The Bone King, Chapter 65

King’s Landing came into view after half a morning on foot, the sun still low enough to cast long shadows across the hills. I’d been walking the ridge roads that cut between tilled earth and pastureland, watching farmers in the distance till soil made stubborn by recent cold. Oxen trudged through furrows. A woman knelt by a creekbed, her skirts muddied to the knees. The smell reached me not long after the last hamlet. It wasn’t just rot or dung or animal waste. No. It was something heavier. Human. The stench of latrines left unchecked and chamber pots emptied into gutters. Raw and sour and so thick in the air it rode the breeze like a living thing.

As far as I knew, King’s Landing did not have a working sewer system. Because it would not have smelled this bad if it did.

I covered my mouth with the edge of my cloak. It didn’t help much. The road turned east, sloped gently down through a patch of sparse trees. I could see the city from there. The haze that hung above it was the color of ash and old smoke. Crows circled the western wall. The Red Keep rose like a blood-clotted tooth behind it all, perched atop the Hill of Aegon with its towers stabbing upward. Even at a distance, the walls seemed stained. The stonework patched and uneven. Mismatched towers jutting out like bones reset wrong.

The closer I came, the more obvious it became—King’s Landing had been raised in a hurry, a sprawl without rhythm. Streets choked with too many roofs. Buildings pressed shoulder to shoulder with no thought to grace or order. The foundations looked crooked in places, as though the city had never had time to settle. Its walls were tall but pocked with repairs. I passed by wagon ruts filled with stagnant water and piles of refuse swept off the main road.

A boy squatted behind a hedgerow just off the roadside, trousers about his ankles. He met my gaze without shame, and I looked away. Further down, two men worked a broken cart axle with rusted tools, one cursing loud enough to draw the attention of a tethered mule. A pig bolted through a vegetable plot. Chickens scattered in its wake. I could hear shouting from the gates even before I reached the final bend in the road.

There were beggars just outside the main entrance. Dozens of them. Old women with hands outstretched. Children with matted hair and open sores. One man with no legs sat atop a board with wheels and slapped his palms against the stone, muttering a prayer to the Mother. I stepped over a hand that reached too close. The guards didn’t spare them a glance. They leaned against spears, watching the carts roll in, nodding off in their helms like men who had stood too long and had too little to care about.

A knight in gold-trimmed plate walked past on horseback, his destrier gleaming with fresh oil. The poor stepped aside without being asked. A few of them bowed low. The knight did not acknowledge them. I kept walking. The gate yawned open before me, a maw of timber and rusted iron.

I crossed the threshold and entered the city. And the smell, holy shit, was even worse within.

King Daeron was likely pacing the chambers of the Red Keep by now. Some candlelit room high in Maegor’s Holdfast, maps unrolled and hands wringing over every inch lost. His scribes would be working their quills to ruin, his spymasters shouting over one another, and the maesters whispering worse truths than the courtiers could stomach. A whole host broken in a single night. Leaders captured, banners scattered, the Neck turned into a pit of bones and mud. And yet, no raven had come from me. No message. No demand. No word.

I hadn’t sent terms. Didn’t plan to. There was no negotiation to be had. What could they offer that I might need? Their gold? I could raise wealth from the dead. Their loyalty? I already had armies that never slept, never aged, never disobeyed. Their cities? One word and they’d crumble beneath dragons’ fire or drown beneath rising bones. No, I held all the cards. All the power. They had nothing I could want. The game was over and only I refused to flip the board.

I could walk into the Red Keep if I wanted. Just walk. No blade drawn, no spells cast. I could raise my hand in the throne room and peel the flesh from every man, woman, and child within those stone walls. There was no power in this city that could stop me. No dragon remained. No knight stood who could withstand me. If I called for Nightfury, the black beast would blot out the sun and set the city ablaze before a single horn could sound.

But I hadn’t done any of that. Not yet.

I didn’t want to. Not unless I had reason. Provocation. A cause to justify what I knew I could do. Let them stew. Let them tremble in their halls, imagining what came next. Sometimes silence bred more terror than flame.

So I had myself a better idea.

While the Northern Lords sharpened their spears and reinforced their coasts, ready to meet the Royal Fleet in blood and fire, I had slipped south, alone. Just a man in a dark cloak walking roads already pounded thin by merchant wheels and refugees’ heels. I’d left Neverwinter without ceremony, without escort. I told no one where I’d gone. There were whispers of Jason Lee, sure. They knew the name now. The name was carried by ravens and fear and rumor. But my face? That remained unknown. I wasn’t carved into coins or etched into banners. My features—handsome though they were—could pass for a sellsword or hedge knight, maybe even a merchant’s spoiled son if I kept my cloak clean.

