girl, though she might be dirty and ill-favored, she had fought valiantly in the Battle of the Gullet. “As did the two betrayers,” Lord Celtigar countered.
The Hand’s impassioned protests and the Grand Maester’s cool caution both proved to be in vain. The queen’s suspicions had been aroused. “Her Grace had been betrayed so often, by so many, that she was quick to believe the worst of any man,” Septon Eustace writes. “Treachery no longer had the power to surprise her. She had come to expect it, even from those she loved the most.”
It might be so. Yet Queen Rhaenyra did not act at once, but rather sent for Mysaria, the harlot and dancing girl who was her mistress of whisperers in all but name. With her skin as pale as milk, Lady Misery appeared before the council in a hooded robe of black velvet lined with blood-red silk, and stood with head bowed humbly as Her Grace asked whether she thought Ser Addam and Nettles might be planning to betray them. Then the White Worm raised her eyes and said in a soft voice, “The girl has already betrayed you, my queen. Even now she shares your husband’s bed, and soon enough she will have his bastard in her belly.”
Then Queen Rhaenyra grew most wroth, Septon Eustace writes. In a voice as cold as ice, she commanded Ser Luthor Largent to take twenty gold cloaks to the Dragonpit and arrest Ser Addam Velaryon. “Question him sharply, and we will learn if he is true or false, beyond a doubt.” As to the girl Nettles, “She is a common thing, with the stink of sorcery upon her,” the queen declared. “My prince would ne’er lay with such a low creature. You need only look at her to know she has no drop of dragon’s blood in her. It was with spells that she bound a dragon to her, and she has done the same with my lord husband.” So long as he was in the girl’s thrall, Prince Daemon could not be relied upon, Her Grace went on. Therefore, let a command be sent at once to Maidenpool, but only for the eyes of Lord Mooton. “Let him take her at table or abed and strike her head off. Only then shall my prince be freed.”
And thus did betrayal beget more betrayal, to the queen’s undoing. As Ser Luthor Largent and his gold cloaks rode up Rhaenys’s Hill with the queen’s warrant, the doors of the Dragonpit were thrown open above them, and Seasmoke spread his pale grey wings and took flight, smoke rising from his nostrils. Ser Addam Velaryon had been forewarned in time to make his escape. Balked and angry, Ser Luthor returned at once to the Red Keep, where he burst into the Tower of the Hand and laid rough hands on the aged Lord Corlys, accusing him of treachery. Nor did the old man deny it. Bound and beaten, but still silent, he was taken down into the dungeons and thrown into a black cell to await trial and execution.
The queen’s suspicion fell upon Grand Maester Gerardys as well, for like the Sea Snake he had defended the dragonseeds. Gerardys denied having any part in Lord Corlys’s betrayal. Mindful of his long leal service to her, Rhaenyra spared the Grand Maester the dungeons, but chose instead to dismiss him from her council and send him back to Dragonstone at once. “I do not think you would lie to my face,” she told Gerardys, “but I cannot have men around me that I do not trust implicitly, and when I look at you now all I can recall is how you prated at me about the Nettles girl.”
All the while tales of the slaughter at Tumbleton were spreading through the city…and with them, terror. King’s Landing would be next, men told one another. Dragon would fight dragon, and this time the city would surely burn. Fearful of the coming foe, hundreds tried to flee, only to be turned back at the gates by the gold cloaks. Trapped within the city walls, some sought shelter in deep cellars against the firestorm they feared was coming, whilst others turned to prayer, to drink, and the pleasures to be found between a woman’s thighs. By nightfall, the city’s taverns, brothels, and septs were full to bursting with men and women seeking solace or escape, and trading tales of horror.
’Twas in this dark hour that there rose up in Cobbler’s