A standoff took shape atop the tower. Viserys stood on one side of the brazier with a longsword in his hand, with only that besotted woman from Lys, Daelore, beside him.
Daenerys, her handmaids, and the Unsullied guards stood on the other side.
"Clang, clang, clang!"
Several Unsullied in black breastplates advanced slowly, tapping their short swords against their shields. They also carried the latest five shot crossbows. Once they fired, Viserys would have no way out.
"No, don't shoot yet. He's my brother," Daenerys whispered to the guards.
"Bitch, whore, you lied to me." Viserys was crying and laughing at once as he pointed at Daenerys and screamed abuse.
He waved his longsword wildly and shouted at the sky. "Ten thousand men. Ten thousand will be enough. With ten thousand elite warriors, I can sweep across all Seven Kingdoms. When that time comes, the great houses will rise to serve me and follow their true king. The Tyrells, the Redwynes, the Darrys, the Greyjoys. They hate the Usurper just as much as I do. The people of Dorne in the south have long burned with rage, waiting to avenge Princess Elia and her children. And the common people even more so. They will raise a righteous cry and fight for their king."
"Brother, one day we will go back," Daenerys pleaded through tears.
"I am the king. A king needs no pity. Do you take me for a beggar? Even without you, I will reclaim the Iron Throne myself," Viserys roared. "I will kill the Usurper with my own hands," he declared grandly, never stopping to think that he had never killed anyone in his life, "just as he killed my brother. And that Lannister Kingslayer will not escape me either. I will avenge our father."
"You are the king, you are the king," Daelore urged at once, tears still on her face.
Daenerys looked at her brother. He was tangled in too many terrible memories. Restoration, revenge, the Iron Throne, the Seven Kingdoms. Those grand words had crushed him and twisted his mind.
Daenerys had once thought him mad. Now she only found him pitiful.
"Put down the weapon, brother," Daenerys said as the Unsullied raised their crossbows, their bolts glinting with cold light.
"Shut up, whore. You are no longer my sister. I gave you to that bastard, and how did you repay the true dragon? You would not send a single soldier for me, and now you're carrying that bastard's child, jumping ahead of my claim, aren't you? You left me in Myr. My days were nothing but drink and women. I am the king. No one can take my crown from me," Viserys shouted. "My sister is dead. You killed Rhaegar. You killed our mother. And now you want to kill me too, is that it?"
"That's not true, brother." Daenerys's eyes shone with tears. Viserys had always held her birth against her. And now there was one more grievance. In his eyes, Daenerys had betrayed him. She had found someone else to rely on.
The first grievance was that Daenerys had been born too late. Nine months after their mother fled, she was born on Dragonstone. Viserys claimed that because she had been born too late, Rhaegar had married a Dornish woman he did not love, and everything that followed came from that.
The second grievance was their mother's death. Daenerys had been born during a summer storm that seemed ready to tear the castle apart. They said that storm had been terrifying beyond measure. The Targaryen royal fleet anchored in the war harbor was all but destroyed, and great stones broke from the battlements and crashed into the raging waters of the Narrow Sea. Their mother died giving birth, and Viserys had never forgiven Daenerys for it.
"Whore, make your Unsullied guards get out of my way. I'm taking the dragon eggs and leaving," Viserys shouted. "You betrayed the true dragon. The true dragon will never forgive you."
Daenerys looked at her brother and knew there was no talking him down.
"I am the king." Viserys lifted the lid of the cedar chest with bronze fittings. Inside lay three fossilized dragon eggs, beautiful and strange. Each looked different, their colors and patterns so rich that they seemed studded with jewels, and a young girl would need both hands just to hold one.
But Viserys quickly discovered a problem. The eggs looked like the finest porcelain, glazed ceramic, or glass, yet they were far heavier than that, as though they had been carved from solid stone.
"I'm taking the dragon eggs. Every one of them is worth a fortune. Enough to buy my ships, my army..." He pointed at Daenerys again, at the small crown on her head that had once belonged to their mother. "That crown is mine too. You will give me that as well."
"Stop, Your Grace," Daelore pleaded tearfully, staring at the gleaming blade and the mad king.
Daenerys looked at her brother, removed her crown, and gazed at him with deep pity. She understood that behind Viserys's madness, most of it was pressure and delusion.
"Stop? How am I supposed to stop?" Viserys's gaze fell on Daenerys's chair and table, where the letters she had written home for the soldiers still lay. The seals on the envelopes bore a quartered banner.
