The Bone King, Chapter 69

The princes stayed close to the stone wall, knees drawn to their chests, faces pinched. Rhaegel held the wooden dragon I’d given back to him. Maekar just stared at the dirt, lips moving like he was whispering to someone who wasn’t there. Neither spoke to me. Neither looked my way unless I moved too fast. When I walked, they flinched. When I sat, they tensed. Reasonable.

I’d kidnapped them. From their beds. In the dark. Silenced their guards, burned a few, stole a dragon from hell and dropped it on their father’s road. I hadn’t even bothered to lie about my intentions. I just took them. Took them and their queen and flew off toward the edge of the world.

Now I was here. On some salted spit of rock that didn’t show on any Maester’s map, surrounded by cliffs and pine and nothing. No ravens. No sails. Just wind and wave and basalt black as coal. If Daeron had half the spine his songs said he did, he’d chase me. But it might take weeks. Months, maybe. Longer, if he guessed wrong or got lost or gave up. He might never come.

And I didn’t like waiting.

Maybe I’d take them to Winterfell. Drop them off in the snow with the Starks. Let the new King in the North worry over them like he worried over everything else. Or maybe I’d just fly right back to King’s Landing, kick the gates in again, throw the queen back into her tower and tell the king to try harder next time.

I hadn’t really planned that far ahead.

Across the fire, Myriah Martell sat with her legs folded and her back straight. Hair tied up. Robes patched with ash and dried seawater. She watched me like a cliff watches a storm—silent, unmoving, and ready to fall if the wind came wrong. The firelight caught the gold in her eyes, turned them into coins that didn’t blink.

Between us, the boar turned slowly over a bed of coals. Skin blistered. Fat hissed. The smell had soaked into the moss and stone. Even Nightfury had curled closer, nostrils flaring at the scent. He lay stretched beneath the overhang, wings tucked tight, tail tapping every so often like a pendulum counting down to nothing.

I stirred the coals with the tip of a stick. Sparks leapt. Grease popped. The crackling echoed off the cave walls and out toward the cliffs where the sea kept breathing in and out.

“Good boy,” I muttered, glancing toward the dragon. Nightfury snorted, then dipped his head back into the dark like he couldn’t care less.

He was enjoying this. Flying over the water, diving for whales, pulling squids apart in the surf. He thought we were on vacation.

And maybe we were.

I scraped my knife along the boar’s flank, let a strip of crackling peel back. Flesh steamed beneath. Pink, soft, perfect. I sliced another bit free, then another. Held it out across the fire on the flat of the blade.

The queen didn’t move. Her sons watched her. I shrugged and tossed the meat onto a stone near the edge of the coals. The smell curled toward them. Rhaegel blinked. Maekar’s stomach growled loud enough to make the pine needles shift. I didn’t laugh. Just leaned back and watched the fat drip from the carcass and sizzle into flame.

“You ever eaten kraken?” I asked. “Nightfury caught one yesterday. Thing had hooks for teeth. Tasted like burnt leather and regret.”

No answer. Just the wind and the fire and the quiet sound of a mother choosing not to speak.

I took another slice of boar, dragged it through the grease at the pit’s edge, and bit in. The fat ran hot down my chin. I wiped it off with the back of my wrist.

“I think I might’ve overdone it in Neverwinter,” I said. “Too much fire. Too many swords. I got carried away.”

Still nothing. Myriah kept her hands folded in her lap. Her jaw flexed once, then stilled.

“Felt like the right amount of killing at the time,” I said.

The fire cracked louder now. A log shifted. The boar’s leg slipped down, sizzling in the pit. I reached over, lifted it free with a grunt, and propped it back onto the spit. Sparks flew up, drifted into the ceiling and vanished.

The princes hadn’t moved. But their eyes followed every piece of meat I touched.

I cut another strip. Tossed it their way. It landed with a soft slap near Maekar’s boot. He stared at it for a while, then picked it up and took a bite. He didn’t even chew. Just held it in his mouth like it might disappear if he looked away. Rhaegel followed a second later. Their mother never glanced their way.

