Archmaester Vaegon
"Did he say that? An heir for a day?"
It was not that the middle nephew's behavior astonished Archmaester Vaegon, but Daemon in their rare meetings had always seemed a narcissistic ass to him, and what Aegon had just laid out proved so tactless that it was beyond the pale.
"By all appearances, yes," the younger nephew grimaced.
"Too low even for him."
"And for you, My Lords, as well, though you are both rare ulcers," chuckled Dennis, setting goblets of wine before the Archmaester and the Prince.
Aegon raised his cup and proclaimed:
"To Aemma and Baelon, may Balerion receive their death!"
"To us all, may the Gods have mercy on us," muttered the Archmaester himself, saluting slightly with his glass.
"To dragons who know how to hold their tongues," put in the knight-servant.
In the Archmaester's chambers, he definitely allowed his tongue more liberty than at court, but Vaegon did not blame him for this. In the end, in the Citadel the lad was not simply a nursemaid to two Princes of dragon blood, but also a student, and if this did not place him on the same level as Aegon, it definitely raised his status. Dennis Greyhead himself ultimately turned out to be a quite tolerable person and not the worst student the Archmaester of Mathematics had had in many years; furthermore, when he lived in Oldtown, Vaegon's daily life improved in a surprising manner—food turned from tolerable to acceptably good, there was less dirt on the books, and the order established by the Archmaester himself was not violated. To be completely honest, Vaegon would have been hard-pressed to say whom he was happier to see—his blood nephew or his sworn shield.
This time Aegon brought with him news of the demise of the Queen and her newborn son—he wanted to ensure that absolutely nothing could have been done. The new Archmaester of Medicine was an Ironborn named Cadhwil, who had a scar across his entire face and spoke like a rusted axe, just as reluctantly and disagreeably; his temper was fit for the devil, and instead of brains—seawater with silt and pebbles. Vaegon had objected to his acceptance into the Conclave, but the Seneschal, you see, had his own considerations; Vaegon had them too, and by no means in his head, but he had to reconcile himself with the blockheaded rock behind the silver mask.
Cadhwil, after Aegon's detailed account of Aemma's last day, declared sparingly and raspingly that had he been in the Red Keep instead of the Grand Maester, he would have cut open the Queen's belly by noon to extract the infant.
"If the King needed an heir so badly he was shitting himself, there was no need to dally so long," he spat on the floor and repeated. "No need to dally. They would have got the lad out, and the King would have found himself another woman. Any would spread her legs for him."
Aegon thanked the Ironborn with restraint, but Vaegon knew his nephew well enough to understand how close this cretin had come to a meeting with his Drowned God.
"In the end, I was right," concluded the Prince. "Mellos delayed too long."
"You have no luck with Grand Maesters," the Archmaester chuckled. "Runciter—a nonentity without an opinion of his own, Mellos—an indecisive tortoise."
"But the Conclave sends them to us; why did you not advise us someone better?!"
"The Seneschal proposes candidates, and they are chosen by a majority of votes," snapped Vaegon. "I voted against Runciter and against Mellos. Do not shift this onto me. If I alone made decisions, I would have proposed better Maesters."
This answer scarce satisfied his nephew, but Vaegon had no other for him.
"This is all dragon shit," the Prince delivered after some silence.
"That it is," the Archmaester nodded in agreement.
For the whole week that Aegon was a guest in Oldtown, he recounted his Essosi journey in all possible details. Perhaps the Archmaester had never listened so much nor asked so many questions since he himself was a student. The treatises on mathematics and economics brought by his nephew, copied and bought up in the Free Cities from Braavos to Volantis, scarce merited attention: Vaegon knew himself well—if he opened even one, he would have no concern for the youth. His hands itched to unroll one of the old scrolls and check his own calculations against the discoveries of the ancients, but he wanted to listen to his nephew more. But even under threat of the torments of the Seven Hells, Vaegon would not have confessed that he had missed him.
News that his sister Saera lived quite calmly in Volantis and had reached very considerable heights amused the Archmaester greatly, and her words gave him pause.
