"Fear is a promise, and I keep my promises."
Susan Bones,
to herself, more times than she could count.
—•—•—•—
"Sue."
A whisper, close to her ear, half laughter and half alarm.
"Susan, wake up, you complete toad, he's going to see you—"
What?
"Susan!"
She woke up with a start.
Gasping, the air turned out to be ordinary October air, and found Hannah Abbott's round, worried face inches from her own, blonde plait swinging as she glanced back toward the front of the paddock to make sure Hagrid hadn't noticed.
Oh.
Instantly, she knew this as one of her dreams that are also memories, both at once, folded together like a letter read twice.
She was sixteen again, and the 'classroom' smelled of hay and dung and something underneath it that was almost sweet, like rot dressed up in perfume.
Care of Magical Creatures had never been Susan's favourite class, exactly, but it had been the class she loved best in the particular, guilty way one loves anything that asks nothing of you. Charms asked for precision. Ancient Runes asked for her evenings, and Potions asked for her weekends, the small hours after the common room had emptied and Hannah had gone up to bed complaining that Susan would ruin her eyes. Herbology asked for patience she did have and stamina she often didn't. But Magical Creatures, out here in the cold beyond the paddocks with Hagrid's booming voice rolling over the frosted grass, asked only that she show up and not get bitten.
She had chosen it for that reason, precisely. An elective for the tired. A class where the worst that could happen to her marks was a smudged essay on flobberworm mucus, not a missed Ministry grade that would follow her for years. She needed one hour in her week where the weight came off her shoulders.
Today, evidently, it had come off entirely, because she fell asleep.
She could feel the truth of it even as she lived inside it: she had been up half the night finishing her Ancient Runes essay, translating a passage on binding glyphs that refused to make sense no matter how many times she turned the textbook sideways, and by the time Hagrid's voice had settled into its low, fond rhythm… well her chin had dropped to her chest and her quill had rolled off her knee into the frost wet grass.
"I wasn't asleep," Susan said, with the particular, useless dignity of someone who absolutely had been.
She heard a scoff.
"You were snoring." Hannah did not bother to look sympathetic. "Like a kettle."
"I do not snore like a kettle."
"You do. It's endearing, actually, which is the worst part." Hannah passed her the quill, now damp and faintly green at the nib from the grass. "You missed loads."
"Tell me the important bits and not the bits you find funny."
Hannah considered this a genuine and difficult request. "He's doing breeds. Origins. How they hatch, mostly — he's going on about temperature and clutch behaviour and how a mother dragon in the wild will turn her eggs herself, night and day, because if she stops the shell goes cold and stays cold." She hesitated, glancing toward Hagrid's broad back where he stood in front of the paddock fence, hands moving as he described something to the class that made three Slytherins take a visible step backward. "No demonstration today. Obviously."
"Obviously," Susan agreed, and did not need to ask why. By now, everyone knew Hagrid had a pet dragon once. Which he named Norbert of all things. He mentioned it by a slip of tongue and told the class to forget it. Of course, no one did but none mentioned it aloud. Not when the Golden Trio from Gryffindor defended their professor so much. Hagrid was not allowed a live specimen. Specifically illegal ones without supervision of an expert. Hagrid was, technically, also not supposed to be discussing the illegal breeding of dragons at all, and did so anyway in the fond, digressive way of a man who had never once in his life let a rule get between himself and something he loved.
Susan sat up properly, rubbing grass out of her elbow, and made herself listen, because it seemed suddenly, senselessly important that she listen, though she could not have said why. It was only a lesson. It was only dragons, which she would never see outside a book or a reserve in Romania, which had nothing to do with her life, with the Ministry post she was building herself toward one exhausting essay at a time, with the small, orderly future she had sketched out for herself in a leather diary with a Hufflepuff badger stamped on the cover.
She copied down what Hannah murmured to her. Egg membrane permeability. Hatching: humans caring for a dragon egg needed to maintain the right temperature in place of its mother's breath. Fresh air influenced the length of its head and tail, while the mood that the area provides influenced the size of its body. Playing music was particularly helpful. How there's a specific job at the Ministry for Dragon lovers. The Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau was a part of the Beast Division of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.
She would think of this later — of how carefully she had written down the heat temperature and the different body part uses and hatching and breeds and never turned her hand to a single practical use, because why would she, because dragons were Romania's problem and dragonologist's problem and certainly never, ever going to be hers.
>~>~>~>~>~>
The dream tore without asking permission.
One moment she was in October sunlight watching Hagrid's hands shape the air into the outline of a wing. The next she was in a corridor thick with smoke and the smell of ozone, stone dust raining from a ceiling that had taken a curse meant for something else, and the noise. The noise was the worst of it, worse even now in memory than it had been in the living. Screaming that had stopped being separate voices and become one long animal sound. Spellfire crackling green and red and a sick, bruised purple against the dark. Someone was shouting her name. She never found out who.
She saw Colin Creevey first, because Colin was always first in this dream, no matter how many times she lives through them. He was smaller than the wall he'd flattened himself against, camera forgotten, wand hand shaking. He was fifteen. He should not have been there at all, and everyone had told him so, and he had come anyway because Colin Creevey collected brave moments and Harry Potter photos. And this was the bravest thing he would ever be given the chance to do while also providing proof of how he was present when the Chosen One fought against a Dark Lord.
Soon enough, a Death Eater rounded the corner with his wand already rising, already forming the shape of the curse, and time slowed for her and sped for everyone else. She saw the wand. She saw the beginning of the word. She saw Colin's face, and it was not brave at all in that moment, it was simply young, simply frightened, simply a boy who had wanted one good photograph before the end of the world.
She did not decide to move. There was no moment of choice, no interior monologue about duty or love or the badger on her tie. Her body simply went, the way a hand goes to a falling cup before the mind has finished registering that the cup is falling.
