Never before had Aegon been so surprised to find that the old maxim, drummed into him by a septon in childhood about kindness to one's neighbors being the source of one's own happiness, had received its confirmation. It turned out that giving gifts was easy and pleasant, and he experienced no less joy from them than those he gifted.
He gladdened Viserys with a whole chest of Valyrian treatises on architecture and plans of Valyrian cities, including Valyria itself. Dusty scrolls, having miraculously survived two centuries of oblivion and several weeks of sea travel, were of greater value to the King than a million golden dragons from Braavos. While the Prince was away, his brother had begun carving miniature towers and palaces from white limestone, and now he had acquired a practically complete and exhaustive guide to recreating the Valyrian City. While Viserys indulged in raptures like a child, Aegon involuntarily managed to exchange glances with Aemma—she, naturally, was happy for her husband, but in her weary eyes, beneath which shadows lay from a difficult pregnancy, there was also an unspoken hope that now she would not be the only one to brighten the King's evenings.
To the Queen herself, Aegon presented a kokoshnik-diadem of Valyrian steel with rubies—a dragon spreading its wings formed a crown above the head, and its head, gleaming with precious stones in its eyes, hung over the forehead, resembling a "third eye." In the Prince's view, the gift was simply magnificent, though not entirely suited to Aemma—for her, it was too complex and too Valyrian. It was noticeable that it was not entirely to the Queen's taste, yet she thanked her cousin for his kindness and attention, and in this, she was charmingly sincere.
To Rhaenyra, who threw herself on his neck scarce had propriety allowed it, Aegon gifted the contents of a whole tailor's workshop—in Lys and Pentos, where they had looked in before returning, he had bought up the finest fabrics, the most delicate laces, and the most beautiful beads that would go toward new dresses for the Princess. His niece attempted to "work off" the gifts with "Farewell to Valyria," which she for some reason read from the end, but Aegon interrupted her after the second verse when it became clear she did not intend to stop.
"You shall have time yet to demonstrate your successes to me, riña (child)," he said, sending her to her waiting friend; perchance Alicent would also receive something from his gifts. He did not begrudge it.
But, definitely, the most stunned of all the recipients looked Daemon. When the servants laid their burden before him, the middle brother stared at the pile of metal lying before him and asked the most stupid question of all:
"What is this?"
"What you thought," smiled Aegon. "A full suit of Valyrian armor. Very late, naturally, the master was definitely inspired by Andal knightly plate, but still..."
"Damn it, one could buy a whole kingdom for this!" his brother could not restrain an exclamation, turning a dull-grey vambrace in his hands.
"If you wish to sell it, with the money gained you could buy up all the Magisters of some Free City. One could, of course, act more cleverly and allow them to fight over it."
"Where did you find it?! Such things are numbered!"
"In Mantarys; the city of monsters is underestimated. I have no need for armor—I did not much like war, and I shall not perform in tournaments, so it is yours. I thought it would suit Dark Sister."
"Are you serious?" the desire to possess the creation of ancient masters and disbelief distinctly battled in Daemon. "You found it... Are you certain?"
"Of course, I am certain," Aegon repeated patiently. "It is yours. Consider it gratitude for the Candle—it saved my life several times."
Instead of an answer, his brother grabbed him in a bear hug.
"Did you decide to break the rest of my bones?" Aegon hissed in a strangled voice.
Daemon laughed, but released him:
"You have not seen Harwin Strong yet. Now there is a Breakbones!"
Essosi gifts and Westerosi favors continued to pour in a torrent. Viserys again proved he could think quickly: the Prince had not warned him about Jaegaer, but had made his cousin learn by heart beforehand all the phrases he was to say and which he might hear. Fortunately, everything went according to the best scenario: Jaegaer was given knighthood, a surname (not even the worst one), and a Valyrian sword—quite not bad for a bastard.
In total, the cousin and sworn shield raised five swords from the catacombs beneath the Mantarys temple: three bastard swords and two greatswords, with wavy, as if flaming, blades. One of them went to Ser Jaegaer; on the blade, which was larger than Rhaenyra, a nameless master had engraved the sword's name—Remembrance; the cousin, reading the glyphs, chuckled joylessly and announced that this suited them both perfectly.
Remembrance, of course, was a cumbersome weapon, and one needed to get used to it, but the newly knighted man did not waste time and began to disappear in the training yards of the Red Keep, where literally in a couple of weeks he managed to predictably befriend Daemon and that selfsame Harwin Breakbones. And by the end of the first month in King's Landing, Jaegaer awkwardly inquired of Aegon when the King might receive him.
"You are our acknowledged cousin," the Prince raised his eyebrows in surprise. "You need not send a petition through the Lord Chamberlain."
