Chapter 115: Battle for King's Landing — First Light
ULF
Dawn broke over Blackwater Bay like a wound opening, the sun coming up behind Ulf as he crossed in from the east. Vermithor worked beneath him, the bronze dragon's roar rolling flat across the water and up into the harbor district until the moored hulls knocked against their pilings with it. Silverwing flanked to port, low and pale, her fire already licking at the first ballista tower.
Salt first. Then tar. Then pitch catching, a smell that didn't wash out of a man's hair for days. The wind off the bay came cold enough to numb his hands through the reins, and it brought the rest of the morning up to him in pieces: bells hammering out of sequence, boots slapping wet stone, a tower captain howling at his crew.
"Cut it free! Cut it free, damn you, before it takes the engine with it!"
"Dragon!" That cry went along the waterfront faster than the flames did. "Dragons. Two dragons."
"The bronze one's Vermithor. That's the Old King's beast. Who in seven hells is riding the Old King's beast?"
Nobody answered him, and that was the part Ulf couldn't take back. He'd known it before he mounted. Half the garrison stood on the seawall in the grey light watching one man turn a bronze dragon left and a silver one right, in daylight, with no hood and no story to hide behind. Every man who lived through the morning would carry it home to his wife and his alehouse. No more rumors about the strange dragonseed. They'd have seen it themselves.
He banked Vermithor hard left and felt the muscle bunch and let go under the saddle. The first bolt went past him wild, loosed by a crew that had never sighted on anything but gulls. Vermithor's answer turned the tower to slag. The iron arms of the scorpion sagged, folded, and dropped into the sea still smoking. Silverwing screamed past on the right, her fire washing the second tower's battlements end to end, and the harbor's defensive line cracked open like an egg.
Below, Cole's men were already moving. Dark shapes streaming out of the low ground toward the walls, the green banners of the loyalist coalition snapping stiff in the dawn wind, ladders going up before the sky was anywhere near clear. Cole hadn't waited. He wasn't going to have it said afterward that his ground had been won for him by two dragons, and Ulf had known he wouldn't from the hour the plan was set. The garrison was split now between the fire above and the steel at the gates, exactly as it was meant to be.
Which left the clock. Down in the dark beneath the cellars, Stokeworth's tunnel team was moving on a schedule that only held while the sky kept every eye pointed up. A long fight above the bay meant men on the walls looking down instead, and men looking down would find the drainage grate. Ulf had minutes. He didn't have a morning.
And then Ashclaw rose from the Dragonpit.
The dragon was young, no more than a decade out of the egg, its grey hide still carrying the oil-sheen of a beast that hadn't been scarred out of its shine yet. Its rider was younger. A boy, seventeen or eighteen, both fists locked on the saddle horn, riding with his shoulders hauled up around his ears. A dragonseed. One of the bastards Rhaenyra had raised up during the war and handed a dragon, a surname, and a place to die in.
Ulf brought Vermithor level with him across forty yards of cold air and shouted into the wind.
"Turn back. You're outmatched. Land your dragon and I'll spare you both. This war is almost over. You don't have to die for it."
The boy shook his head. His face was bloodless. His hands didn't move. "I have my orders. The Queen commanded it."
"The Queen is losing. Look at the harbor. Look at the city. This fight is done. Don't throw your life away for a cause that's already fallen."
"They'll call me a coward if I land. They'll say I didn't fight."
"They'll be wrong. And they'll be alive to be wrong."
Under him Vermithor rumbled and pulled against the reins, wanting the young dragon and wanting it now. Silverwing had already swung wide on the outside without being asked. Both of them had gone from burning towers to something that could bite back, and both wanted it finished. Ulf held them where they were and paid the boy the seconds it cost.
"Your dragon is ten years old. Vermithor was old when your grandfather was born. This isn't a fight. It's a drowning."
"My mother saw me take him." The boy's voice cracked halfway through it. "She was at the Pit. She watched me get up on his back and she cried."
"Then she'd rather have you than the glory. Land."
"Which one are you?" he called suddenly. "They said there was one who rode two. My cousin swore it was a story."
That one, Ulf let go by. "Last offer. Land. Surrender. Live."
For a moment the boy hesitated. His grip on the reins loosened. His eyes went to the burning harbor, to the two broken towers, to the green banners already coming up over the outer wall. Seventeen years old, in front of a man with two dragons, and everything in him that wanted to keep breathing was shouting at him to put the beast down on the sand.
But he'd been raised on the stories. That bastards could earn their way to glory. That a dragonseed could be made into a legend. That dying for his queen was the best use a rider could be put to. It was the same feed that had gone into a whole generation of Targaryen bastards, and he couldn't set it down now.
"I have my orders," he said again, and he sounded less like a warrior than like a child reciting a lesson he only half believed.
Then Ashclaw lunged, and the moment for surrender was gone.
He came out of the saddle off Vermithor's shoulder with Soru driving him, one kick against empty air to correct his line, and he hit Silverwing's back and had her reins in his fist before the bronze finished his turn. Vermithor peeled away toward the third tower without being told. The towers were his. The boy belonged to Silverwing, lighter and quicker, able to turn inside anything that young.
Ashclaw's fire came and missed by yards, boiling the air until Ulf's eyes stung and his throat closed on the heat. Silverwing answered. Hers didn't miss.
The wing tore. The membrane split with the sound of old sailcloth going under load, and the young dragon shrieked, high and raw, an animal that had never been hurt before and had no idea what was happening to it. Denys Waters, though Ulf wouldn't learn the name until later that day, held to the saddle while his mount spiralled, fighting for the wing and for the height, losing both.
They hit the bay together. Water went up fifty feet, steam and spray, and then the long grey shape of the dragon settled down through the green beneath it. Waters didn't come up.
Ulf circled the place. Silverwing's wings beat steady in the cold, and the harbor came up at him in wet ash and boiled salt. The line was broken. Cole's banners stood on the outer wall. The city was falling exactly as it had been built to fall.
The boy's face stayed. The bloodless terror, the fists on the saddle horn, *they'll call me a coward*, which was the last honest thing anyone had said out loud this morning. Seventeen, and a dragonseed the same as Ulf had been a dragonseed, given a beast by a queen who'd have discarded him the week after she was crowned. And Ulf had killed him. Not because there was no other road. Because the boy wouldn't land and the tunnel team needed the sky quiet.
"I could have taken him alive," Ulf said. Silverwing rumbled under him, unsettled by whatever she heard in it, and he let his weight settle against her neck to steady her. "I could have crippled Ashclaw and left them the water. I was fast enough. I was skilled enough. I just didn't try hard enough."
The sky was won. It stayed won. It didn't feel like winning.
Smoke was climbing off the walls now, black and fast, from the stretch of stone where the eastern gate had been. Cole was through. Ulf turned Silverwing's head toward it with his jaw locked and Vermithor coming round behind him over the cleared harbor, and there was no time yet to carry the boy properly. He would carry him later.