Green light.
An Avada Kedevra.
She had always heard it described as light without warmth, and that was true, but no one had told her it was also light without weight, that it would feel like nothing at all, like a held breath finally released, and that the absence of pain would somehow be more frightening than pain itself, because pain at least would have meant she still had a body to feel it with.
The whole corridor and surroundings dissolved into fire.
Not spellfire. Nor human made. A different fire, older, wider, the kind that did not need a wand to exist. She was standing — floating — inside it, and it did not burn her, which she understood, in the strange logic of dreams, to mean something, though she could not have said what. Wings passed overhead, vast enough to eclipse whatever light there was. A voice that was not quite a voice, more a pressure behind her eyes, behind her sternum, spoke without speaking.
The night is long, it said.
And it does not end where you think it ends.
>~>~>~>~>~>
She woke.
Waking was worse than the dream, because the dream at least had the mercy of being over quickly, and this did not.
Her head throbbed with a deep, thudding ache that seemed to originate somewhere behind her left ear and radiate outward with each pulse of her own heart, and for one long, disoriented moment she could not understand why her wrists would not move, why her mouth tasted of dry cloth, why the air smelled of salt and stone and tallow smoke instead of the clean linen of her chamber.
Then it came back. All of it.
The meadow. The crossbow's whoosh, twice, three times, the sound she would hear in her skull for the rest of her life whether that life was long or short.
Edwyn going down with his hands at his throat. Dessa — Dessa, who went down slow and then not slow at all. Blood going out and back in. Valarr's arms around her. The blow to the back of her skull, the world tilting sideways into darkness.
She was in a cave. Or some sort of tunnel.
It took her eyes a long moment to adjust, and when they did, the shapes that emerged were not comforting ones. Rough stone walls, damp and glistening faintly where torchlight caught the wet rock, arched overhead into a low ceiling she suspected a grown man could not stand fully upright beneath. The air had the particular thick, briny weight of a place where the sea came and went on its own schedule, indifferent to whoever might be trapped inside when the tide turned.
Her wrists were bound in front of her with coarse rope that had already rubbed her skin raw, and a strip of cloth was tied over her mouth, tight enough to pinch at the corners of her lips. Her ankles, she found when she tried to shift them, were bound as well.
Beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him even through the cold stone floor — lay Valarr.
Her heart lurched so hard it hurt more than her skull did.
He was unconscious, or asleep, or something in between; his chest rose and fell in shallow, uneven movements that she watched with the fixed, desperate attention of someone counting something they were terrified would stop. His lip was split and swollen on the left side, a dark bruise already blooming purple black along the curve of his jaw, and someone had wrapped a strip of grubby linen around his right calf, tied off in a crude, hurried knot. The linen was dark with old blood in a way that made her stomach twist. It was not fresh — the bleeding had been stopped, at least, however badly — but it was not clean either, and Valaena, who had spent the better part of a year learning exactly what an infected wound looked like in this world with no antiseptic worth the name, did not like the look of it at all.
He is alive, she told herself, fiercely. He is alive, he is breathing, that is the only fact that matters right now.
Beyond them, past the edge of torchlight, two men crouched near a low fire built in a blackened ring of stones, speaking in voices pitched low enough that she caught only fragments — a name that might have been a place, the word coin repeated twice, a laugh that had no humour in it at all.
She did not move. She did not so much as let her breathing change, though every instinct in her small, aching body screamed at her to thrash, to scream against the gag, to do something. She had learned this, at least, in five — nearly seven — years of being smaller and weaker than everyone around her: information was worth more than motion. A frightened child flailing against her bonds taught her captors nothing they didn't already know. A silent, watchful one might learn something worth knowing.
So she watched, through lashes kept low, breath kept even, and she listened.
>~>~>~>~>~>
Morning came slowly to a cave with no true windows, marked only by a faint change in the quality of light bleeding in from somewhere beyond the tunnel mouth, and a shift in the men's voices from the low murmur of night watch to the rougher, more careless volume of men who believed themselves unheard.
"—told you we shoulda left the boy," the larger of the two was saying. He had a broad back and broader hands, and a voice that came from somewhere deep and gravelly in his chest, the voice of a man who had spent decades shouting over wind and surf. His accent rolled thick through every word, dropping the ends off half of them, the accent of the dockside that ringed every port from here to the Arbor. "Weren't part o' the bargain. Bittersteel wants the girl. Just the girl. Boy's dead weight, an' dead weight's a liability, an' liabilities get us caught."
The other man did not answer immediately. Valaena had already, in the space of one night's careful listening, begun to sort the two of them by the shape of their silences as much as their words. This one — leaner, quieter, seated with his back very straight against the cave wall in a way that suggested old discipline rather than mere posture — let silences stretch before he filled them, as though every word cost him something he preferred to spend carefully.
"The boy," he said finally, and his voice carried a faint foreign lilt beneath the Common Tongue, vowels rounded in a way that made her think, distantly, of the merchants who occasionally passed through Summerhall's markets with silks from across the narrow water. Tyroshi, she thought. Or near enough. "Is worth coin of his own, Gull. Targaryen blood is Targaryen blood. Second in line to a throne fetches more than a girl with a warm rock in her lap."
Gull — she filed the name away, turned it over, decided it suited him, broad and grey and loud — spat into the low fire. "Rian's dead 'cause of him. I say we kill him and bring only his head."
"Rian is dead," the quiet one said, "because Rian was slow, and because a knight came running. That is not the boy's doing."
"He tried to run. Twice. A small cut for warnin' but still troublesome."
"And you tied it," the quiet one said, "which was more mercy than you showed the men at the meadow."
Gull's mouth twisted, and for a moment Valaena thought he might argue, but something in the quiet man's flat, level stare made him subside instead, muttering something under his breath that might have been agreement and might have been curse.
