Vaegon, naturally, persuaded Ebrose, and Aegon was firmly assured that Daemon and Viserys had been right: there is no problem wine cannot solve. For two whole months, the Prince emerged from his uncle's chambers only for the Archmaester of Medicine's lectures, devoting all remaining time to cramming, checking his knowledge with Dennis, and re-checking it with Vaegon. The latter, to his own surprise, had forgotten not so very much since his own student days, and compensated for lost knowledge with demandingness.
Amidst the preparation for the examination, both princes forgot about their kin, and only thanks to Dennis, who dutifully visited the Ravenry, was it known in King's Landing that uncle and nephew had not yet poisoned one another with their sarcasms. Almost unnoticed in those weeks was a mournful letter from Grandmother Alysanne, reporting the demise of Princess Gael from a summer fever. Uncle Vaegon met the news indifferently—having left the Red Keep even before her birth, he had first seen his younger sister at the Golden Jubilee tournament as a grown maid, who remained for him one of many faces at court. When Aegon informed him of the Princess's death, Vaegon deigned to inquire:
"Was she as much a fool as Daella?"
"Nay," Aegon was indignant. "I knew not Aunt Daella, but Gael always comforted Grandmother... She sometimes read the Seven-Pointed Star to her and wrote her letters..."
"Oh!" unfeigned surprise was reflected on Vaegon's face. "So she knew how to read!.."
Having said this, he forced Aegon to return to the next lesson.
In the end, the arduous efforts bore fruit, and on the seventh day of the eighth month of the ninety-ninth year After the Conquest, the Prince emerged from Archmaester Ebrose, proudly clutching a hard-won silver link in his hand.
Scarce having received the long-awaited confirmation of his healing skills, Aegon, lifting a heavy head the next morning after a merry night, was met by his uncle with a plate of steaming scrambled eggs, thrust upon him by the ubiquitous Dennis, whom a hangover seemed not to touch.
"Sums or astronomy?" the Archmaester asked instead of a greeting. Aegon immediately recognized a skillfully set trap in the question and decided to disappoint his uncle:
"History."
He had received the copper link for it a week before the Holy Week, contrary to his own fears having managed without much labor the deeds of the later Durrandons, the genealogy of the Gardeners, and recounted the events of the Faith Militant Uprising and the reign of Maegor the Cruel in sufficient detail and impartiality, as the portly Archmaester Crey himself admitted. Evidently, the months in the libraries of the Red Keep and Dragonstone and acquaintance with the records of Grand Maester Benifer had not been in vain.
By the middle of the hundredth year After Aegon's Conquest, his namesake great-great-grandson felt as confident in Oldtown as on Dragonstone. Moreover, he could boast of his own connections: after the history exam, in the corridors of the Citadel, he had locked horns in a dispute with a novice from the North, who during the exam had let slip several critical remarks about the dynasty of the Kings of the Reach, for which he was shown the door by the gatekeeper and not admitted to answer. As it turned out, this was one of the numerous nephews of Lord Theomore Manderly, Marlon; a descendant of the house exiled by the Gardeners from their ancestral lands, naturally, could not remain silent on such a question. Having agreed that Mern IX got his just deserts on the Field of Fire, the youths quickly became friends and soon pored together over the problems of Archmaester Vaegon, who had finally got his hands on teaching his nephew his favorite science.
Marlon, having no chances for the family title nor even for the allocation of his own fief, had been sent by his lord-uncle to Oldtown so that he might later return as the Maester of White Harbor. To convince Lord Theomore that the Citadel itself distributes Maesters to castles based on the requests of lords of all the Seven Kingdoms had proved impossible. Marlon himself had not yet decided what he wanted more: to return home with a chain on his shoulders or to flee from there once and for all.
"At least," Aegon consoled him once, sitting in a tavern—more decent than the one where the Prince had drowned his first failure—"you will surely leave here a Maester, that is already an immutable quantity."
"Oh, aye," the other was encouraged. "Let us designate it with the Valyrian glyph Æ (Immutable/Constant) and compose the following inequality with its aid..."
Aegon could not restrain himself and laughed for the whole tavern to hear—his friend managed to mimic Uncle Vaegon very similarly indeed. When the latter read lectures, he forgot everything in the world, plunging into the world of numbers, constants, and variables, and his voice acquired that exalted intonation with which minstrels sing of fair ladies.
"And yet," Marlon said then. "I would not mind finding myself the Maester of Dragonstone one fine day."
"And why not the Red Keep?"
"Regarding the Red Keep, I shall speak with your uncle," the other chuckled.
"Then you will have to sit in the Citadel another twenty years, if not more—Allar has sat in the Small Council only his third year."
"We all walk beneath the Gods..."
