The Red Keep woke tense the next morning, the particular kind of tension that spreads through a castle's stone the way damp spreads through old wood, felt long before anyone could name its source.
Word had traveled quickly, the way it always did among servants who spent their days moving unseen through halls where lords and kings forgot, sometimes, that walls carried voices further than intended. Everyone below stairs knew, by the time the sun had properly cleared the horizon, that the King and his brother had quarreled the night before, sharply enough that the former Queen herself had to intervene, and that Prince Viserys now sat confined to his chambers by his own mother's order. No one knew the particulars of what had been said. The guards who'd stood witness said nothing, trained well enough in discretion that even the most persistent kitchen gossip couldn't pry more than a raised eyebrow from them. But a queen forced to physically intervene, and an heir confined afterward like a disobedient child rather than a prince, that alone told every maid and steward in the Red Keep that whatever had passed in that solar had been no small thing.
They whispered about it in the kitchens, in the laundry, in the narrow servants' passages that ran behind the castle's grander halls, speculation blooming in the particular way it always did where certainty was denied it. But not one of them breathed a word of it anywhere the royal family might overhear, because every soul serving in that castle had learned, across two years, exactly how far such careless words could travel, and exactly how little patience the King's justice held for those who spread rumor about matters that weren't theirs to speak of.
Damon, for his part, gave the whispers no thought at all that morning. He had a war to begin, and a war left little room in a man's mind for court gossip, however loudly it murmured behind him.
He stood now at the gates of King's Landing, dressed for flight rather than court, the same black leather and dark steel rings he'd worn into the trial by combat two and a half years past, Ice absent from his hip, left to be reworked into a sword more fitted to him. Before him stood Cersei Lannister, her hand held loosely in his, her green eyes fixed on his face with an expression carefully composed into something that might, to any watching eye, have passed for genuine worry.
"Be careful," she said, her fingers tightening faintly around his. "I'll be waiting for word of your victory, Your Grace. And your safety." She let the smallest, practiced tremor slip into her voice, the kind that suggested more feeling than perhaps sat beneath it, though whether that suggestion was truth or performance remained, as it so often did with her, difficult even for Damon to fully untangle. "Come back to me whole."
"I intend to," Damon said, and offered her the faint, reassuring smile he'd learned, across two years, tended to settle whatever nerves, real or performed, she chose to show him.
Above them, the sky darkened.
It happened suddenly, the way it always did, the light dimming as though some vast cloud had rolled swiftly across the sun, and a heartbeat later the roar came, twin and thunderous, rolling across the city and echoing off every wall and rooftop within earshot. Caraxes descended first, wings vast and blood-red against the morning sky, Dreamfyre close behind him, pale and pearlescent, both dragons circling once, twice, above the gates before descending to land a short distance beyond them, the ground trembling faintly beneath the combined weight of their arrival.
Cersei's hand went rigid in Damon's grip.
Her eyes, wide now, had left his face entirely, fixed instead on the two enormous shapes settling onto the open ground beyond the gates, wings folding slowly, long necks turning, gold and green eyes blinking against the morning light. Fear moved plainly across her expression, unguarded for once in a way Damon rarely saw from her, and beneath the fear, something else, something closer to awe, a reluctant, helpless appreciation for the sheer scale of what stood before her.
"My partners have arrived," Damon said, following her gaze toward the dragons before returning it to her face. "It's time."
Cersei blinked, startled from whatever thought had briefly consumed her, and quickly composed herself again, smoothing the fear from her expression with practiced ease. "Of course. Go, Your Grace. I'll await your word."
Damon released her hand, inclined his head once, and turned from her, walking unhurried across the open ground toward his dragons, leaving Cersei standing at the gates behind him, her eyes following his back the whole way.
Caraxes lowered his massive head first as Damon approached, nostrils flaring, a low, rumbling growl building somewhere deep in his chest that was not quite a threat and not quite a greeting, something particular to him alone that two and a half years had taught Damon to read easily enough. Damon reached up and rubbed a broad palm along the ridged plates of the dragon's snout, warm scale beneath his hand despite the cool morning air.
"How have you been, partner?" he murmured, more to the dragon than to anyone listening. Caraxes rumbled again, deeper, almost content, leaning faintly into the touch the way a hound might lean into a familiar hand.