She lay very still, cataloguing what she had learned methodically, without letting her hands shake. Rian — the third man, then, the one with the crossbow, the one who had killed Edwyn and Dessa and been left behind to deal with whoever came running. He was dead. A knight had come. She did not know his name yet, but something in her chest, hoped fiercely that he was well, that he had survived whatever had happened after the world had gone dark for her.
Two men left, then. Gull, broad and loud and impatient, who had wanted Valarr dead from spite and now argued for his death from something closer to fear — fear of the coin they'd have to split further, perhaps, or fear of a hostage who might yet cause them trouble. And the quiet one, whose name she had not yet caught, who thought in numbers and dragon blood and profit margins.
Bittersteel. She knew that name — from the whispers she'd caught in corridors and council chambers over the past years, from the word Blackfyre spoken like a curse, from her father's jaw tightening whenever ships from the Stepstones were mentioned in his hearing.
Someone across the narrow sea wanted her. Wanted her enough to pay men to bind her wrists and carry her through tunnels in the dark. And they wanted her alive.
She kept her breathing slow. In. Out. The gag chafed at the corners of her mouth, and her wrists ached with a dull, constant fire, and beside her Valarr's chest rose and fell in its shallow, uneven rhythm, and thought, she can't.
She cannot use apparition to get them both out of here.
She had turned the thought over a hundred times already in the dark hours before dawn. She apparated before, though not often.
Destination. Determination. Deliberation.
But she had never attempted it in this new life — not once, not even alone, not even in the relative safety of her own chamber. Her magic, wandless and untrained in this small body, was unreliable for advanced spells. To attempt something as complex and precise as Apparition now, frightened and injured and with another person's body bound to the outcome of her concentration — it was not a matter of bravery or belief to try that. It was a coin flip with Valarr's life on the losing face.
She could risk herself. She had already decided that, somewhere in the black hours of the night, with the same flat, unsentimental certainty she'd once decided to run toward a curse meant for someone else. Her own splinching, her own failure, her own risk — that was hers to spend.
She would not spend Valarr's.
The guilt of it sat in her chest like a swallowed stone, sharp edged and constant. She had been so certain, always, of her own vigilance. She, who remembered a war, who had died once already to carelessness and surprise, who should have known better than anyone in this world how quickly a quiet afternoon could turn to blood in the grass. She had let herself be distracted by discovery and the small, foolish satisfaction of a problem solved, and Dessa and Edwyn had died, and Valarr lay beside her now with a wound in his leg because she had not been careful enough, had not been fast enough, had not been enough.
Her father would be sick with it. She knew this in the particular, aching way one knows a parent's fear without needing to witness it. Her father, who did not know how to be soft, who had handed her a dragon egg with his back turned so he would not have to watch her reaction, was somewhere in the daylight world, tearing Storm's End apart stone by stone.
Uncle Baelor, who had held his son's face in his hands a hundred times with that particular fierce gentleness — she thought of what his face must look like now, this morning, this exact moment, and had to close her eyes against the thought before it undid the careful stillness she was holding herself in.
Right now there was only the cave, and the rope, and the two men by the fire, and a boy beside her whose life she intended, with a determination that felt almost violent in its clarity, to preserve.
>~>~>~>~>~>
Midday, or what she judged to be midday by the thin grey light at the tunnel's mouth, found her turning escape plans over with the same patient, joyless attention she'd once given to Arithmancy proofs.
She needed land. That much was obvious. Whatever this place was, it smelled and sounded and felt like somewhere the tide could reach and claim, and she would not risk Apparition, would not risk anything at all, in a space that might be swallowed by seawater within the hour. She needed to know where they intended to take her, needed a destination worth aiming for even in the far off event that magic became a viable option again. She needed her pouch back — she had seen it, twice now, half buried beneath a folded oilskin in one of the men's packs, and relief at the sight of it had been so sharp it had nearly cracked her careful stillness. They had not opened it. She did not think they had even properly noticed it, beyond taking it as one more piece of a captured child's belongings not worth the bother of searching.
Small mercies. She would take them where she found them.
She was still turning the shape of a plan when the quiet man rose, crossed the cave with unhurried steps, and crouched beside them both.
"Awake, are you," he said, not quite a question, and reached to tug the gag from her mouth with fingers that were, she noted with grim interest, careful rather than rough. Practical care. The care of a man protecting a merchandise, not a person.
She gasped as the cloth came free, working her jaw, tasting blood where the fabric had cut into the corner of her lip.
Gull ambled over as the quiet man moved to free Valarr's gag as well, and crouched on his haunches with the loose, easy posture of a man entirely unbothered by what he'd done.
"Mornin', little princess," he said, and there was something almost jovial in it, something that made her skin crawl worse than open cruelty would have. "Didn't mean for it to come to this, truth be told. Nothin' personal in it. Man's got to eat, and eatin' don't come cheap in Essos these days."
"You kidnapped us," Valaena said, and was pleased, distantly, that her voice came out steady.
"Aye." Gull did not so much as blink. "Necessary evil, that. You're a particular choice o' target, but Bittersteel's got sense enough to know what he's doin' and the coin to get it. Business is business."
Beside her, Valarr stirred, groaning low as consciousness dragged him upward, and Valaena's whole attention snapped to him even as Gull kept talking.
"V-Valarr." She twisted as far as her bound ankles allowed, until her shoulder pressed against his. "Valarr, can you hear me?"
His eyes opened slowly, unfocused, then found her face, and something in them cleared with a speed that made her chest ache.
"Val?" His voice cracked on her nickname. "You're — are you hurt, did they—"
"I'm well." It was mostly true. "You're the one who's hurt. Your leg—"
"It hurts," he admitted with red eyes, and Valaena's gaze dropped to the crude bandage at his calf, to the dark stain that had not gotten any smaller since she'd last looked, and something cold and furious settled in her stomach.