Aegon derived special pleasure watching how, at the exam, Archmaester Vaegon tried to find a flaw in his nephew's solution. With deep vexation in his voice, he was, however, forced to admit its correctness and issue Aegon, and after him Marlon, a gold link. Both youths eventually agreed that were it not for the Archmaester's golden mask, the expression on his face would have been the greatest reward for them.
Economics and sums were followed by astronomy, for the study of which Aegon's idea of the normal time of day was completely thrown off. Night observations of celestial bodies, calculating the trajectories of wanderers, and compiling astrological forecasts were borne easily enough, but Uncle's morning risings, who considered it his duty to wake everyone and thereby ruin their lives, became quite unbearable. When after another night of study he complained to Dennis of the injustice of the world, the other only chuckled:
"Were this your house, my Prince, I would lock the Archmaester in his room."
"I do not think he would notice," Aegon grumbled, examining the clumsy notes of omens read lately in the stars.
Attitudes toward astrology in the Citadel were dual. Some, like Uncle Vaegon, censured it as an unscientific discipline having nothing in common with objective reality.
"Charlatanry!" the Archmaester grumbled whenever he noticed his nephew compiling another horoscope. "What next? Practicing magic? Turning dung into gold?"
Other Archmaesters, such as Crey and his colleague-astronomer Desmond, preferred to check their lives against the will of the heavens, reckoning it would save them from troubles.
Aegon himself began to engage in this in the hope of shedding light on the nature of his dreams, but the resulting predictions turned out foggy, contradictory, and vague, leaving great room for interpretation; in other words, they had nothing in common with that strange feeling of incorrect reality that visited the Prince in the First and Second dreams, as well as in the daydreams of flight.
At first, he tried to compile a horoscope for himself, but soon his faith in them was undermined. At the end of the fifth month of the hundredth year, the stars predicted imminent guests for him; indeed, in his latest letters, Daemon swore he would soon flee his Bronze Bitch and fly on Caraxes to Oldtown. However, a couple of weeks later, another raven from the Vale brought a comfortless letter in which his brother briefly apologized and postponed the visit, citing certain urgent affairs with which Father had burdened him.
Then Aegon compiled horoscopes for the whole family, sitting up nights over them, but they did not match even in trifles. When the stars warned Uncle Vaegon against rash actions and recommended behaving with more restraint, he managed to quarrel with the Seneschal—it reached the point where the venerable scholars nigh dragged each other by their chains through the Conclave. When the heavenly bodies advised the Archmaester to be more active to achieve his ends, he, contrariwise, might not appear on the street for whole days. Though, having managed to study his uncle well enough, Aegon came to the conclusion that he might secretly read his notes and intentionally do everything contrary to them. In any case, very soon Aegon lost faith in the utility of horoscopes too and concentrated on the abstract study of stars and wanderers.
And then, in the first week of the seventh month, a raven flew from Dragonstone. Vaegon received the letter himself and, having read it, passed it to Aegon. Maester Gerardys informed Archmaester Vaegon that his mother, the Good Queen Alysanne, had passed away quietly in her sleep on the night of the first of this month at the venerable age of sixty-four.
Tears rose to Aegon's throat. Does it mean that time on the ship from Dragonstone to King's Landing... was the last they spoke alone? And he would play for her no more? And she would not go to visit Silverwing? And the last letter? Of what did he write to her? Of some trifles, that the exam for the bronze link for astronomy was approaching, complaining of Uncle's habits... And she, of what did she write? It seems, of the same trifles: it is windy on Dragonstone, but warm, that she feels a little better, that dear Rhaenys visits her often with the children, and Father was there quite recently—he will be an even greater King than Jaehaerys.
The Prince's sad thoughts were interrupted by the tolling of the bells of the Starry Sept. Vaegon, who until then had sat motionless in his armchair staring with the same unseeing gaze at the wall, somehow shook himself at once, like a dog after rain, and rose.
"Let us go," he commanded his nephew. "Our Most Holy neighbor will serve the Stranger for the Queen. You and I must be in the first row. We are princes, after all..."
As it turned out, the Seneschal and Lord Hightower were also already aware: a carriage draped in black silk waited at the threshold of the Targaryen house. Scarce did the Archmaester pay attention to this, but the honor escort of the City Watch he accepted as his due. It struck Aegon inopportunely that Uncle, however much he tried, had never managed in these years to scour his royal origin from himself. After all, the blood of Dragon Kings flowed in his veins, and certain of their habits and rules of conduct evidently became as integral a part of Targaryens as the Valyrian appearance. On the way to the Sept, Aegon asked suddenly:
"Tell me, Uncle, how long is it since you were in a Sept?"
"In the ninety-sixth year," the other answered without thinking. "When the High Septon sang the requiem for Maegelle. An odd one she was, after all, but evidently, such are the ones who go into septas."