"Our parents were not so good," said Vaegon. "They sent Maegelle and me to Oldtown, kicked Saera out by the scruff of her neck. How many of our brothers and sisters did not survive childhood? I fear I shall forget someone, but Maegelle would surely remember everyone. She prayed for Saera too, the fool. What use are our prayers to her?"
"Aunt is right at least in that you are happy in your place," spoke Aegon.
"Your parents were happy too. And Aemon as well. But all are dead, as one."
The Archmaester met the tale of new nephews with a smirk. Children, though born of the gods know whom, turned out to be worthy descendants of the House of the Dragon, adopting in turn all qualities inherent in Jaehaerys's children. It was hard to devise better proof of their origin. Maerys was a pity—he would have made a good Archmaester, were it not for his flirtations with the Red Priests. Viserra, judging by the rapturously sad tales, turned out to be a political whore, like her mother—she attached herself to the winner, casting aside and forgetting all that was before; for the sake of variety, Vaegon kept his opinion to himself. Jaegaer seemed a faded and uninteresting personality to him personally; a strongman and carouser with a sharp cudgel—what a marvel.
However, the newfound relatives flew completely out of his head the moment Aegon told of what he had endured in Mantarys. The tale dragged on, and when the nephew finished, it was past midnight.
"You do not believe me," he said with conviction after a prolonged silence.
Vaegon, who had been staring unceasingly at the fire dancing in the hearth all this time, spoke unexpectedly for himself:
"I believe. What is most terrible—I believe."
One could not say that the Archmaester denied the existence of gods.
Like any scholar sufficiently immersed in the depths of researching the universe, he could not ignore that in that very universe there was too much that cold reason and sober calculation simply could not explain. Like many Archmaesters before him, Vaegon reached the circumstances of the creation of the world in his reasonings; they had not a single solid piece of evidence pointing to specific circumstances accompanying this process; if it came to that, some were not certain that this process had taken place at all—they believed that the world as everyone knows it had always existed. Vaegon was not of their number; in the universe, as he knew, everything had its end, and it would be foolish to assume that finite things exist in an eternal world. This led him to several questions: if the world once arose, then how? why? by whose will? for what purpose?
To give an answer to these fundamental questions without agreeing to the axiom of the existence of certain supernatural forces was impossible, and Vaegon, as a true mathematician, accepted this on faith, as he accepted that two straight lines intersected by a third and not perpendicular to it, upon sufficient continuation, must intersect each other as well. Further philosophizing on the nature of the supernatural interested him little; this was the lot of his lazy brethren who engaged in empty reasonings for days on end. The legends of the Septons seemed nonsense to him (though Maegelle sincerely believed in them), tales of the nameless Old Gods—barbarism, the teaching of the Red Priests—uncontrolled fanaticism, other Essosi cults—a sign of the backwardness of the nations professing them. He had never thought about the Valyrian religion; he had no inclination for historical research like his nephew, and otherwise, these were dead gods of a dead civilization. Or rather, so he thought before.
Aegon's tale reopened the youthful anguish of when Vaegon lay at night on a creaky and hard bed in a stuffy student's room, staring at the dark ceiling, and suffered from the unresolved fundamental questions of being and the realization of his own mortality. Old memories raised old questions before the Archmaester and added new ones to them.
Could Aegon have invented all this? Perhaps he could. He had managed to read enough to construct a reasonably plausible version, and had enough time to work it out both in depth and breadth, and to learn it by heart. What would this give him? Perhaps only the righteous wrath of the Faith and its intolerantly pious parishioners. To start something against the Starry Sept meant violating the Old King's concordat, and the Prince, for all his foolishness, was smart enough to understand the necessity of observing it. Therefore, there was no sense for him to invent this whole story with Valyrian gods.