"He woke up on the way here," Gull offered, unbothered, jerking his chin toward Valarr. "Kept tryin' to squirm off. Third time he nearly had the ropes loose I had to remind him what happens to boys who don't sit still." He said it with unapologetic cheer, as though a split lip and a leg wound to a child were simply the cost of doing business, a toll paid and forgotten.
"He needs a maester," Valaena said. "Now. That wound could turn — if it isn't cleaned properly, if it festers—"
"Oi. Shut it, little princess. We bandaged it." Gull's voice hardened at the edges. "More'n we had to. You'll eat, you'll drink, you'll sit still, and you'll be thankful we didn't leave him bleedin' in the grass, which is more mercy than most in our trade would spare a hostage that weren't part of the bargain."
"He is at risk of infection," Valaena pressed, keeping her voice as steady and reasonable as she could manage, the voice she'd learned to use, the voice that made adults forget, briefly, that they were speaking to a child. "You want coin for him. A dead hostage is worth nothing. A hostage who dies screaming from a rotted leg two days into your voyage is worth less than nothing — it's worth a knife in your own back, because this man called Bittersteel does not strike me as a man who pays for spoiled goods."
Gull's jaw worked. "Only need you alive," he said, but there was the first thin crack of uncertainty in it. "Boy's extra."
She turned, deliberately, from Gull to the quiet man, who had settled back on his heels near the fire and was watching this exchange with the flat, assessing patience of a man weighing figures on a ledger. A man who probably made decisions with his head and resented anyone who tried to reach him through his heart, but who could occasionally, carefully, be reached through his purse.
"He is the eldest son of the Prince of Dragonstone," she said to him, directly, ignoring Gull entirely now. "Second in line to the Iron Throne. His life is worth more gold than mine, worth more than you or I can easily count, and if you bring him to Bittersteel alive and whole, you will be paid for two royal hostages instead of one. If you bring him dead, you bring nothing but a corpse and my father's fury following you across the narrow sea for the rest of your days, because Prince Baelor Breakspear does not forgive men who kill his first son and heir out of spite."
Silence, but for the low crackle of the fire and the distant, patient hush of water somewhere deeper in the tunnels.
"She's not wrong," the quiet man said at last, and something in Gull's face soured further, though he did not argue. "Alive is worth more than dead, whatever your temper wants." He rose, crossed to his pack, and returned with a waterskin, crouching to press it, without ceremony, into Gull's hands. "Water. And wake him properly — he'll need his strength if he's to stand when we move."
Gull grumbled something under his breath but he obeyed, tipping the waterskin carefully to Valarr's split lip, muttering all the while in a tone that mixed genuine irritation with something that might, in a different man, have passed for grudging respect.
"You're a strange one," he said to her, eyes narrowing as he studied her face in the dim light. "Too old for your years. Too clever by half for a girl not yet ten. Thought you'd be crying and asking for your mother. Someone ought to have told your father to watch you closer than the boy."
Valaena said nothing, only held his gaze until he looked away first, muttering, and busied himself instead with the fire.
"You'll wait," the quiet man said, to both of them now, rising to his full height and looking down at them both with something that was not quite kindness but was not quite cruelty either. "Wound's not going anywhere worse before we reach the ship. Proper stitching, proper cleaning — that comes when we're aboard, not before."
"That may be too late," Valaena said quietly.
"It'll have to do," he said, and something in his voice closed the subject as firmly as a door.
She did not argue further. She had won what she could win. She filed the rest away. The ship, the promise of it, the confirmation that they were still travelling, still moving toward some destination she had not yet seen — and turned instead to helping Valarr drink, to murmuring low reassurances that were not quite lies, and waited.
>~>~>~>~>~>
They untied their wrists to eat, though the ankles stayed bound, and the men watched them the whole while with the wary, half-bored attention of jailers who had done this before and expected no trouble from children too frightened and too small to cause any.
Valaena did not eat much. She made herself eat enough. Travelling bread, hard and stale, and a strip of dried meat that tasted mostly of salt. Because a body that did not eat was a body that could not think clearly, and thinking clearly was the only weapon she had left. But most of her attention stayed on Valarr, who ate less than she did and winced with every small shift of his injured leg, and who, when the men's attention had drifted back to their low, murmured conversation by the fire, finally let his careful, princely composure crack.
"I thought you were dead," he sniffed, so quietly she had to lean close to catch it. His mismatched eyes were bright and wet in the low torchlight.
"When you went down. I thought — I couldn't wake you, and I thought—"
"I'm here." She reached for his hand, found it cold despite the fire's nearness, and held it between both of hers. "I'm not going anywhere without you, Val. I promise you that."
"Father will find us." He said it the way one recites a prayer — with more hope than certainty, but with enough of both to hold the words steady. "He and uncle both. They won't stop looking."
"I know," she said, and made herself believe it as she said it, because Valarr needed her certainty more than he needed her honesty just now. "We only have to hold on until they do. And your leg will heal — it hurts now, I know, but it will heal, I promise you that too."
He nodded, jaw tight, blinking hard, and did not cry, though she thought it cost him something to hold it back, some careful, hard won discipline that a boy raised to be brave in front of everyone had learned too young.
She did not tell him what she was already planning. Not with two sets of ears close enough to catch a whisper.
But that night, when the fire had burned low and Gull's breathing had deepened into the heavy, openmouthed rhythm of true sleep and the quiet man had settled into the watchful half-doze of a man who trusted his own instincts more than his eyes, Valaena worked her fingers — slow, careful, silent — beneath the edge of Valarr's makeshift bandage.
"What are you doing," he breathed, eyes flying open.
"Hold still." She kept her own voice thinner than air. "Trust me."
He did. That was, she thought later, the single bravest thing about him — not the joust, not the swordplay he was so proud of, not even the crying he refused to let himself do in front of captors who might use it against him. It was a boy of seven, in the dark, afraid and in pain, trusting her.