"And before that? Before any funeral?"
Here the Archmaester had to take a longer pause, during which Aegon himself pondered his own question.
"I remember not," he answered not too confidently. "Mayhaps before taking my vows, or mayhaps even earlier, in the Red Keep."
"Is that why Septa Maegelle came to you? She knew you would not come yourself."
"Likely," the Archmaester shrugged, clinking his chain, and began to adjust the leather straps of his golden mask at the back of his head. "Maybe Mother asked her to look after me, so she, the compassionate soul, tried."
Perhaps for nigh the first time in Aegon's memory, Uncle spoke of kin without a shadow of sarcasm. Well, thought the Prince, everyone grieves in their own way.
The memorial service in the Starry Sept gathered nigh all Oldtown. Aegon stood between his uncle and Lord Hightower and could observe in all detail the complex ritual of divine service at the altar of the Stranger. The High Septon, short and a trifle stout, in a tall crystal tiara, swung the censer so that from the fragrant smoke of frankincense and myrrh, the sunbeams scattered by the Crystal Star beneath the dome seemed almost tangible; when he knelt before the altar, the richly embroidered hems of his black vestments were held by two of the Most Devout, while two more brought forward an open Seven-Pointed Star; seven more holy fathers accompanied him in the procession from the altar of the Stranger to the altar of the Father, where His Holiness asked of him just judgment and mercy for the soul of the Good Queen. A choir of seven-year-old boys sang the words of prayers and hymns in beautiful voices, sometimes even hitting the notes; Aegon grimaced—could no one more decent be found in all Oldtown for the sake of the late Queen? The very next night, the Prince dreamt a wondrous melody, sad and solemn, filled with a grief that turned the soul inside out, and waking, Aegon was not surprised to discover his pillow wet with tears.
At breakfast, Vaegon unexpectedly complained to his nephew:
"I regret."
"What?" Aegon was surprised.
"When Maegelle died, I buried her. She was a Septa, but born a Targaryen, and her body had to be committed to the fire."
The Archmaester began absently twisting the gold ring on his skinny finger.
"Those Septons wanted to bury her, but I insisted on a funeral pyre. 'She is of the blood of the dragon,' I told them, 'she came into this world in fire, and she shall leave it likewise.' Naturally, they yielded."
"And you lit the pyre?"
"There was no one else," Vaegon chuckled bitterly. "Mother flew no longer, my father had no time, and yours cared not. Your brother, I mean your dragon-ridden brother, I blame not: you never saw her. To light the pyre was my duty. Mother later wrote me a long letter with thanks for it. I regret that I could not do this for her."
Having said this, the Archmaester shook his head, as if driving away sad thoughts thereby, and began to gather the egg yolk that had spread over the wooden plate with a crust of bread. When he rose from the table, he donned again the invisible, prickly armor of the eternally frowning scholar-hermit, despising everything and everyone in the whole world beyond his study.
"Return to astronomy," he ordered. "We have nothing else to do. And in your place, I would think on what to study next."
Aegon had only to nod. Day flowed after day again, gathering into weeks and months; having added a bronze link to his burgeoning chain, Aegon, after thought, returned again to copper, burying himself headlong in what was known of the history of Old Valyria.
Ancient scrolls, covered with even lines of Valyrian glyphs, told of the days of the Freehold's greatness, when the Forty Great Houses ruled half of Essos, bringing immense armies onto the field of battle, whilst dozens and hundreds of dragons soared in the sky above them. The Targaryens, who were in those times far from the most powerful family of dragonlords, now represented but a pale reflection of days past. With the death of old Balerion, the last ember kindled in the times of the Valyrians' former glory had gone out.
Having brilliantly withstood the second exam with Archmaester Crey—nothing else was expected of a true heir of Valyria—Aegon did not abandon his Valyrian researches and with the beginning of the new year 101 began systematically rereading everything concerning dragons. Starting with Septon Barth's "Unnatural History", he corrected his own "Notes on the Last Days of Balerion", earning his uncle's sparing praise:
"Now they can at least be taken seriously," the other nodded. "At least in the part not concerning Barth's musings on dragon nature."
Afterward, he took up the Andal chronicles, which contained legends of the Age of Heroes. Comparing several versions of the ballad of Serwyn of the Mirror Shield, Aegon came to the conclusion that the dragon Urrax killed by the hero was at least twice as large as Balerion at the moment of death, which caused him bewilderment:
"How did he fly then?" he shared his doubts with Marlon and other acquaintance novices. "When Viserys saddled Balerion, he could barely tear him from the ground and force him to fly around King's Landing. He would not even have made it to Dragonstone—his own weight pulled him down; moreover, he was evidently ill and tired quickly. If Urrax was even bigger, where did he get the strength to carry his bulk?"