And that meant I could walk into the very heart of the kingdom I had broken and see the rot from within. I didn’t come with magic boiling at my fingertips. I didn’t ride a skeletal steed or float above the ground on a bed of ghostlight. I came walking. Just walking. Down through the Riverlands where the harvests had failed and men traded chickens for salt. Through the Kingsroad where abandoned wagons marked the path of a retreating supply line. Past burned villages and gallows trees that bore the fruit of failed deserters. Past soldiers drunk on stolen ale, too scared to return home and too dumb to run further north.

And just like that, I was in the heart of the kingdom. The seat of a crumbling throne. The last bastion of a crown that still dared call itself sovereign. I walked through cobbled streets where fish guts and spoiled fruit mixed in the gutters. I passed shops shuttered with boards nailed in haste. I passed a sept where the doors stood open but the benches were empty. I passed Goldcloaks arguing with their commander, their voices raised just enough to let passersby hear the doubt behind the discipline.

I walked through the stink and the fear and the dying glory of the South’s greatest city. And no one stopped me. No one knew me. No one thought to ask what man walked among them while the world bent to his will.

I walked through King’s Landing. And I smiled.

I went where my feet took me. Through alleys and open squares, over stones slick with brine or piss or both. I entered the shops as they came. One by one, doors creaking open under my hand. Some had bells that jingled. Some had no doors at all.

I passed through the fish market where men and women shouted over barrels of eels and cod and herring. The smell was dense. Gut-rot and salt and scales. A boy sliced a mackerel's belly clean open on a stone slab, his blade catching light for just a moment before he wiped it on his shirt. The eyes of the fish still watched me as I walked by.

I stepped into a barber’s shop and sat without speaking. The man wore an apron speckled with hair, his razor glinting as he moved with slow precision. He asked nothing. I said nothing. When he finished, I stood, dropped a silver on the counter, and left. His eyes followed me out.

The clothier’s was a narrow place. Fabrics stacked like stone walls, bolts of green and red and gold. A girl worked a needle behind the counter. She looked up, looked down. I touched a bolt of linen, ran the rough edge of it between two fingers, and moved on.

The taverns were loud. Too many men in one place, talking too fast, drinking too deep. I watched them. Watched how the serving girls laughed too quickly. Watched how the guards drank without joy. I sat at a corner table and let the wood press into my spine. The ale was sour. The stew worse. Still, I ate it. Coins changed hands and I left.

A florist’s stall stood near the edge of a narrow lane. The woman there sold blooms from her own garden. Small. Wilted. But fragrant. I bought a single stem. Purple. No name given. I held it between two fingers as I walked, and dropped it into a gutter two streets later without a word.

I passed smithies. Some rang with the hammer. Others were still. I saw blades on racks and suits of armor hung like ghosts against the wall. One smith watched me from behind a forge fire. He said nothing. I nodded once and kept moving.

And I passed the brothels. Painted doors. Perfume in the air. Girls leaning from windows, calling down with false laughter. Men inside shouting songs with voices gone hoarse. I didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. That kind of business was never mine.

I moved through the city as one might move through memory. Without destination. Without rush. I left nothing behind. Took nothing with me. I simply passed through.

Night came down over King’s Landing slow and heavy. The sky turned black and stayed that way. The air thickened. Fires burned low in the hearths behind shuttered windows. Smoke curled from the chimneys and disappeared into the dark. I stood on a slanted rooftop not far from the Red Keep and looked out across the city. It sprawled like a corpse in the torchlight, too tired to rise.

Somewhere in that keep, the King of the Six Kingdoms was likely pacing his floors, wringing his hands over maps that no longer mattered. It used to be seven, before the North broke away. Before Brandon Stark raised his own banner, before Neverwinter rose out of the swamp, before I stepped into the world and dragged it by the spine into something new.

I didn’t have a reason for being here. That was the truth of it. No grand purpose. No war to fight. No final blow to strike. I came out of curiosity, or boredom, or maybe just because no one could stop me. I walked their streets in daylight, slipped between their people like smoke between fingers. And now that the moon had climbed high and the wind had gone quiet, I decided I’d do something small. Something to remind them.

Not kill. Not yet. There was no sport in that.

But fear. Fear was free. Fear left marks deeper than wounds. I didn’t want the King dead. I wanted him changed. I wanted him looking over his shoulder until the day he dropped into his grave.

So I thought of his family.

What better way to scare a man than to go for his most precious, most personal treasure? Daeron might’ve been the King, but he was also a husband and a father. 

But, since I wasn’t an animal, I had no intention of hurting them. 

No, I was just going to kidnap them. 

Why? Because it’d be funny.