She did not have Vulnera Sanentur fully in her control yet. Not in this small body, not with her magic still learning to move without the channel it had once trusted absolutely. But she had enough. She saw it work on Dessa before…. everything. It was enough to knit the worst of the torn flesh closed, enough to stop what fresh bleeding the day's jostling had caused, enough to slow whatever infection might already be creeping in at the wound's ragged edges.
It cost her. She felt it the way she'd felt every piece of magic in this new small body cost her: a hollow, draining ache behind her eyes, a tremor in her hands afterward that she had to breathe through, slow and careful, so as not to wake anyone with the sound of her own shaking.
She did not fully heal it. She could not. Full healing would have taken more than she had to spend, more than she dared risk with two captors close enough to notice the wound regenerating back to normal without any scars or marks left. But she closed enough of it, over that first long night and the two that followed, working in careful stolen minutes whenever the men's guard slipped, that by the fourth morning the wound had stopped weeping the thin, foul-smelling fluid she had dreaded most, and Valarr could bear his own weight on the leg for short stretches without his face going white with the pain of it.
It was not enough. But it was something, and something was more than nothing, and nothing had very nearly cost her a life she had sworn, silently, fiercely, to protect.
>~>~>~>~>~>
They stayed in the tunnels three full days and into a fourth, and Valaena understood, by the second day, exactly why.
"They's searchin' the cliffs," she heard Gull mutter to the quiet man, early on the second morning, when he thought both children still asleep. "Baratheon guard's crawlin' over every inch of the coast like ants on spilled honey. We sit tight till the fuss dies down some."
Five people's worth of food, she calculated silently, counting the dwindling stores each time the men unpacked their meals, stretched carefully across three days and part of a fourth. Planned, then. Deliberate. Whoever had organised this had known enough of Storm's End's geography to choose a hiding place the search parties would not reach: a hidden water tunnel beneath the castle itself, accessible only at high tide, guarded by nothing but jagged rock and old murder holes long since abandoned to damp and disuse. She thought of her father and Uncle Baelor riding on the cliffs above her, searching every visible inch of coastline, never once suspecting that the answer lay directly beneath their boots, sealed behind a portcullis and the sea's own indifferent timing, and had to close her eyes against the fresh sting of grief that thought brought with it.
She used the days as best she could. She listened, filing away every fragment of conversation that drifted her way — the name of a fishing village, mentioned once and never again, that she suspected was their next destination; a muttered complaint about a ship's captain who charged too dear for silence; the word Evenfall, spoken with the particular weight men give to a place they mean to merely pass through. She counted paces when they allowed her to shift position, measuring the cave's dimensions in the dark, building a map in her mind of a place she could not see.
And each night, in the thin margin between the men's watchfulness and true sleep, she pressed her hands to Valarr's leg and gave what magic she dared spare, and felt the wound knit, slow and stubborn, beneath her palms.
By the fourth day, packed and moved at last into a small boat that rocked with sickening unfamiliarity beneath her, she thought that he might just survive the wound after all.
Whether either of them would survive what came next was a separate question entirely.
>~>~>~>~>~>
The boat was small, low sided, and old, patched planking, a hull that smelled of pitch and fish and years of salt worked deep into the wood grain. Gull rowed first, and the quiet man after him, and they traded the oars back and forth through the day with the unhurried, practiced habit of men who had done this exact work before, on this exact stretch of water, more times than either cared to count.
Valaena sat huddled against the boat's curved side with Valarr pressed close beside her for warmth, both of them wrapped in rough, salt-stiffened blankets that did little against the wind coming off the water, and watched the cliffs of Storm's End recede behind them with an ache in her chest that had nothing to do with the cold.
She understood, watching the men navigate, why they had chosen a boat this small, this careful, this slow. Shipbreaker Bay lived up to its name in every direction she looked. Black rocks breaking the surface like teeth, white water frothing and hissing against stone in patterns that shifted with a suddenness that made her stomach clench in sympathy for any larger vessel that might attempt these waters uninvited. She had read, in some idle afternoon at Summerhall's library, that the old Storm Kings had never kept their fleets at Storm's End itself for exactly this reason — that the true anchorages lay elsewhere, at Massey's Hook, at Estermont, along the gentler curve of the Sea of Dorne, and that Shipbreaker Bay was left to smaller craft and desperate men who knew its moods.
Gull and the quiet man knew its moods. That much was clear in every stroke of the oars, every small correction made before she could even see the danger they were correcting for. They rowed close to the cliffs, never far out into open water, taking it in turns to rest while the other worked.
She asked, once, where they were taking her, and received only silence in answer. The flat, closed silence of men who had already decided the question wasn't worth the breath of a reply.
The sun tracked its slow arc overhead and began its long fall toward the water, and still they rowed, hour after aching hour, the coastline sliding past in a blur of grey stone and white spray and, occasionally, gulls wheeling overhead with a mockery of freedom.
Valarr slept for stretches, exhausted more by pain and fear than by any exertion of his own, his head heavy against her shoulder, and she let him, watching the shoreline and counting whatever landmarks she could commit to memory.
By the time the light began its true fade toward evening, the boat turned inward, and a settlement came into view along a short stretch of cliffside. Smaller than she'd expected, a cluster of perhaps thirty stone houses hunched together against the wind like a herd of sheep in a storm, smoke rising thin and grey from a scatter of chimneys.
"Here," the quiet man said, and it was the first word either of them had spoken in hours.
Before they touched land, Gull produced two long, worn robes from beneath the boat's forward bench, rough wool gone soft and grey with age and use, and thrust one at each of them without ceremony.