"Dragons on the whole lend themselves poorly to explanation," Adrian Hill put in. Being a bastard of Lord Tarbeck, upon reaching majority he was presented with a choice: the Citadel, the Sept, or the Wall. Having few inclinations for a righteous life and even less desire to freeze his backside in the North with wildlings, the youth made the only possible decision and regretted now only that he could not become a knight. "An animal of flesh and blood, spewing flame, and moreover capable of flying? Sounds just as incredible as the tales of the First Men."
"Did not your grandfather, Seven bless him, fly all over Westeros, many would be certain dragons are a fiction," Marlon chimed in. "And as for Urrax... mayhaps he did not fly, because he was so huge? How else would Serwyn have defeated him?"
There was a grain of sense in his reasoning, but Aegon preferred to ask his uncle to recheck his own reasoning.
After the Andal chronicles, the time came for Valyrian scrolls. Many of them nigh crumbled to dust from age, and Aegon hastened to copy them so that the knowledge they held would not be irretrievably lost. Translating from the Valyrian tongue to the Common, he encountered the same problem Barth had encountered in his time: in the centuries passed since the Doom of Valyria, no people remained capable of perceiving the entire meaning of a Valyrian text as a whole, in the form in which it was written. Many turns of phrase seemed too cumbersome and complex, and metaphors—so figurative that to tear through them was rather difficult, and to translate into the Common Tongue without losing part of the meaning was quite impossible.
However, Aegon achieved some successes nonetheless. Thus, he discovered that his ancestors did distinguish two sexes in dragons, which with a certain degree of convention could be translated as male and female. The Valyrians themselves called the males perzys (fire) and the females ānogar (blood). They came to such a conclusion by establishing that, firstly, after the mating dance, eggs are always laid by only one individual; secondly, the jet of flame breathed during the ritual by the other dragon is at least twice as bright, long, and hot as the flame of the first, and he, unlike her, lays no eggs. Furthermore, the Valyrians imbued the names of the sexes with philosophical meaning as well: perzys breathes life and fire into his descendants, flowing in their veins together with the blood given them by ānogar.
With the heat of a religious fanatic, he laid out his discoveries to his uncle, but the other only shrugged indifferently: Vaegon the Dragonless had not forgiven dragonkind his unhatched egg and now punished it with his total indifference. Other Maesters expressed more interest but entered into polemics, accusing Aegon of incorrect interpretation of facts—saying the young acolyte had understood everything wrong, and in reality ānogar means too much to the Valyrians to recognize the right to its transmission for a female individual, for seniority passes by blood kinship from father to son, which means ānogar implies the male sex.
Defending his position in the unfolding discussion, Aegon wrote to his grandfather with a request to allow him to return to Dragonstone—in the old Targaryen library he might find new information that had previously seemed incomprehensible or unimportant to him through ignorance. Not counting particularly on royal generosity, the Prince sent letters also to his father and Viserys, asking them to send him old scrolls or at least their exact, verbatim copies.
A raven required about a week to reach King's Landing, and Aegon assumed no less than another month for the search by his brother (in whose help he believed more) for the necessary materials. He allowed that he would receive rather a letter signed by the King with an order not to engage in nonsense and even began to compile a reasoned objection to it. The Gods, however, had their own plans.
At the end of the second month of the hundredth year 101, a messenger in black-and-red clothes covered with a thick layer of dust appeared on the threshold of Archmaester Vaegon's house. For some reason looking with pity upon Aegon, the messenger accepted a cup of water offered by Dennis, wiped himself, and pronounced hoarsely:
"My Prince, Archmaester, our Sovereign sends you both his royal greeting and a message."
"And we send him our archmaestery one," Vaegon cast out acidly, adjusting the gold mask dangling on his neck. Aegon glanced anxiously at his uncle: if Grandfather decided to react thus to his request, nothing good was to be expected from it.
The messenger, meanwhile, slit his broad belt with a short dagger and extracted from it a leather bundle, in which was hidden an envelope of thick paper, in the center of which proudly displayed a large black seal with the three-headed dragon. Breaking the seal, Uncle extracted the letter, which proved rather brief. He read it with the most detached and impartial air, and having finished, pronounced only:
"Seven Hells!"
The letter passed by him to Aegon read:
"To Archmaester Vaegon in the Citadel, our son, And to Prince Aegon Targaryen, our grandson,
Royal greeting and fatherly blessing!
Hereby we inform you that our beloved son and heir, as well as your brother and father, Baelon, Prince of Dragonstone, by the will and allowance of the Seven passed away on the seventh day of the second month of this year after a brief illness following an accident at the hunt. Deep and inescapable sorrow has settled forever in our heart. We command you to arrive immediately and without any delay at our court in King's Landing.
Jaehaerys, First of His Name, King."
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