Chapter 162: What the City Sang
ULF
Three days after the throne room, Ulf walked River Row in a brown cloak with no white on him anywhere, and heard the smallfolk call his son the hidden prince.
The district smelled of gutted mackerel and pitch and the burnt-sugar reek of the sweet-seller's cart. He bought a cup of small beer he didn't want so he could stand still unnoticed. A boy of perhaps fifteen had climbed onto an upturned crab basket outside the salt-house with a lute that had been mended twice, and he was singing about Helaena.
The rhymes were rough. The meter stumbled in the third line of every verse, and the boy fixed it by singing louder. He sang about a queen who fled a burning keep with her children in her arms, about the smoke on the road, about the White Protector who walked beside her with a sword and no dragon. He sang about a boy hidden in a fishing village while the realm burned. He sang that the boy was coming home.
"That's not how it goes," a woman said from behind the fish table. She had scales on her forearms to the elbow and a knife in her fist. "The smoke comes before the gate, not after. I saw her go through that gate. Two years past. She carried the girl on her hip and she didn't look at any of us and she was crying and she didn't make a sound doing it."
"You've said that eight times this week, Mysa," said the man beside her.
"Because it's mine. I made the first three verses. He's got them out of order."
"Then teach it him right."
"I've tried. He likes his way better." Mysa split a fish, eyes on the blade. "It's a good enough tale. Poor girl watched her boy die on her own bed and the gods gave her another one out of a fishing village. Anybody who says a word against that in front of me can buy their mackerel down the row."
The man beside her said something about what the lords would say. Mysa said the lords hadn't walked out of that gate in the smoke either, and that ended it.
The singer sang the verse about love found in the ashes of war and the crowd came in on it, forty voices, none of them together. A porter with a barrel on his shoulder stopped and set the barrel down to clap. Somebody threw a copper. Ulf drank the beer anyway and understood that he'd been afraid for eleven days of something that had never been going to happen.
They weren't angry. They weren't even scandalized. They'd been handed a queen who had lost everything and found one thing, and they'd taken it and put a tune to it before the ink on the court record dried.
Cole found him at the corner of the Hook, out of armor, which meant he'd been walking the city too.
"They're calling it 'The Queen's Secret,'" he said. "Three different versions already. The fishmonger's wife claims she wrote the original, but a baker in Flea Bottom says she's been singing it for months. Either way, the smallfolk like it. They like the tale. The queen who found love during wartime. The protector who fathered a child in secret. The boy who's finally being acknowledged."
"And the lords?" Ulf asked.
"Mixed. The ones who were going to oppose anything Helaena did are still opposed. Fossoway is already drafting a formal protest about the succession implications."
"Then we hear it tomorrow, not in six months when he's found nine friends."
The council chamber was cold. Orwyle had laid the draft out in four fair copies and stood back from it, already bracing for someone to start shouting.
Fossoway didn't shout. He'd learned something in the gallery three days ago, and what he'd learned was to sound reasonable.
"I have no quarrel with the boy," he said. "I have a quarrel with silence. Acknowledge him and say nothing of the succession, and in thirty years there will be a man with silver hair and a mother's name and no written word standing between him and that chair. I have read what happens then. So have you. Every one of us buried a cousin for it."
"Say what you want written," Helaena said.
"A bar. Permanent, in law, sealed, read in every sept in the Seven Kingdoms. Aegon of House Targaryen, trueborn in name, barred from inheritance and from the succession, he and his issue, forever."
"His issue too," Ulf said.
"His issue too. Half a bar is a knife with one edge."
Corlys leaned his weight onto the table's edge. "Do it and be done. I have four hundred hulls waiting on Braavosi credit and every factor in that city is asking the same question, which is whether this realm intends to have another war over a two-year-old. Give them a document with wax on it. Ships don't sail on sentiment, they sail on certainty."
"You want it read in the septs," Helaena said. "You want every hedge knight from here to Oldtown to know my son's name and know it comes with a wall around it."
"I want the wall built while everyone is watching. Walls raised in private get moved in private."
"He's two. He falls asleep in the middle of eating." She turned one of the fair copies around with two fingers so the writing faced her. "Have you ever noticed how the gulls go quiet before the tide turns? My father's maester said it was the wind. It isn't the wind." She read the third line twice. "Add that no man may raise the bar against him in any other matter. He is barred from the throne, not from bread, not from a horse, not from a wife. Put that in and I will sign your wall myself."
"And what does the crown pay for the Fossoway seal on it?" Ulf asked.
Fossoway spread his hands. "Nothing today."
Ulf looked at him for a moment. Nothing today meant something later, at a moment of the man's choosing, and both of them knew it, and Orwyle's quill had already stopped moving.
"Nothing today," Ulf agreed.
Helaena signed it. Jaehaerys signed beneath her, nine years old, his letters careful and too large. The High Septon's witness went on with the crystal seal, and Corlys pressed his own into the wax and said the wax was cheap at the price. Fossoway signed last, slowly, and did not smile, and Ulf watched him fold his copy into his sleeve and thought about how a man carries a thing he means to use.
Cole came down the steps with him afterward, into the raw gray light of the yard.
"Agreed, then."
"Agreed. Aegon is acknowledged as Helaena's natural son. Given the Targaryen name, raised in the Red Keep, treated as a prince in all but succession rights. But he will never sit the Iron Throne. That's enshrined in law, witnessed by the Faith, accepted by the Small Council." Cole shifted the strap of his sword belt. "He's home. And the realm, mostly, has accepted it."
Not home yet. Five more days of Dalla and the cottage and the smell of drying nets, because a boy that small doesn't get moved for a signature. Ulf let it stand anyway.
The moderate lords had mostly fallen in line, the ones who'd been waiting to see how the realm reacted. Corlys's public support helped. The High Septon's blessing helped more. And Jaehaerys's speech, the boy-king defending his brother in front of the entire court, had sealed it for a lot of people.
Aegon walked through the city that afternoon, his small hand in Helaena's, his eyes wide at the crowds that lined the streets. The smallfolk cheered. Not the dutiful cheer of subjects acknowledging their rulers, but the warmth of people who'd heard the song and decided they liked it. The hidden prince. The Good Queen's secret. The boy who'd finally come home.
Ulf walked home behind them with the chamber emptied at his back and the lamps going up along the Hook, and somewhere off toward River Row a crowd came around a corner singing the third verse, wrong, loudly, the meter stumbling, the whole street picking it up as it passed.