast.

Tom caught the spear on the shield face, turned it, stepped inside, and cut across the man's throat. The body fell against him. Another came over it. Tom drove the shield rim into his teeth and opened his belly before he finished falling.

There was no time to think.

Only movement.

Kemal had told him that real fighting punished thought that arrived late. Today thought did not arrive at all. His body found the lessons without asking permission. Foot on stone, not mud. Shield high. Blade low. Do not chase the red cloak. Watch the shoulder. Breathe after the cut. Turn the wrist before the hand locks.

Jory fought to his left, economical and cold. Tall Spear's point flashed beyond him, ugly now in the way Kemal had demanded, no flourish wasted. Boro roared in the center, axe rising and falling. Aemon's Valyrian steel moved like dark water. Vissenya danced through the right flank, beautiful and merciless, dagger and sword trading hands as men discovered too late that her softness was an error made by eyes.

The red line kept coming.

For every man who fell, two pushed over him. Spears struck shields. Arrows snapped into dirt. Fire crawled through grass in strange patches and died where rain had soaked the earth too deeply. A priest shouted blessings. Another shouted for Tom to be taken alive.

Alive.

That word found him.

Something opened.

Not like a door.

Like a wound remembering it had once been a mouth.

The world sharpened until it became unbearable.

Tom heard individual breaths inside the battle. Leather creaking under a man's left arm. Rainwater dripping from a spearhead. Jory's boot sliding half an inch in mud. The priest's ruby clicking against his breastbone when he shouted. A red soldier's heart beating too fast beneath boiled leather.

Heat moved under Tom's skin.

Not fever.

Not anger.

Older than both.

The next spear came toward him slowly.

No.

Not slowly.

He was faster.

Tom stepped past the point and cut the spearman's hands from the shaft. He did not watch the man scream. His sword was already moving. A shield opened. A throat. A thigh. A face. He turned beneath an axe and drove his shoulder into the wielder hard enough to feel ribs crack through mail. Someone struck his back. The blow slid away or failed to matter. He caught the man's wrist, broke it, took the knife from the failing hand, and buried it in another soldier's eye.

He moved forward.

That was wrong.

The line was meant to hold.

Tom moved forward anyway.

"Tom!" Jory shouted.

The name came from very far away.

Red filled the world.

Not blood alone. Cloaks. Prayers. Fire. Rubies. Faces flushed with holy certainty. Men who thought dying for a god made them lighter. Men who thought killing strangers could be clean if a priest named it service.

Tom cut them down.

One.

Three.

Six.

He stopped counting or never started.

A spear pierced his cloak and missed flesh. He caught the shaft under his arm and pulled the man holding it into his blade. A mace struck his shield hard enough to split the rim. He dropped the shield, stepped inside the second swing, and took the man's head halfway from his shoulders. Two fanatics came at him together with curved knives. He killed the left one with the sword and the right one with the broken shield edge still strapped to his arm.

The heat inside him rose.

For a moment, he thought he heard wings.

Then a red priest stood before him.

The broad one. The one who had called his name.

His ruby glowed at his throat, red light pulsing against skin. His eyes were wide now. Not afraid. Hungry.

"There," the priest whispered. "There you are."

Tom drove his sword through the man's chest.

The priest caught the blade with both hands and smiled around blood.

"Fire sees you."

Tom twisted the steel.

The ruby cracked.

The priest's smile died before he did.

Something like pressure burst in the air. Men nearest them staggered. Tom felt heat rush over him and then through him, as if a hot wind had found the hollow places in his bones. He shouted, though he did not know whether it was pain or fury or something that had no human name.

The red soldiers broke.

Not all.

Enough.

The Tears surged.

Aemon cut through two hired spears trying to reach Tom's back. Vissenya hamstrung a man in red mail and opened his throat as he fell. Kemal drove the center forward with short, brutal commands. Boro killed a man with the haft of his axe because the blade was stuck in another. Mera appeared at Tom's right long enough to put a knife into a fanatic's ribs, then stared at him as if she no longer knew what she had saved.

Tom kept moving until there was no one in front of him.

The valley quieted in pieces.

First the songs failed.

Then the orders.

Then the screaming, though that took longest.

When Tom stopped, the morning had changed.

Smoke drifted low over wet grass. Red cloaks lay in heaps around him. Men groaned beneath bodies. A broken spear burned at one end. Blood ran black through rainwater in the low places between stones. Tom stood in the middle of it with his sword hanging from one hand, breath tearing in and out of him as if he had run for days.

His arms shook.

He looked down.

He was covered in blood.

Some of it was his.

Most was not.

"Tom."

Jory's voice.

Close now.

Tom turned.

Everyone was looking at him.

Jory stood with blood on his cheek and fear he had not hidden quickly enough. Boro's axe rested low in both hands, his mouth slightly open for once without a joke waiting behind it. Mera stared as if measuring the distance between ally and danger. Tall Spear had gone very still. Kemal watched with a master's eyes and a man's unease. Cleyton looked stricken, not surprised exactly, and that was worse. Aemon's face had lost all skepticism. Vissenya's blade dripped red at her side while awe and calculation warred openly in her violet eyes.

Tom tried to speak.

Nothing came.

Only breath.

Heavy.

Hot.

Alive.

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Disclaimer: Frostfyre is a non-commercial fan fiction project inspired by a Realm of Thrones campaign for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. All rights to those original settings and characters remain with their respective owners.