Chapter 1: Prophecy in the Garden
The air in the courtyard was thick with the smell of damp earth and rotting petals. Moonlight, thin and milky, filtered through the tangled canopy of the godswood, casting a lattice of shadows across the overgrown flagstones. The hedges had not been trimmed in seasons; they coiled now like sleeping serpents, their thorns catching faint gleams from distant lanterns.
In the heart of the thorn-labyrinth, Helaena knelt.
Her pale dress was soaked at the knees with dew. She did not seem to notice. Her attention was fixed on a spider, diligent and grey, as it spun a new web between two unforgiving barbs. Her lips moved, soundless at first, then a whisper so soft it was almost part of the wind.
“Thread by thread, a kingdom made,” she murmured. “Silver for strength, red for regret. The wind will come from the east, little weaver. It will tear you apart.”
“Sister.”
The word was a blade cutting the stillness. Aemond stood at the ragged entrance to the clearing, his leather boots silent on the moss. The lone sapphire in his eye socket caught a sliver of light, a cold, dead star in the shadow of his face. His good eye, violet and sharp, missed nothing: the dirt on her hem, the rapt stillness of her hands, the intricate web.
Helaena did not startle. She never did. She turned her head, a slow, deliberate motion, and the knowing smile that touched her lips was more unsettling than any scream from the dungeons.
“Aemond. You’re walking in circles.”
“I am assessing the state of my brother’s keep,” he said, his voice flat. He stepped closer, the fragrance of leather and cold steel briefly cutting through the vegetal rot. “What are you doing out here? The maids said you slipped the guards again.”
“They were loud,” she said simply, turning back to the spider. “This is quiet. She listens.”
Aemond suppressed a sigh. Conversations with Helaena were like trying to grip smoke. “It’s a spider. It hears nothing. It only eats and breeds and dies.”
“So do kings,” Helaena replied, her tone light, conversational. She tilted her head. “Aegon dreams of fire. He smells it in his sheets. He screams for water, but the pitcher is always empty.”
A cold knot tightened in Aemond’s gut. He hadn’t told anyone about Aegon’s night terrors, the frantic, slurred begging for a drink the injured king was too weak to hold. The maester had dismissed it as milk of the poppy dreams.
“How do you know that?” he asked, his voice lower.
She pointed a slender finger, not at him, but at the web. A soft night breeze had begun to stir, making the delicate structure tremble. “He’s in the red threads. See how they sag? The weight is too much. It was never meant to be his web.”
Frustration, hot and familiar, prickled at him. This was what she did. She spoke in riddles that later made a terrible, obvious sense. He had no patience for it, not with the Black Council surely gathering, not with ravens flying daily from Storm’s End and the Eyrie.
“Speak plainly, Helaena. I have the governance of a kingdom in my hands. I don’t have time for games.”
“Games?” She laughed, a sound like tiny bells dropping into a well. “You are so blind in your one eye, brother. You look at maps and ledgers. You do not look at the webs.” She stood finally, brushing the damp from her skirts with an absent hand. Her distant gaze pinned him. “A beast will be offered to you. A gift with green eyes. Do not put it in a cage. Cages make beasts desperate, and desperate beasts bite the hand that feeds them.”
“What beast? From whom?”
“From the friend who wears a squid’s face,” she whispered, her smile returning, cryptic and chilling. “The blood will be on the stairs, Aemond. Not in the sky. Not yet. First, it will be on the stairs, and you will have to choose between a crown and a debt.”
For a long moment, he just stared at her. The political calculus ran automatically in his mind. A gift. The Greyjoys? An alliance? A trap? The blood on the stairs… an assassination attempt within the Red Keep itself?
He hated this. He hated the gnawing doubt she planted. He dealt in facts, in armies, in dragonfire. Not in whispers and spider-silk.
“You should be inside,” he said finally, his tone dismissing her prophecy. “It’s cold. You’ll take a chill.”
“The cold is coming for all of us,” she said, but she allowed him to take her elbow and guide her from the thicket. As they passed out of the shadows, she looked up at him, her expression suddenly lucid and unbearably sad. “You will try to be hard as stone, Aemond. But even stone cracks under the right pressure. Remember the debt.”
He didn’t answer. He led her back toward the torchlit gallery, the warm, familiar scent of beeswax and smoke replacing the damp of the garden. But her words clung to him, colder than the night air, wrapping around his plans like insidious vines.
A gift with green eyes. Blood on the stairs.
Behind them, in the newly abandoned darkness, a stronger gust of wind tore through the thorns. It shredded the delicate web, sending the grey spider tumbling into the void. The threads, silver and red, snapped and vanished into the dark.
The threads, silver and red, snapped and vanished into the dark.
Aemond did not return to his chambers. The quiet there was worse, filled with the ghost of Helaena’s whispers. Instead, he found himself in the training yard, its hard-packed earth scented with old sweat and crushed straw. He took up a practice sword, the blunted edge catching the grey dawn light, and began a series of punishing drills. Each swing was a rebuttal to a phantom voice—webs, debt, blood on the stairs. Muscle and steel were real. They were clean.