"But surely I cannot simply open the door of his chambers and ask if His Grace can receive me?" the other objected. "It is not done so with us in Volantis."
"Did you also send a slave to your mother to kiss her goodnight?"
"No, but..."
"This is Westeros, Jaegaer. Everything is different here."
"Precisely why, Westerosi mother of yours, I have not been able to speak with him for a week!" the cousin snapped.
Aegon sighed, rolled his eyes, and taking Jaegaer by the sleeve like a little child, led him through the castle corridors. The King was discovered in the Tower of the Hand, where, together with Lord Otto and Lord Lyman, he stood over a table littered with papers.
"...believe it can be expanded," the Hand pronounced confidently.
"There is money enough for it, of course," spoke Beesbury. "But what will the Starks say? This will enrich the Manderlys even more—talk may start that they aim for the place of the new Wardens of the North."
"The Starks have been loyal to the Iron Throne since the Conquest," Viserys waved him off. "We have no reason to be wroth with them, and they understand that nothing threatens their position."
"True, Sovereign, but..."
Aegon scraped his cane on the floor, drawing attention to himself.
"Ah, Aegon!" the King greeted him with a nod. "And we are just thinking what to do with your victories. Otto proposes expanding the port of White Harbor, for it is becoming a trifle crowded for Braavosi merchants."
"The Celtigars will not be too glad of competitors' happiness," the Prince remarked. "But we came on another matter."
"Is that so?"
"Yes, Your Grace," Jaegaer stepped forward; in fairness, in the presence of the King and his councilors, all timidity and indecision left him and the Westerosi saw the Volantene Aeksio again. "I ask your permission to join the City Watch."
"Already? Do you not need... more time to grow accustomed to our life?" Viserys spoke in surprise. "In any case, Daemon commands the Gold Cloaks, so the decision is his to make."
"He offered this to me a week ago, Sovereign."
"Well, if it is his idea, then I have nothing against it. It is good service, no worse than others."
"I thank you, Your Grace."
Lord Otto frowned, and Aegon pondered what was the cause of his displeasure: that the barely acknowledged kin of the King received a not too important, but nonetheless an appointment, or that it was Daemon's idea. The Prince laughed heartily when Daemon told how the Hand had successively squeezed him out of posts in the Small Council until both were forced to be content with the post of Commander of the City Watch. From his brother's point of view, there was little funny in this, but he was at least pleased with the new place: under his command were three thousand guardsmen, whom he clothed, armed, and drilled to the state of a quite combat-ready small army.
When Aegon and his cousin had already turned to leave, Viserys said with a light fatherly chuckle:
"Ah yes, Jaegaer, when next you wish to speak of something, it is not necessary to address me through Aegon. You are our cousin, albeit you have another name—you may speak with me freely, as with a brother, at any time. And I wish, My Lords, that you too remember this, as you, Ser Harrold."
Whether the members of the Small Council were pleased with this or not, they obediently bowed before the royal will and returned to where they were interrupted.
Another sword, this time a bastard sword, Aegon granted to his sworn shield for many years of loyalty and stainless service. He, naturally, denied it for a long time:
"Have mercy, My Prince, not every lord has a Valyrian blade! Even the Lannisters do not, and they shit gold! Even the Velaryons, and they are from Valyria too!"
"Both lost their swords through their own folly and stupidity," Aegon shook his head, sweeping aside all objections. "And now neither golden shit nor caravels plying the expanses of all the seas of the world can return them to them."
"But surely it is above my station!" Dennis continued to resist.
"I shall take your head off with this sword right now and shove it down your throat, so it definitely becomes yours!"
After this joking threat, in which the knight, after the Mantarys events, evidently saw not so much of a joke as Aegon would have liked, the sword received the symbolic name Shield and found a new owner.
They never really spoke of Mantarys: Dennis could simply not gather himself to raise this question, and Aegon did not rush him, since he wanted to sort everything out himself. And primarily this concerned those finds that his cousin and his knight had raised to the light of day from beneath the ruins of the Valyrian temple.
Naturally, Aegon had already demonstrated something important and not too mysterious to the court: jewelry (which became his own and that which he gifted to the Queen and his niece), Valyrian armor and several swords, and some scrolls. Judging by what he himself vaguely recalled of what he had seen personally, and what Dennis told, the temple dungeon was something of a treasury. When the Doom came and destroyed the entire familiar world, the vaults cracked and collapsed, burying the entrance beneath them, and a guard in full kit remained underground for two centuries until Aegon came with Vermithor, and the dragon moved the pile of rubble with a paw.