"On," he said. "Hoods up. Cover the hair — that colour's worth more than the two of you combined if anyone with eyes gets a good look at it." His gaze cut to Valaena in particular, to the pale platinum of her hair, and something almost like genuine concern flickered across his weathered face before he smothered it back into blankness. "You make a sound, either of you, before we're behind a door — you understand what happens."
She understood the threat and so did her cousin. A threat that has already been proven capable of following through.
They were carried the last stretch — Gull hefting Valarr with a careless efficiency that made the boy grit his teeth against a cry of pain, the quiet man's arm closing around Valaena's waist with a grip that brooked no argument — through the gathering dusk and toward the edge of the village, past shuttered windows and the low murmur of a settlement settling in for the night, to a building set slightly apart from its neighbours. A tavern with weathered sign hanging crooked above a door that had clearly seen better decades.
They did not enter through the front.
A narrow door at the rear of the building opened before they'd even fully approached it, as though someone had been watching for their arrival, and a heavyset man with thinning hair and deep, worried creases around his eyes ushered them inside with quick, nervous movements, glancing past them into the darkening street before shutting the door and dropping a heavy bar across it.
"Upstairs," he said, voice pitched low. "Quick, now. Quick."
He led them up a narrow, creaking staircase and into a small room tucked beneath the eaves, low ceilinged and close, furnished with nothing more than a hard, narrow bed and a single shuttered window. Gull dropped Valarr onto the bed with a grunt of effort, and the quiet man set Valaena down beside him with rather more care, and then both men turned to the tavern owner, who stood wringing his hands in the doorway.
Valaena watched him carefully, even through her own exhaustion, and understood within moments that this man was no willing accomplice. There was nothing of Gull's rough cheer in him, nothing of the quiet man's flat professional calm. He was afraid — genuinely, deeply afraid.
"News," the quiet man said, without preamble, once the door had swung mostly shut behind them, leaving only a thin gap through which Valaena could still make out the low murmur of the men's voices.
"Three days past," the tavern owner said, and his voice shook faintly even as he tried to steady it.
"Prince Maekar came through with a full company of Baratheon guardsmen. Turned this village over stone by stone, near enough. One of his men came through my own common room, searching every corner, telling anyone who'd listen that two royal children had been taken, that there's a bounty out — coin enough to make a poor man rich, for anyone who brings back the children or word of their captors. Told me to spread it to every soul who passes through my door, and I have, because what choice did I have?" His eyes flicked, briefly, guiltily, toward the ceiling, toward some room above them that Valaena could not see. "The tourney's been called off entire. Word says Prince Baelor himself stayed behind at Storm's End Castle in case word came, while Prince Maekar leads the search along the coast towards Bronzegate and Felwood. And now they say the King's sending men down from King's Landing besides — reinforcements, due within two days' time."
Two days. Valaena filed the number away with a small, fierce flicker of hope she did not let show on her face.
"You'll be gone on the morrow," the tavern owner continued, wringing his hands harder. "Please. I beg you — the ship you're waiting on, it comes at first light. Take them and go before the King's men reach this far south, I can't — my daughter—"
"Your daughter will be returned come morning," the quiet man said, in a tone that closed the subject as firmly as it had in the cave, "same as we agreed. See that the room stays quiet, and you'll have no trouble from us."
The tavern owner's face crumpled with something that might have been relief and might have been despair, and he retreated without another word, pulling the door most of the way shut behind him, though not, Valaena noted with quiet, careful attention, quite all the way.
She lay very still on the hard, narrow bed beside Valarr, whose breathing had evened into something like true sleep despite the pain still etched faint across his sleeping face, and turned the tavern owner's words over and over in her mind.
His daughter. Held somewhere — she did not know where, did not dare ask, but understood exactly why a man would open his own back door to kidnappers and lie to a prince's own guardsmen with his hands shaking the whole while. Blackmailed. Compromised. A father with no choice at all, caught in the same trap Bittersteel had built to catch her, except that his cage had no gold at the bottom of it, only fear.
She thought of her own father, of Uncle Baelor's stillness at the funeral, of the particular desperate love that made grown men do things they would never otherwise choose, and something in her chest ached with a sympathy she had not expected to feel for a man who had, after all, helped hide her away from the people searching for her.
But sympathy did not change the arithmetic of the morning. A ship, arriving at first light. Whatever chance existed for her and Valarr to be found before that ship carried them across the narrow sea existed here, in this village, tonight, and nowhere after.
She did not sleep. She lay awake through the long hours of the dark, listening to the tavern settle and quiet below them, to Valarr's slow breathing beside her, to the faint, distant hush of the sea, and built her plan piece by careful piece.
Tomorrow. It would have to be tomorrow.
>~>~>~>~>~>
They left at dawn and the tavern owner ushered them out the same narrow back door through which they'd entered, his face grey with exhaustion and worry both.
"Gods go with you," he murmured — to whom, Valaena was not entirely certain, and suspected he was not entirely certain either.
The walk to the docks took longer than she expected, the men keeping to narrow paths behind the village's houses rather than the main track, and Valarr limped beside her with his jaw set hard against the pain, one hand fisted in the rough wool of his borrowed robe, refusing with a stubbornness she recognised and privately admired — any offer of support from either of their captors.
The docks, when they reached them, were smaller than she'd pictured: a simple wooden platform extending out over the shallows, built for fishing boats and the divers who worked the rocky shoals beyond the village, empty at this hour save for a scattering of men clustered near a vessel moored at the furthest end, half hidden beneath the overhang of wind-bent trees that crowded close to the cliff's edge.
The fishing boats themselves stood empty, their owners already gone out before dawn to whatever the day's work demanded of them, leaving the dock eerily quiet but for the slap of water against pilings and the low murmur of voices carrying from the ship ahead.
"Won't be lonely much longer," Gull said, close to her ear, with a sly, unpleasant edge to his voice that made her skin crawl before she'd even fully processed the words. "Plenty of little ones your age aboard already. You'll have playmates for the crossing."