I licked grease from my fingers. Stared into the fire. The flames danced red and yellow over bone and ash. Somewhere above us gulls wheeled and screamed into the wind.

“You’re not afraid of me,” I said.

“No,” she said. One word. Flat. Not proud. Not angry. Just true. I knew only one other person who did not have a single bone in their body that was afraid of me and it was Halga, who was now my apprentice/right hand. 

I nodded.

“That’s fair,” I said. “If you were, I would not be as respectful of you as I am now.”

Still she didn’t move. Just watched. Not like a hawk or a lion or any of that poetic shit people like to say. Just a woman who’d seen something she didn’t like and wasn’t going to look away.

The silence stretched again. Nightfury grunted in his sleep. The princes chewed slower now, the edge of hunger softened. My knife clicked back into its sheath.

I leaned back on my elbows. Watched the smoke crawl along the cave ceiling. Thought about what came next. Thought about Daeron, and ships, and the taste of king’s blood in the air.

Myriah said nothing. She just kept staring. Eventually, with a sigh from her lips and a growl from her belly, the Queen eventually indulged herself as well. She took a piece of rib bone and gnawed on it. Good choice. Meat tasted best the closer it was to the bone. “You still haven’t answered my question, my lord.” 

“I know,” I said. “I’m still thinking of an answer.” 

“Your first answer, then, was the truth,” Myriah sighed. “You did all of this because you could. There’s no grand plan, no strategy, not even politics. You did it because you felt like it, you could, and so you did.” 

I nodded. “Yeah, that about sums it up.” 

She ate in silence. The kind that didn’t weigh anything at first but began to grow teeth the longer it sat between you.

The fire cracked. Wind pulled smoke sideways, dragged the smell of charred fat toward the mouth of the cave. Somewhere beyond the cliffs, the sea kept breathing, deep and slow.

Ten minutes passed. Maybe more. The princes were asleep, curled beneath a patch of moss, the smaller one still clutching his dragon. Nightfury lay with one wing half-spread like a curtain, his tail twitching once every few beats.

Then she spoke again.

“These powers of yours,” she said, voice low, almost to herself. “This grand sorcery. The dragon. The deathless servants. All of it. Have you done any good with them?”

I looked up from the meat. She hadn’t looked at me. She tore another strip from the rib bone and chewed it slow.

“I mean for others,” she said. “The realm. The people in it. Have they gained anything from your strength?”

I raised a brow. She kept eating.

“I know you freed the North,” she went on. “That’s something, I suppose. And commendable, if you look at it a certain way. But what of the rest? What of the common man? The ones who don’t kneel in courts or lead banners?”

I leaned back on one elbow. The stone beneath me was still warm from the fire. I tossed a rib bone into the flames and listened to it snap.

“I’ve assigned some twenty thousand skeletal workers to help in the North,” I said. “Farming. Construction. Hauling timber and stone. The kind of work that breaks backs and kills slowly in winter. My unpaid interns don’t mind the cold.”

She looked at me then.

“They don’t need food,” I continued. “They don’t sleep. They don’t speak. They just work. Roads went up in weeks instead of seasons. Bridges too. New grain silos. Granaries. Storehouses. Even wells. There’s a town past the Last River that used to beg salt from the Vale. They’re shipping flour south now.”

“And the lords?” she asked.

“They call them interns too. I didn’t start that. One of them even put a crown on a corpse just to make it foreman over the rest. It’s still out there, waving its hand in circles.”

She shook her head once. Not in disbelief. Just the slow sort of motion a woman makes when something is both foolish and true.

“They’re building ships now,” I added. “White Harbor. New docks. Hulls big enough to carry grain and timber all the way to the Arbor. Or farther. And Nightfury…”

The dragon grunted in his sleep. A tremor rolled through the stone.

“…has helped flatten hills. Drained a few marshes. Burned out some forest that wasn’t good for anything but bandits and wolves. The ash makes decent soil. You can smell it in the cabbage.”

She said nothing for a time. The flames whispered around the edges of the carcass, licking the bone clean.