The rest of the contents of the excavated dungeon the Prince tried to hide as best he could—not out of vulgar greed, but out of fear of harming himself and those around him. That was why he left The Striped Elephant in Dragon's Haven and returned to the island as soon as propriety allowed, to investigate the acquired wealth, which had no price, in the strict silence of the ancestral castle.
The most understandable find for the Prince turned out to be half a dozen Glass Candles: three black, two dark green, and one smoky red. His Maester half immediately supposed that their color had some special meaning; retiring with them in his chambers, Aegon lit each of them in turn, in pairs and threes in different combinations, all together, including even the one he received from the Sealord of Braavos, but he felt and realized no difference. Then he armed himself with Ockhart's Razor, the sharpest of philosophical razors-maxims, and cut away all his complicated conjectures as superfluous.
His cut fingers burned—deep cuts healed before his eyes, like that "dancing" glyph on his chest, leaving only pinkish strips of tender, almost childish skin. Aegon purposefully ran the sharp glass wick over his arm a couple of times to see how the wounds healed; there was little pleasant in it, but it was encouraging. The Prince wanted to test the new ability with Valyrian steel, but Dennis, observing him with naked fear until now, intercepted his hand reaching for the cane to draw the blade from the weirwood scabbard.
"Have you lost your mind?!"
"But you saw it! What if..."
"What if you bleed out? What am I to tell your brothers then, have you thought?" the knight barked at his liege. "Merciful Gods, you are like your uncle—you know not with what you play!"
"I know," Aegon answered calmly, tearing himself from the grip. "The merciful Gods are precisely what do not let me bleed out."
"And so you took it into your head to cut yourself for amusement?!"
"It is not amusement..."
"Of course not, you simply poked yourself with dragon glass with the face of a madman!" Dennis snorted. "Did it not occur to you that all this is given to you not simply so?"
The Prince sniffled resentfully; his sworn shield, as always, turned out right, even without understanding too much of what he spoke. Aegon muttered something unintelligible, but on that day the experiments ended there.
However, in the morning he extracted several round plates of dragon glass from the brought things. Something clicked in his head, turned, and the mosaic came together. That which until now had been separate fragments, unclear sensations, vague memories of something very important, barely appearing on the edge of consciousness and immediately slipping away, formed a single whole.
"Take everything and follow me," he commanded Dennis sharply and, somehow shoving the obsidian dish into his bosom, rushed to the Windwyrm with all possible haste.
The Windwyrm, a tower resembling a screaming dragon, was the highest in the castle, and most of its windows faced the Dragonmont. As everywhere else, skillful carvings depicting the most varied subjects with dragons covered its walls. Stopping near one of the bas-reliefs on the stairs—a winged lizard craning its head to the ceiling and spreading its wings—the Prince sequentially pressed several scales on its belly; one by one, they sank into the wall and immediately popped back out. Where this sequence came from in his head, Aegon could not say, as he could not say why he came to this very wall, past which he had walked so many times in childhood.
But then the fourteenth scale fell back into its place, something creaked and turned behind the wall, and the whole bas-relief shifted slightly to the side, revealing a dark slit. The Prince pushed the secret door with his shoulder, and it yielded easily. Behind it turned out to be a small semi-dark corridor leading him and Dennis into a small room, four yards by two, with a single narrow window opposite the entrance, giving very little light. Approaching it, Aegon saw only the back of another gargoyle—that was why the opening was not noticed from outside.
"Need to put in glass," he ordered.
"I shall do it myself," Dennis guessed to say. "Or I shall call my brother. He will not blab, I swear."
"And does he know how to work with glass?"
"He is a glassblower."
"And I thought all in your family were smiths," Aegon was surprised.
"And I thought all in the royal family were kings," the knight retorted sarcastically.
Snorting, Aegon turned and looked around the absolutely empty room again; in the wall furthest from the entrance, a dusty alcove with a stone shelf bridging it was discovered. The Prince approached closer and, not thinking long, swept the dirt and cobwebs away with the sleeve of his doublet; it came out not very clean, but he did not want to call a maid to tidy up.
Beneath the dust, barely noticeable depressions in the stone were discovered, and Aegon, not thinking long, set the obsidian dish in the recess, leaning it against the wall. Taking the chest from Dennis, the Prince fished out another, smaller dish from it and laid it flat before the first, and already on it arranged the Valyrian Candle.
"Close the door," he ordered, rubbing the glass wick.
Drops of blood ran along the curves of the patterns, gathering on the disk. The secret lock clicked quietly, the quiet steps of the returning Dennis rang out. A light breeze flew into the room, but it did not waver the kindled unnatural flame.
"Gaomin tolvȳn hae jeme vestriat (I do all as you said)," pronounced the Prince, sinking to his knees before the altar.
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