“You’ll tire yourself out before the day’s first council,” a voice observed from the arched entrance.
Ser Criston Cole leaned against the stone, arms crossed over his white enameled plate. His face was all familiar lines: weariness, loyalty, a hardness earned on the same yards decades prior.
“The council is a forum for old men to fret over grain counts,” Aemond said, not breaking rhythm. The sword whistled through the air. “Action is what wins wars. Something my brother understood, in his way.”
“Your brother understood little beyond his own appetites,” Criston said evenly, stepping fully into the yard. “It is why he now lies broken, a king of bedpans and nightmares. Caution is not cowardice, my prince.”
Aemond stopped, chest heaving, and turned his single eye on the Lord Commander. “Caution allowed the trout of Riverrun and the falcon of the Vale to declare for my half-sister. Caution lets a village in the northern Crownlands fly a black banner on a smug little windmill.” He drove the practice sword point-first into the dirt. “The village of Cobb’s Ridge. They swore fealty to House Darklyn. The Darklyns have sworn for Rhaenyra. Therefore, Cobb’s Ridge is in rebellion.”
Criston’s gaze turned guarded. “A village of farmers and millers. They have no strategic value.”
“They have symbolic value.” Aemond pulled a cloth from his belt and wiped the sweat from his palms. The motion was deliberate, cold. “Every hamlet that thinks it can choose its loyalist without consequence is a crack in our foundation. We seal it. With fire.”
For a moment, the only sound was the distant call of a waking crow. Criston’s jaw tightened. “Aemond. To burn smallfolk for the treason of their lord…”
“Is the established law of the land,” Aemond finished, his voice flat. “They declared for a usurper. They are not innocents; they are combatants in a war they were too stupid to avoid. I will fly to Cobb’s Ridge at dusk on Vhagar. The message will be undeniable.”
“The message will be one of terror,” Criston countered, stepping closer, his voice dropping. “It will galvanize the opposition. It will turn hesitant lords against you for fear of your… fervor. There are other ways. A levy of their grain. Taking hostages from the leading families.”
“Hostages eat. Grain can be stolen back.” Aemond’s sapphire eye seemed to swallow the light. “Ash is permanent. I will not plead for loyalty from ploughmen and sheepherders. I will command it, and the price for disobedience will be written across the sky where every village in the realm can see it.”
Criston studied the young man before him—the rigid spine, the unblinking stare. He saw no hot-headed rage, only a chilling, surgical resolve. This was worse. This was Aemond Targaryen building his legacy not on his brother’s broken body, but on the charred bones of peasants.
“Your mother,” Criston tried, a final card. “The Queen—”
“The Queen trusts me to secure her son’s throne,” Aemond interrupted. “Do not lecture me on politics, Ser Criston. You are the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard. Your duty is to execute the crown’s will, not question it. See that the men at the Dragonpit are ready. Vhagar will be hungry at dusk.”
He left the practice sword trembling in the ground, a stark, upright line. He walked past Criston without another look, his boots echoing on the stone steps leading back into the holdfast.
Criston did not move for a long time. He watched the first true sun of the day cut across the yard, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. He thought of Aegon, bloated and babbling in his bed. He thought of Helaena’s fractured whispers. He thought of the young, furious prince who had just ordered a holocaust to prove a point.
Finally, he turned.
He did not head toward the White Sword Tower. He took the narrower, more discreet passages that led to the Queen’s apartments. The guards there knew him, and with a grim nod, they let him pass.
Alicent Hightower was at her window, staring out at the city as it woke. She held a piece of embroidery in her hands, but the needle was still. She looked older in the morning light, the red of her house a vivid shock against the grey at her temples.
“Ser Criston,” she said, without turning. “You bring the morning’s news, I presume. Does it come from the council chamber, or the training yard?”
“From the yard, Your Grace.” He closed the door softly behind him. The space was fragrant with lemon oil and dried roses. It felt a world away from the scent of cold earth and prophecy. “I have just spoken with the Prince Regent.”
Alicent turned then, her eyes finding his. They were the eyes of a woman who had spent a lifetime listening to what men did not say. “And?”
“He intends to burn a village today. Cobb’s Ridge. For declaring for Rhaenyra.”
The embroidery fell to the floor, a tumble of silken stags now trampled underfoot. Alicent’s hand rose to her throat, a habitual gesture. “He cannot. It is… monstrous. It is folly.”
“I attempted to caution him. His mind is set. He speaks of sending a message, of being seen as strong where Aegon is…” Criston let the sentence die.
“Where Aegon is weak,” Alicent finished, the words tasting of ash. She walked to the hearth, staring into the cold grate. “He is my son. But he has Vhagar, and he has his father’s scorn festering in his heart. He will do this thing to show the realm, to show me, that he is not to be managed.” She looked back at Criston, her expression hollowed out by a terrible weariness. “How do we stop a dragon, Ser Criston?”
Criston’s voice was low, stripped bare. “Mayhaps he would heed the advice of his mother, Your Grace."
Alicent nodded slowly. "I will see what I can do."