Something cold slid down her spine. "What do you mean?"
Gull only smiled, and it was the quiet man, walking a step ahead, who finally answered — the first time, she realised with a jolt, that he had ever spoken to her without being pressed to it first.
"Slavers," he said, flat and simple, as though the word cost him nothing at all to say. "You didn't think we worked only for this one trade, did you?"
The world tilted, briefly, sharply, and Valaena had to lock her knees to keep from stumbling.
"We keep to the old rule—no hands on highborn blood, lest the hunt that follows costs more than the taking. But this contract pays too well to refuse. And gold is the lesser half of what's owed us."
Slavers. Not merely hired kidnappers paid to deliver a princess and a prince to a single waiting buyer, but men who trafficked in this — in children, in the ordinary horror of it, in a hold full of small, frightened bodies bound for markets across the narrow sea she'd read about in Adel's careful, grieved voice a lifetime ago.
Astapor. Yunkai. Meereen. They sell people like cattle. It is good business there.
And she thought, with a clarity that steadied her more than it frightened her, that whatever chance she had been waiting for had just arrived.
Beside her, Valarr's face had gone bloodless, his hand tightening convulsively around hers where their captors had, in careless overconfidence this close to their destination, left them briefly untethered from one another. She felt the moment his fear crested into something closer to panic, felt his breath catch, and knew she had perhaps three heartbeats before he did something that would cost them both the element of surprise she desperately needed.
She did not look at him. She did not dare risk the men noticing anything different in her bearing. She only breathed in, slow and even, and reached for the small, stubborn thread of magic that lived beneath her skin, and whispered, so quietly the words were barely more than shaped breath, "Silencio."
Twice. Once for each man.
Gull's mouth kept moving — she caught, from the corner of her eye, the shape of some further unpleasant remark forming on his lips — and no sound came out at all. His brows shot up in genuine, startled confusion, one hand rising to his own throat as though he might physically locate the missing sound there.
She did not give either man time to understand what had happened. She had one advantage left, and it was surprise, and surprise did not wait politely for anyone to catch up.
"Petrificus Totalus!"
The word cracked out of her low and precise, effort trembling through it rather than volume, and she felt it catch Gull mid stride. She watched his arms snap to his sides as though bound there by invisible rope, his legs lock rigid together at the knee, his jaw clench shut around whatever curse or shout he'd been a half second from loosing on the men in front of them. His eyes went wide and furious and entirely, helplessly aware, and that was the part she had gambled on and gotten right: he did not crumple. He toppled, stiff as a felled board from ankle to crown, and she was already there to guide the fall with both small hands flat against his shoulder, steering his considerable weight sideways onto the coil of old netting stacked at the dock's edge instead of the bare planks. It landed with a soft, muffled thump, no worse than a dropped sail.
The quiet man was faster — he was already turning, yelling something soundless while reaching for something at his belt — but her second casting caught him before his hand closed around it, and he went rigid and toppled in the same breath, arms pinned, mouth clamped soundlessly around a word that never came. He fell not onto the hard planking but into the netting beside Gull's frozen bulk, awake behind his own wide, unblinking eyes and utterly unable to do anything at all about it, which struck Valaena, even in the middle of her own terror, as a very particular sort of justice.
For one endless, ringing moment, Valaena simply stood there, staring at the two large, motionless bodies sprawled across the dock, and could not quite believe it had worked.
"Valaena." Valarr's voice, thin with shock, broke the spell of her own disbelief. "Valaena, what's happening—"
"Later." She was already moving, already crouching at his side, her hands finding the ruined bandage at his calf with quick, urgent efficiency. "I'll explain everything, I swear it, but not now — we have to go, we have to get help—"
She pressed her palms to the wound, feeling for the thread of magic that had grown so familiar these past nights, and had made it perhaps halfway through the working — feeling the torn edges of muscle draw closer beneath her touch, feeling Valarr's breath catch at the strange, tingling relief of it — when a shout split the morning air behind them, rough and furious and entirely too close.
She looked up. Five men, at least, were striding fast from the direction of the moored ship, faces already twisted with alarm, hands already dropping to weapons at their belts.
There was no more time.
"Come on!" She hauled Valarr upright with strength she should not have had in a body this small, one arm wrapped hard around his waist to take the weight off his injured leg, and they ran.
>~>~>~>~>~>
They ran back the way they'd come, past the empty fishing boats, off the dock and onto the muddy track that curved back towards the village, and behind them the shouting grew louder, closer, more men's voices joining the first until it seemed the whole waking village must surely hear it.
"Don't be afraid," she gasped out, between one desperate stride and the next, already working the shape of the charm through her mind even as her lungs burned. "I'm going to make us hard to see — stay close to me, don't let go of my hand, whatever you do—"
"I'm not afraid," Valarr said, and there was something in his voice — steady, sudden, absolute — that made her chest ache even in the middle of her own terror. "I trust you."
She did not have time to answer him properly. She only tightened her grip on his hand and pushed the last of her strength into the spell, feeling the familiar cool shiver of the Disillusionment Charm sweep down over them both like a bucket of water tipped slow over her scalp, watching Valarr's form beside her waver and thin and finally vanish into a near perfect blend with the muddy track and the pale morning sky behind him.
They ran on, close enough together to be nearly invisible, their footfalls the only proof either of them still existed at all, and behind them the shouting fractured into confusion — she caught, over her shoulder, the sight of the pursuing men slowing, spreading out, searching a stretch of empty road with the particular baffled fury of hunters who have lost a scent they were certain of only moments before.
A headache split through her skull with sudden, blinding force, sharp enough to make her stumble, and she gritted her teeth against it and kept running. Too much magic, too fast, too close together — her body, small and undeveloped, had not been built to bear this kind of strain, and it was telling her so now in the only language it had, a white hot lance of pain behind her eyes that made the whole world briefly swim.
