Pentos, 297 AC, Sixth Moon
The first thing I felt was silk.
Not the scratchy hospital sheets that smelled of bleach and death, but real silk—cool, slippery, expensive. It slid across my skin as I shifted, and for one disoriented heartbeat I thought the morphine had finally won. Then the memories slammed into me like a warhammer.
Cancer. Rage. Rob's golden light. And now—this.
Pain lanced behind my eyes, white-hot and precise. I gasped, clutching my skull, and the memories kept coming, two lives trying to occupy the same skull at once.
I am Ethan Matthew Carter, nineteen, dead of osteosarcoma and a broken heart. I am also Daeron Targaryen, third child and second son of King Aerys II and Queen Rhaella, born in the last months of 278 AC, in the shadow of dragons long gone cold.
The pain ebbed. I forced my eyes open.
Moonlight spilled through tall arched windows, silvering the room. My room—because of course Illyrio gave the "dragon princelings" separate chambers, the better to keep us complacent. The bed was enormous, drowned in Myrish lace and pillows stuffed with goose down. A breeze carried the scent of lemon trees and salt from the garden below. Somewhere far off, a night bird called.
I sat up slowly. My body obeyed, no tremor, no bone-deep ache. Nineteen years in this world and I had never once woken without pain. The absence of it was almost terrifying.
Three moons since Viserys, Daenerys, and I had arrived in Pentos, guests—prisoners—of Illyrio Mopatis. Three moons from now, in the original timeline, Viserys would trade his sister to a Dothraki horselord for an army that would never materialize. Three moons until the real story began.
I had three moons to break the board over my knee.
First things first.
I closed my eyes and reached inward, the way Rob had promised it would work. Two doors, he'd said. One for the dragon. One for the gold.
The doors were there, shimmering at the edge of thought like heat haze over desert stone. I brushed the first.
A roar rolled through my mind, vast and ancient and delighted. Home, little fire. You kept me waiting.
The bond snapped into place, bright and unbreakable. My dragon—my dragon—was awake, stretching wings that could blot out the sun inside a pocket of reality only I could open. I felt grass beneath his claws, warm wind, the copper taste of fresh kills. He was content, for now.
The second door opened just as easily. Gold. Mountains of it. Valyrian coins stamped with dragon profiles, Westerosi dragons from every reign since Aegon's Conquest, bricks of Myrish silver, even strange round coins from Yi Ti and Asshai that hummed with residual spellwork. Enough to buy every sellsword company from here to Qohor twice over, and still have coin left to pave the Red Keep's courtyard.
I let both doors close. The weight of possibility settled on my shoulders like a cloak.
Next: the serum.
I pictured the vial exactly as I'd imagined it in the void—thick smoked glass, silver stopper, liquid inside the color of molten amethyst. My hand tingled. When I opened my eyes the vial was simply there, cool against my palm.
No hesitation. I uncorked it and drank.
Fire.
It felt like swallowing dragonflame. Every vein burned, every bone sang, my heart hammered so hard I thought it would burst. I doubled over, teeth clenched so tight I tasted blood, waiting for my body to tear itself apart.
Then the fire banked, became warmth, became power.
I straightened slowly. The silk sheets had slipped to my waist. I looked down at my arms—still lean, still nineteen-year-old slender, but the muscles beneath the skin were suddenly defined in a way they had never been. Not bulky; Captain America at the beginning of his run, not the end. Elegant, lethal, perfect.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood. No wobble. No weakness. My bare feet met cool marble and it felt like I could run across the Narrow Sea without tiring.
There was a tall silver mirror across the room. I walked to it.
Valyrian, through and through. Hair like spun white-gold falling past my shoulders, eyes a deeper violet than Viserys's watery lilac, skin pale but glowing with health. Cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, jaw strong but not brutish. At six-foot-one I already towered over most Westerosi knights; now I looked like what the songs claimed Targaryens were—half god, half dragon in human skin.
I smiled at my reflection. The expression felt foreign. I hadn't smiled without pain in years.
"Hello, Your Grace," I whispered.
The reflection smiled back, and for the first time in two lifetimes, it didn't look like a dying boy.
I dressed quickly—loose sleeping trousers and a robe of black silk embroidered with tiny crimson dragons. Barefoot, silent, I crossed to the window and looked out over Pentos.
Red tile roofs silvered by moonlight. The Flatlands beyond the city walls. Somewhere out there, across the sea, Robert Baratheon drank and whored and grew fat on a throne he never deserved. Tywin Lannister sharpened his claws. Jon Arryn still lived, for now. And in Dragonstone's ruined halls, Stannis ground his teeth and waited for a war that would never come the way he expected.
But here, in this perfumed prison of marble and lemon trees, the real game was already moving.
Illyrio Mopatis—fat, smiling spider—thought he was playing with tame dragons. Varys, his partner across the sea, thought the same. They wanted to use us to warm the throne for a boy they claimed was Aegon, son of Rhaegar, true king by right.
A Blackfyre, more like. I had read the theories. I knew the clues Martin had scattered like breadcrumbs. Young Griff, pretty as a girl, hair dyed blue to hide the telltale silver. The Golden Company breaking a contract for the first time in a hundred years. Illyrio's doting on the boy like a proud father.
Their plan was elegant in the way a hangman's knot is elegant: simple, brutal, and designed to look like mercy at the end.
Step one: dangle the last Targaryen girl in front of a forty-thousand-strong khalasar. Let Viserys (poor, stupid, starving Viserys) believe that Drogo's horde would follow the dragon banner across the Narrow Sea because of a name. Let him preen and posture and call himself king while the magisters counted coins and the Spider spun his webs.
Step two: send the Beggar King and his screaming horselords crashing onto Westerosi shores like a wave of fire and rape. Let the smallfolk see silver hair and hear High Valyrian and remember the Mad King's laughter as he burned their grandfathers. Let the lords (Stark, Baratheon, Lannister, Arryn, Tully) set aside every grudge and unite against the new Dothraki menace, the way they once united against the Blackfyres.
Step three: while the realm bled itself white fighting savages who had no siegecraft, no ships, and no interest in holding a single castle longer than it took to loot and burn it, the real weapon sails in from the east.
Young Griff. "Aegon VI." Hair freshly dyed silver, eyes a perfect Targaryen violet, raised in secrecy on a poleboat, tutored by a half-maester and a bitter exile who still wept for Rhaegar. Backed by the Golden Company (ten thousand professionals who had just broken a contract older than most kingdoms for the first time in a century). Led by Jon Connington, the man who loved a dead prince more than life itself.
They would land in the stormlands or the crownlands, raise the red three-headed dragon (not reversed, not Blackfyre black, but the true red of House Targaryen), and be greeted as saviors. The boy who came back from the dead to save the realm from his mad uncle and the horse-lords. The perfect story.
Stupendous, Varys would call it in that powdered, sexless voice. A masterpiece.
Except they had made one tiny mistake.
They thought they were playing with two broken children and a mad beggar prince.
They didn't know the third dragon had woken up with memories of another world.
Their board was already cracked.
I was going to flip it over, set it on fire, and piss on the ashes.