These were all evidences "against," but they were insufficient to convince Vaegon finally—evidences "for" were needed. The Archmaester had but one: burning Valyrian candles. Neither before nor after bad he seen anyone light these artifacts, though thousands of students upon investiture unsuccessfully tried to do so for centuries; even he had not succeeded, and yet he too was of the blood of the dragon—so his father had told him once in childhood. Could some magic explain this? Perhaps only it could. Acknowledgment of this fact raised the question of the source of this magic, and for this role, perhaps only Valyrian deities were suitable, as it turned out, not dead in the slightest.
Therefore Vaegon believed in what his nephew had gone through. He would have laughed any other to scorn, but every time the Archmaester closed his eyes, the glass wick of the obsidian candle burned with an imperishable, unnatural light before his mind's eye.
"And what do you intend to do now? With all these," Vaegon waved his hand vaguely before him. "Powers?"
"Fulfill what is expected of me," the nephew answered simply. "They hinted quite unambiguously that fooling them will not work—Maegor tried and paid for it."
"By the by, this explains much in his history. Certain events were too incredible to happen: beginning from the rise to power and ending with death. Who would have thought that a divine curse truly destroyed him."
"Only completely different gods cursed him than those customarily spoken of," remarked the knight, huddled on a chair a little distance away.
After some silence, the Archmaester asked unexpectedly for himself:
"Here is what interests me: if you spoke with Balerion, why did you not ask him for a healthy leg?"
Aegon shrank noticeably:
"I... You understand, I simply forgot about it. Besides, to ask for something like that was petty."
"And what, did the gods not see that their chosen one is a trifle crippled?"
"Perchance they considered that this would not hinder me from fulfilling my part of the bargain. Or they considered that my clubfootedness is too insignificant to be bothered with."
"That is, they healed Vermithor, but neglected his rider?"
"The gods made it clear that dragons are more valuable to them than people," Aegon shrugged indifferently. "Besides, without fire breath and with limited abilities for flight, a dragon is almost not a dragon. But a lame man can still do something."
"Well, you are a fool, you should have asked," Vaegon snorted and sipped wine; the nephew had brought a barrel of Arbor Dry Gold straight from the royal cellars—and the drink was quite worthy to be tasted by the Valyrian gods themselves.
"I would look at how you would behave before them. Besides..."
"Well, speak on," the Archmaester encouraged the Prince.
Aegon sighed heavily.
"One must pay for everything in life, Uncle."
"You say this to the Archmaester of Mathematics and Economics?" Vaegon pronounced mockingly.
"For a few minutes I became... normal," the nephew's gaze fixed on the flames of the hearth, as if it prompted him what to say next. "Even more than normal. I have never felt so madly, furiously alive. It cannot be explained or understood. I was... like flame, roaring dragon flame. But because of this, Maerys died, Uncle."
The Archmaester, who had brought the cup to his mouth, froze and blinked in bewilderment.
"It happened because of me, do you understand?" the Prince looked straight at him; his eyes were dry, but such unpoured bitterness stood in them that Vaegon felt ill at ease. "They—the gods, I mean—asked me if I was ready to give them my death. I refused."
"Therefore they killed your cousin?"
"No, they saved me, gave me strength. But by this they showed me what they are worth. Spilled blood. Our blood, Uncle. Not Andal, nor Rhoynar, nor Dothraki, nor the blood of those Mantarys grotesques—the flowing blood of Old Valyria."
Vaegon, naturally, knew that blood magic was practiced in the Old Freehold, but it was one thing to know, and another to imagine the scale of the bloodthirstiness of the gods of the ancient homeland.
"Alchemists say that magic is an equivalent exchange," the Archmaester spoke cautiously.
"You know no worse than I that those old fools understand not a damn thing," Aegon waved him off irritably. "What equivalent exchange can be spoken of if gods are on the other side? They, naturally, left me the possibility to become... normal. Like everyone. But if the price for this is the life of our kin, then I refuse to pay it. Better let me be lame for the rest of my life than become one who sacrificed kin for the sake of his own power."
"It is gratifying to hear that you will not slit my veins in the night," remarked Vaegon.
The nephew grinned nervously and raised his cup again:
"To a fair price!"
"To an appropriate bargain," Dennis supported him.
Vaegon thought a little and added his own:
"To god-fearingness."
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