Dreamfyre waited a short distance beyond, quieter as always, watching with patient golden eyes, and Damon crossed to her next, offering her the same familiar affection, palm resting against her pale, gleaming snout.
"We have enemies to burn," Damon told them both.
Both dragons rumbled in near-unison, low and eager, wings shifting restlessly against the ground, as though the words themselves had stirred something ancient and hungry in each of them.
Damon smiled, faint and genuine, and moved to Dreamfyre's side. She lowered her wing and shifted her long body slightly, offering him the ridge along her shoulder the way she always did, patient while he climbed, and settled into his saddle, and locked himself in.
"Sōvegon," he said, clear and steady.
Fly.
Dreamfyre's wings unfolded with a sound like a hundred silk banners snapping at once, and a heartbeat later Caraxes rose beside her, the ground trembling once more beneath the force of both dragons' launch. They climbed together, fast and steep, banking north and west toward the Crownlands and, beyond them, the long journey to Casterly Rock and the sea past it, leaving King's Landing shrinking rapidly below, its gates and its walls and the woman still standing at them, watching until the two shapes had dwindled to distant specks against the morning sky.
---
Within the Red Keep, in a chamber, Viserys sat across from his mother, unable to meet her eyes.
Rhaella's face carried nothing so simple as anger. Anger, Viserys thought, might almost have been easier to bear. What sat there instead was disappointment, plain and unhidden, carved into every line of her expression as she studied her younger son in the pale morning light filtering through the narrow window.
"What possessed you," she said finally, quiet, "to do what you did last night?"
Viserys stared at his own hands, folded tightly in his lap, and found he could not lift his gaze to meet hers. "I only wanted to do more," he said, the words coming slowly, reluctantly. "I wanted his trust."
Rhaella made a small, disbelieving sound in her throat, not quite a laugh. "I don't doubt that much is true. But it isn't all of it, Viserys, and we both know it." She leaned forward slightly in her chair. "Tell me your real intentions. All of them."
Viserys said nothing for a long moment, his jaw tightening, his fists curling slowly closed in his lap.
"Damon will have children eventually," he said at last, low, the words dragged out of him one at a time. "A wife. Sons. And when he does, I lose whatever position I have now. I become nothing. Some spare prince with no purpose, remembered only as the King's brother, if I'm remembered at all." His voice cracked, faint, before he mastered it again. "I just wanted—"
He stopped.
Rhaella finished it for him, her voice gentle now, though no less firm for the gentleness. "You wanted to use this chance, while it still existed, to prove to your brother that he didn't need children of his own. That you were already the perfect heir, sitting right in front of him, if only he'd choose to see it that way."
Viserys' jaw worked silently for a moment before he finally nodded, small and reluctant, still unable to lift his eyes from his own hands.
Rhaella was quiet a long while after that, watching him, something sorrowful moving behind her own gaze even as her expression settled into something harder, more resolved.
"You need to rid yourself of that idea," she said finally, "no matter what it costs you to do it. Damon needs to marry. He needs children of his own, Viserys, for the sake of this entire realm, not merely for his own sake. You need to accept that you will lose the position you currently hold, and you need to move past it, and support your brother in whatever comes next." She held his gaze, steady, unrelenting. "He has plans of his own for you. I know this much, even if he hasn't spoken them plainly to you as yet. But you will never see any part of them so long as he doesn't trust you, and after last night, that trust is further away than it's ever been. You need to earn it, not demand it."
Viserys said nothing, though something in his shoulders sagged, slowly, beneath the weight of what she'd said.
"When your brother returns from the Iron Islands," Rhaella continued, "you will go to him, and you will apologize for your behavior last night. And you will promise him, plainly and sincerely, that you intend to do everything in your power to earn the trust you've spent so long simply expecting to be given."
Viserys looked up at her at last, something raw and uncertain in his violet eyes, and after a long moment, he nodded once.
"Yes, Mother."
---
Far above the Crownlands, the fields and forests rolling green and gold beneath him in the morning light, Damon flew on, Caraxes a great red shadow keeping pace beside Dreamfyre's pale wings, the wind roaring past him, the distant curve of the western coast still many hours away.
He had no notion at all of what passed, at that very moment, in a quiet chamber back within the Red Keep's walls, no notion of the conversation unfolding between his mother and his brother, nor the promise being extracted from Viserys in his absence.
His mind, for now, had already turned entirely toward Pyke, and the war waiting for him at the end of this long flight.