Of Common Clay
Fourteenth Day of the Eighth Month 293 AC
The sound of unfamiliar buzzing woke Nettles abruptly, leaving her struggling with the sheets and almost rolling out of bed entirely before she remembered where she was and how she came to be here. It all came rushing back, the memories and the pain, the black smoke and fires as villages smoked like great pyres.
It had been easier to deal with in the Vale, for the sounds and sights of that place had grown familiar to her over the years. She had lived longer in that cave in the mountains, hiding away from the world than she ever had as leading herds up the Dragonmont and much, much longer than those short years when her life crossed the paths of kings and princes. She might have thought them a dream, fleeting as morning dew, yet here she was again looking up at a silver-threaded velvet canopy and the tiny blackflies dancing among the rays of morning sunlight.
The court of this new Viserys Targaryen did not much resemble what she had heard the Old King's court looked like before the war. The King was always on time when it came to audiences and judgements, but often late or absent for feasts.
Of course he didn't really need to eat, did he?
Even a month later her thoughts skipped and stuttered at that realization, at how common the strange and otherworldly was here. She never had cause to visit the Stepstones, but Daemon would tell her about them sometimes, usually when he was in his cups, and he had little good to say of them—pirates, brigands, the desperate and the mad he called those who had chosen to make them home, left unspoken the implication that he too could be counted among the latter two.
What would he have thought if he could see it now? she wondered wistfully, looking out over the city to the southeast along the shore. She could just make out the colonnades of the new
terminus, the odd old word seeming too small for what went on there—trade not from Tyrosh or Volantis, from Old Town or Casterly Rock, not even from the far Jade Sea, but from beyond the world entirely, and all of it the King's to tac and profit from.
She shook herself.
Daemon would have told me to go out and enjoy the festival while I can not brood over might-have-beens.
***
There were a lot more knights and squires abroad now than when she first arrived here, from hedge-knights in battered chain or even just a quilted coat to wealthier and more respectable lords hiding their family banners under a new coat of paint, lest they be reminded on whose side they fought nine years ago. Nettles tried to imagine a similar festival in Dragonstone or Driftmark, with knights who fought under Green banners moving freely through streets held by the Blacks.
Not in nine years and not in ninety either...
"Hey!" am unfamiliar young voice called out from behind her. "Wait up, please!"
Since she wasn't really in any hurry to get to the field with Valaena busy preparing for the journey east, Nettles stopped as she was asked. A dark-haired boy with the look of a Myrman to him and the fading mark of a slave collar around his neck practically ran into her in his haste before stuttering an apology that she could now just about follow in the local tongue. A month wasn't a long time to learn a whole new tongue, but she'd had enough trade tongue in her youth to get by in the village helping sell cheese and milk to sailors who were sick of hardtack. Nettles was thus reasonably sure she wouldn't be insulting someone's mother when asking for directions to the nearest tavern, but there were still some questions she had trouble answering for altogether different reasons.
"Are you really a dragon rider? How did you get your dragon? I thought only folk of the high blood could get dragons. Did you use magic?" Questions like those.
I baited him with sheep... oh and by the way it was well over a hundred years ago... The real answer would not only be unwise it would also get her called crazy even here, but Nettles found she did want to say something to the boy, to make him understand that you didn't have to have silver in your hair to ride a dragon any more than you needed to be called 'Ser' to ride a warhorse. "Dragon is like animal... can lure make friend like animal, but it is big animal with many,
many teeth. Mostly man just look like meat that make too much noise to it, but if get lucky..." She shrugged, thumping her enchanted breastplate with a smile: "Dragon rider."
"Really?" the boy asked. "Do you think I could be one?"
Fuck me, Nettles thought. She should have seen this coming. She had never had and never particularly wanted children, but that did not mean she fancied this one running up to a dragon one day and trying to bait it into being friends. She had long ago concluded that her own success had come down to luck as much as cleverness, something he likely wouldn't have risked if she hadn't still been young enough to think she was immortal. "There are no free dragons now..." she tried. "Up to the King who their riders be. You want dragon, you impress King."
Thankfully that seemed to get across as the child's features first sank in disappointment, then set in resolve. "Alright then, thanks for answering," he said as he ran back to his friends.
Nettles set off on her way feeling just a little more cheerful at how she had navigated the discussion at being the sort of person children could look up to in more than one way.
OOC: Nettles still has a lot of issues to work through, but she is getting there.
