Chapter 128: Ulf's Summons
ULF
Rhaenyra's chains were still ringing faintly somewhere past the far doors when the herald struck his staff against the flagstones and called the next name. The throne room had not warmed. Four hundred bodies packed onto the benches and along the walls hadn't done a thing to the cold coming off the stone, and the air still smelled of wet wool, tallow smoke, and the sour iron of the melted swords overhead.
"Ulf of House Targaryen, called the White. Come forward and answer."
He walked the length of the hall alone. Northern lords filled the left gallery, mountain men and river men in oiled leather, three days in the capital and no love for it. They had buried sons for a war they'd arrived too late to fight, and they wanted somebody in this room to pay a price they could count.
Cregan Stark sat at a plain wooden bench set below the Iron Throne, refusing the throne itself, Ice propped against his knee. Helaena sat at his right hand in Queen Regent's black, her spine straight, her hands folded and still. Behind the throne's shadow, wedged between two Kingsguard, Jaehaerys stood on his toes to see over the rail.
Criston Cole rose with a roll of parchment and didn't wait for permission. "The charges, my lord. In full."
"Read them," Stark said.
Cole read. Hugh Hammer, dead at the God's Eye. Denys Waters, dead in the streets of this city. A hedge knight taken from a Flea Bottom cellar and never seen again. Two men of the Kingsguard's own watch questioned in a room without a door-warden and one of them found in the bay. Cole's voice stayed martial and even, but he read every line slowly, wanting each one to land separately.
Stark let him get through nine before lifting two fingers.
"You've heard the testimony," Stark said. "The dead man in Rhaenyra's court. I've accepted that Daemon Targaryen may still live. But Daemon is not the only question the realm is asking. What kind of man commands two dragons and answers to no lord but himself?" His gray eyes were unblinking. "You killed Hugh Hammer at the God's Eye. You killed Denys Waters in the battle for this city. You eliminated threats to Queen Helaena with methods some call assassination and others call justice. The realm wants to know: are you a protector, Lord Ulf? Or are you a weapon that hasn't yet found its next target?"
The rail behind the throne cracked. Jaehaerys had shoved between the two Kingsguard, and neither had the standing to lay hands on a king.
"He's a protector!" the boy said, his voice cracking. "He saved my mother. He saved me. He saved all of us when the city burned. You don't get to stand there and call him a weapon!"
The Northern gallery made a low sound, not quite laughter. Helaena's hand found her son's shoulder and stayed there. She didn't turn her head.
"Jaehaerys." Ulf's voice was quiet but firm. "This isn't your fight."
"It is my fight! I'm the king! And you're, you're," the boy's voice broke. He was crying, furious, helpless tears. "You're the only reason we're alive. You pulled me out of the dark water. You faced Daemon on the rooftop. You've been protecting us since before I could walk. And now this Northern lord wants to put you on trial like you're one of Rhaenyra's criminals?"
Ulf crossed the floor and knelt, so the boy had to look down at him instead of up. "I know," he said quietly. "And I'm not going anywhere. But this is how justice works. Men ask questions. Men answer them. And if the answers aren't enough."
He stood. Cole had the parchment lifted again, halfway into the tenth charge, and that was the whole trick of it. Let Cole finish and the hall would have a list. A list could be voted on, appealed to, carried north and copied out by clerks, and a man with a list against his name couldn't stand within ten feet of a seven-year-old king.
"Then men fight," Ulf said, and turned to Stark. "I invoke the terms your rider carried north."
Cole's parchment stopped moving.
"You're invoking trial by combat," Stark said.
"I'm invoking the right I sent north with Rodwell weeks ago. Sealed, in your hand, before your host crossed the Trident. If any man, Northern or Southern, lord or commoner, accuses me of a crime, I'll meet him in the ring, and let the gods judge." His voice stayed level. "Not because I'm above the law. Because I believe the law should judge actions, not reputations. I've killed men in this war, yes. I've done things that would make civilized lords flinch. But everything I did was in defense of Helaena and her children. If the court wants to judge that, let it judge through combat."
"Note it," Cole said, to the clerk, loud enough for the galleries. "That the accused declined to answer the charges and chose steel instead. Word for word."
The clerk's quill scratched. Ulf heard it. He'd hear it again someday, read back to him by somebody with better timing, and he let it be written anyway.
A long while passed before Stark spoke again. He turned Ice a quarter turn against his knee, then another. He was looking at the Northern gallery, at the men who had come two thousand miles to be told there would be no reckoning, and he could not look soft twice in one week.
"The court accepts your invocation," he said at last. "Trial by combat, at dawn, three days hence, in the outer bailey where every man here can watch it."
"And the crown's champion?" Cole said.
"Ser Torren Flint." Stark said it plainly, without weight, which was worse than weight. "Of the mountain Flints. Kin to my house by marriage, and the best swordsman in my army. Forty years under arms. He has never lost a single combat, and he has fought eleven."
The hall went quiet. Not the polite hush of court. The sound went out of the Northern gallery first, and then out of the southern benches as the name traveled and got explained, and an old lord two rows back said, to nobody who needed telling, "Torren's never lost. Not once. Not to any man breathing."
Stark stood. "If you win, the questions end. If you lose, the gods have judged. Three days."
"Three days," Ulf said.
They adjourned at dusk. The benches emptied slowly, Northmen filing out talking about Flint's eleven and what he'd done to the last of them, and the Kingsguard took Jaehaerys away, his shoulders still shaking, his mother close behind him. Helaena came back down the hall alone, past the empty bench, past the clerk stoppering his ink, and stopped in front of Ulf with her face pale and her eyes carrying the particular weight of someone who'd known this was coming.
"Three days," she said.
"Three days." Ulf squeezed her hand. "I've faced worse. Hugh Hammer. Daemon. A wild dragon over Blackwater Bay. An old Northern swordsman isn't going to be the thing that stops me."
She looked at him a moment longer than the answer needed. Whatever she wanted to ask, she didn't.
"Promise me," she said quietly. "Promise me you'll come back."
"I promise." He pulled her close. "I'll win. I always do."