Chapter 157: The Question Aegon Asks
DALLA
"Where's my mama?"
Dalla had both arms in the wash barrel to the elbow when he asked it, and the cold water went colder. Two years old, and he'd learned to ask the one question she couldn't answer.
The cottage hadn't changed since the night they carried him to her door. Salt-eaten shutters that wouldn't latch when the wind came off the north. Fishing nets hung to dry along the rafters, still stinking sweetly of the last catch. Past the doorway the gray sea ran out to a horizon that had watched everything and never once told any of it. Only the boy had changed. He talked now, full sentences, careful and deliberate, setting each word down like a man laying stones in a wall. His silver-blond hair curled at his temples with the same soft turn his mother's took when damp got into it.
And he'd started noticing.
He noticed that the woman who came every few weeks held him tighter than Dalla did, and longer, with her chin pressed down on his head so he couldn't see her face. He noticed that the big man who rode with her kept a folded white cloak at the bottom of his saddlebag and never once put it on. He noticed that they both looked at him the same and that whatever it was, it wasn't gladness.
"That woman who comes," Aegon said. His small face was serious. "She cries when she holds me. Why does she cry?"
Dalla dried her hands on her apron and knelt to meet his eyes, her weathered hands gentle on his shoulders. "She cries because she loves you, little one. And sometimes love makes people cry."
"Is she my mama?"
The question hung in the cottage's salt-smelling air. Dalla's mouth opened, closed. She'd been given her instructions the same night she'd been given the child: don't lie to him, don't confirm anything, keep the boy safe and whole until the family was ready to claim him. Nobody had told her what to do when a two-year-old stood in the doorway light and demanded the truth.
"She is someone who loves you very much," Dalla said carefully. "More than anyone in the world. And one day, soon, she's going to tell you everything."
"When?"
"Soon."
It wasn't enough. She could see it in his eyes, that particular flat frustration of being managed without the words yet to say so. He turned around and went out to the stones to watch the gulls fight over the guts pail, and he didn't take the crab claw she'd saved him. Dalla went back to the wash barrel. Her hands weren't steady, and she was old enough to be ashamed of that.
Four days later his mother came.
She came the way she always came, on a plain brown palfrey with a hood up and a cloak that cost more than the cottage, and the big man rode down to the shingle with both horses to keep them off the road. Inside, the woman sat on the floor with her back to the wall and let Aegon build a tower of driftwood scraps on her knee, and she laughed once, low, when it fell.
The knock came at midday.
It was a peddler with a mule, tin buckles on his boots and sour wine on his breath, working his way down the coast with needles and lamp oil and a bag of gossip to trade. Dalla stepped out and pulled the door most of the way shut behind her.
"Saw a boy at your window," he said, friendly as a dog. "White hair on him. Pale as a candle. Don't see that on this coast."
The cold came up through her feet and stopped somewhere under her ribs. Behind the door there was no sound at all, and the silence was its own noise, and she thought: he is holding his breath, and she is holding his mouth.
"My daughter's boy," Dalla said. "Her man was Lysene, off a trader out of Duskendale. Half the babes from here to the Wendwater come out that color and go brown by five." She wiped her hands down her front, unhurried. "You want oil-lamps or nets? I've got neither."
He looked past her at the shutters. "Fine cloak on the peg in there."
"Widow of a merchant, come to buy my husband's nets off me before winter. She pays too much and asks too little, so I'd thank you not to teach her better."
The peddler laughed at that, and from inside the cottage a voice said, quiet and clear, "Aegon, sit."
Dalla didn't move. She did not turn her head.
"Aegon, is it," the peddler said, and his eyebrows went up, and she watched a story assemble itself behind his face.
"Every third boy born in the war years is an Aegon or a Jaehaerys," Dalla said. "Mothers think a king's name buys a long life. Mine thought it too. Look how that went for the kings." She reached back through the door without looking, took the salt fish off the shelf, and pressed two of them into his hands before he could argue. "Take these. Tell them down at the Roost that the reeve's daughter has run off with a caulker, because she has, and that's worth more than a boy with pale hair."
He weighed the fish, and the gossip, and went away happy with both.
Dalla stood in the road until the mule was a brown smudge, then went inside and shut the door and put her back against it. Her legs were shaking. She'd heard herself be calm out there. It had all come out of her mouth smooth as butter, and not one word of it had been decided in advance.
Helaena had moved to the wall beside the window, out of the light, with Aegon against her shoulder and her hand still pressed over his mouth. She took the hand away. She looked at it.
"I said his name," she said.
"You did."
"I have said it perhaps forty times in two years, and I said it to the one man in the realm who was listening." Her voice didn't rise. That was somehow worse. "You were quick. Thank you."
"I was lucky."
"Yes," Helaena said, which wasn't the reassurance Dalla wanted, and was the truer thing.
They stayed until dusk. When Aegon was asleep on his pallet with his fist in his hair, Dalla told them both everything: the question about the crying woman, the question after it, the four days of silence since, the peddler and the fish and the name spoken through a door.
"He's asking," Dalla said. "Soon he'll be old enough to understand the answers. And if he learns the truth from a stranger instead of from you..."
"He won't." Helaena's voice was firm. "We're bringing him home. I don't care about the lords. I don't care about the patron. My son is going to know who his parents are."
They rode out before moonrise, because two horses on the coast road at dawn get remembered and two horses at night don't.
Afterward Dalla sat a long while with the fire down to coals and the tide working at the stones below. She'd told them everything, and she'd told it softly. She hadn't said that she froze for two breaths on the doorstep. She hadn't said that if the peddler had pushed her once more she'd have promised him anything, silver, a bed, a lie he could check. She hadn't said that the deflections she'd used on the boy for two years had stopped working sometime last week and she'd only just noticed.
She got the ink and the scraped parchment out of the chest and wrote it plain. The question. The name through the door. Her own hands shaking after. No softening, because softening was what she'd been doing all along, and it had brought them here.
She sealed it with candle grease and no sigil, woke the reeve's boy, and put it in his hand with a copper and the name of the man at the Gate who'd carry it on. Then she stood in her doorway and listened to the pony go up the dark road, and she didn't go back inside until she couldn't hear it anymore.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
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P.S. — in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com. just saying. that timeline also has more chapters.