“I think I’ve improved lives,” I said. “The smallfolk. The ones who break their backs so highborn children can eat oranges in the sun. They sleep warmer now. Eat more. Lose fewer fingers to the frost.”

She nodded once. It was small.

“Then why,” she said, “don’t you focus on that, my lord, instead of whatever it is you’re doing now?”

The fire popped. A knot in the wood gave way. Sparks leapt.

I didn’t answer right away. I picked up another rib, sucked the grease off it, and tossed it to the edge of the fire pit.

Then I wiped my hands on the edge of my cloak and looked at her.

“I could,” I said. “I still might. You know what, I think I’ll focus on that.”

“What now?” the queen asked. She didn’t look at me when she said it. Her fingers were in her sons’ hair, combing twigs out. “If you’ve no plans for us to begin with, why are we still here?”

I tilted my head. Watched Nightfury stretch out one wing and roll onto his side like a hound too well-fed. The fire had burned down to coals. A rib bone cracked beneath the dragon’s shifting weight.

“Well,” I said, “Nightfury wouldn’t want to fly back just yet.”

She turned her head. Waited.

I thought a moment. Found something that might pass for an answer. “How familiar are you with the concept of a vacation?”

She blinked once. “I’ve never heard of such a word, my lord.”

“Well,” I said, “allow me to be your introduction.”

And so I did.

The next morning we left the cave. The cliffs sloped into forest and the forest broke into scrub and then the scrub just ended, and we found the beach. Long white stretch of it, quiet as snowfall. The sand warm underfoot and fine as flour. The trees grew low near the water, thick with fruit and things that looked like coconuts, but larger, heavier. Everything smelled clean.

The lizards came down from the rocks sometimes. Long and slow, shoulders rolling with each step, tongues flicking. Big as hounds. One tried to bite the dragon. Nightfury pinned it with a claw and flicked it back into the surf. It didn’t come back.

The water was shallow for a long way out, so clear you could count the pebbles. The boys stared at it like it was glass. Maekar picked up a stick and poked at his reflection. Rhaegel waded out to his ankles and jumped at the first cold wave. The queen stood a while, toes in the water, eyes on the horizon. Then she peeled off the robe and went in after them.

They splashed each other like children born of peasants. She laughed hard when Rhaegel tried to dunk her and failed. Even Maekar grinned once or twice, throwing saltwater like it was war. I sat on a driftwood log and watched them. Didn’t move. Didn’t join.

Not a fan of salt water. Too much stick, too much sting. I’d drown a man in it before I’d swim in it.

But it was a strange thing, this scene. Me, watching the queen and her children shriek with laughter in waist-high waves, flinging water like they’d never seen war or fire or dragons. I barely knew their names. But now I knew the sound Myriah made when seawater hit her back. I knew how Rhaegel shouted when he found a sand crab. I knew how Maekar’s voice cracked when he laughed too hard.

It felt like watching someone else’s dream.

The sun crept higher. Their skin turned red across the shoulders, cheeks pinking up like butcher’s meat. I tossed them my cloak once they left the water. The queen wrung out her shift. Rhaegel shivered in the breeze. Sand clung to their legs and elbows.

We found shade under a stand of crooked palms. Nightfury curled nearby, tail twitching now and then, one eye open to the lizards who’d returned, watching from the treeline. I cracked coconuts open with a rock. The water inside was cold, tasted like snowmelt and stone. The princes drank straight from the shells.

What was left of the boar we finished then. Meat cold now, but soft. Fat clinging to the ribs like glue. I ate with them. No talk.

Just the wind through trees and the hush of surf and the slow chewing of a family that wasn’t mine.

Later I stood alone at the edge of the beach. Watched the tide creep in. Sky gone pale, clouds dragging slow across the water. I didn’t feel like a sorcerer. Or a king. Or a god. Just a man in borrowed time, waiting for something to happen that he hadn’t named yet. After a while, I returned to them. “I’ll take you back to King’s Landing tomorrow. After that, I’ll see to it that this war ends with the least amount of casualties. Do try to convince your husband that the North will never again be a part of his kingdom.”