She did not stop.
Behind them, she heard the search fracture further. She heard, distantly, three sets of footsteps break off from the rest, heading toward the village itself, towards the tavern, towards every close, likely hiding place a search party might think to check first. It bought them time. Not much. But something.
They reached the edge of the village proper, past the last scattered houses, to where a cluster of huge, weathered rocks marked some old boundary between the settlement and the wilder land beyond, and there, finally, her legs simply would not carry her another step further.
She pulled Valarr down behind the largest of the rocks and let the Disillusionment Charm lapse, too spent to hold it a moment longer, and they reappeared to the naked eye in a heap of borrowed robes and heaving breath, both of them shaking with exhaustion, both of them very much still within reach of men who wanted them badly enough to have crossed the narrow sea for the privilege.
Valarr could not run further. She saw that immediately, in the pale cast of his face, in the way his injured leg had begun to shake with fine, involuntary tremors beneath him. Her own head throbbed with a pain sharp enough to blur her vision at the edges, and her breath came in short, burning gasps that felt entirely inadequate to the amount of air her lungs seemed to want.
But she did not let herself stop thinking. Not yet. Not while the men were still searching, still close enough that she could hear, faintly, their shouted questions to villagers who had likely never seen a stranger vanish from a muddy road before in their lives.
She needed someone. Not a villager — the tavern owner's fear had taught her enough of what threats and blackmail could accomplish against ordinary smallfolk, and she would not risk placing that same weight on some other frightened family this morning. She needed someone capable. Someone with a horse, with a weapon, with enough independence from this village's quiet terror to actually help rather than simply watch, wide eyed, as two ragged children begged for their lives.
And then, through the gap between two boulders, she saw him.
>~>~>~>~>~>
A rider, coming up the muddy track from the direction of the wider road beyond the village, mounted on a solid brown horse that had clearly seen better decades of grooming than it was currently receiving. He wore mismatched armor, a battered breastplate over a padded jerkin gone thin at the elbows, a sword at his hip that looked well-used rather than well-kept, and he rode with the loose, unbothered slouch of a man who had long since stopped expecting the world to offer him anything worth sitting up straight for.
A hedge knight, she thought, with a surge of something that was not quite hope but was close enough to it to make her chest ache. Landless. Ordinary. Exactly the kind of man too far beneath a lord's notice to have been recruited into a royal search party, and exactly, she prayed, the kind of man who might still recognise an opportunity when it stepped directly into his path.
"Wait here," she told Valarr, pressing him back against the boulder's shadow with a firmness that brooked no argument. "Stay hidden. I'll bring him."
She did not wait for his answer. She was already moving, out from behind the rocks and into the middle of the muddy road, planting her small, aching body directly in the horse's path, arms spread wide, hood still shadowing her face.
The knight saw her — she watched his eyes register her presence, watched something like mild irritation cross his weathered, unshaven face — and did not slow at all.
"Out the way, girl," he called, in a voice roughened by years of drink and hard living both, an accent thick with the flat, clipped vowels of the crownlands' lowborn, "'less you fancy learnin' what a horse's hoof feels like on your toes."
She did not move.
"Suit yourself, then," he muttered, and made to guide his horse in a wide, irritated arc around her.
"Stop," she said, and threw back her hood.
Her hair spilled loose in the pale morning light . Platinum, unmistakable, the exact bright colour that had marked her since birth as something more than an ordinary child and she drew herself up as straight and tall as her aching, exhausted small body would allow.
"In the name of your princess," she said, "I command you to stop."
The horse halted. The knight, at least, had the sense to rein it in, though his weathered face twisted into open, skeptical disbelief as he took in the sight of her: rough, muddy robes, tear streaked face, hair loose and wild, standing alone on an empty road at an hour when no princess in the Seven Kingdoms had any business being anywhere near a fishing village's outskirts.
"Princess," he repeated, flat, unconvinced, and something that might have been a laugh caught halfway in his throat. "Aye, and I'm the bloody King himself, come to collect my morning eggs personal like."
She pursed her lips at his dismissal and cleared her throat.
"I am Valaena Targaryen," she said, holding his gaze with every ounce of steadiness she could muster, though her whole body trembled with exhaustion beneath the borrowed robe. "Third child of Prince Maekar Targaryen. You will have heard, surely — two royal children taken from Storm's End. I am one of them. My cousin, Prince Valarr, is hidden behind those rocks, injured, and we need your help."
The knight's skeptical squint did not fully clear, but something in it shifted. Calculation replacing outright dismissal, the particular alert stillness of a man doing rapid sums in his head. "Heard plenty of rumour," he allowed, slow. "Heard less proof. Any bastard beggar's girl might've heard the same tale and thought to try her luck with an act and a sob story."
"Then bring us to the nearest guardsman and let him judge the truth of it," she said, keeping her voice level though desperation clawed at the edges of it. "We ask nothing more than that — only that you see us safely to whoever is searching, and let my father's men confirm what I say. And when they do—" she drew a breath, steadying herself, playing the one card she suspected would matter more to this particular man than any appeal to honour or duty ever could, "—my father will reward you. Generously. Gold enough that you'll never need beg another lord for a place at his table, nor sleep another night wondering where your next meal comes from. This will not be a waste of your morning, ser knight. I swear it on my own name."
The knight's weathered face went very still.
"Gold," he repeated, and something in his voice had changed entirely — sharpened, brightened, all trace of skeptical dismissal burned away in an instant by that single, simple word.
He swung down off his horse with considerably more energy than he'd shown a moment before, boots hitting the mud with a decisive thump, and looked at her properly now. The way a man looks at something he has just realised might genuinely be worth his while.
"Well," he said, and a slow, gap toothed grin spread across his weathered face, "Why in the seven hells didn't you say so earlier?"