"Let me see what you wrote. Using that bastard's sigil, stealing the dragon banner." Viserys only grew more enraged. "You've become that bastard's slave. You forgot your brother, didn't you? Forgot where your loyalty to the true dragon belongs."
He drew his sword and hacked at the letters on the table. Then he swept the blade across the tabletop, sending the letters fluttering into the air like a cloud of white butterflies.
"All of you, get back. Let me leave." Viserys stirred the coals in the brazier with the tip of his sword, his face twisted with hysteria.
"Please stop, my king." Daelore suddenly rushed forward and wrapped her arms around Viserys, trying to restrain him. But she was no match for his strength.
"Traitor. You're a traitor too." Viserys cursed her savagely, then shoved Daelore with his free hand and drove his sword into her again and again. Bright blood poured from the Lys woman's abdomen.
"I told you already. Just because I slept with you, don't think that makes you the Queen." Blood splashed across Viserys's face, his black velvet clothes, and his red cloak. The whole thing looked like some grotesque bloody performance.
"Your Grace... Viserys... poor man..." Daelore moaned as she collapsed to the side. The color slowly drained from her pale face while blood flowed from her belly and spread across the floor.
Everyone was horrified by the sight. Before, they had thought there was madness in Viserys. Now it was clear there was cruelty in him as well.
A crossbow bolt whistled through the air and struck Viserys cleanly in the arm holding the sword. The longsword slipped from his hand and hit the ground with a sharp clang.
Daenerys felt a stab of regret. If she had acted sooner, her brother would not have hurt Daelore. The woman had truly loved him, but Viserys had always been like this. With nothing to his name, all he could do was hurt the people closest to him.
"You. You dare harm the true dragon? Whore!" Viserys screamed. He had never seriously learned swordsmanship, and he had no other weapon on him.
Then he saw the blazing brazier close by. It might be his last weapon.
The brazier was searing hot, yet somehow Viserys found a burst of strength. Enduring the pain, he bent down and tried to lift it. He no longer feared the Unsullied's bolts.
"I am the heir to the true dragon," Viserys said. "A raging fire burns in my blood."
As he spoke, he tried to hurl the brazier at Daenerys, but he lacked both the strength and the ability to withstand the heat.
"Don't, Viserys."
"Ah."
He had only just managed to lift the brazier halfway when the scorching heat and crushing weight overwhelmed him.
Viserys staggered and fell to the ground, the brazier crashing onto his upper body. The burning coals spilled out, setting fire first to his clothes and hair, then to everything else on him that would catch.
The floor at the top of the tower was white marble and would not burn, but the flames roared fiercely over Viserys's body.
"Daenerys, Daelore, and. And my crown..." Only then did Viserys begin to shriek like a coward finally facing death. It was a high, wordless scream. He rolled over and over, whining like a dog and crying like a child.
"Princess, please turn away," the handmaids and the Unsullied said, unable to stop themselves from warning her. The flames wrapped around Viserys like a demon.
"Go save him."
The Unsullied rushed forward, but they were already far too late.
Amid the screams, the flames burned on until Viserys was reduced to a blackened ruin. Velvet and hair burned most easily. His black velvet clothes and bright red cloak hissed and smoked, his hair caught fire, and his eyes bulged grotesquely.
Viserys was not fireproof. He rolled across the floor howling, but in the end, he could not escape death.
Death took Viserys, the pitiful king.
Daelore, the dying woman from Lys, looked at what remained of him. The flames had taken away his anxiety, his handsome face, his stubbornness, and his bitterness. Now he was nothing more than a corpse in the fire.
"Princess, I thank you. Lord Gendry freed the slaves, and I have always remembered that kindness. I can-cannot harm you. B-But I truly loved King Viserys," Daelore said to Daenerys.
"You are his Queen. No one can take your place," Daenerys said, looking at her. Viserys's death made her sad, but Daelore's death pained her even more.
"Please. Please bury me with the king. No. And our unborn child too. Thank you, thank you, Princess Daenerys." Daelore looked at Daenerys and spoke with the last of her strength.
The Unsullied carried Daelore's body and laid it beside Viserys's burned remains.
He was no true dragon, Dany thought, sorrowful yet calm. True dragons do not fear fire.
Viserys had once called himself king, but when he died, only a humble whore remained by his side.
The two bodies lying together seemed like a cold answer to ambition, death, and love.
Daenerys removed the crown from her head, the keepsake left by her mother, and placed it on Viserys's head. This was her last thought for Westeros.
"I have nothing else to give you, brother. This is the crown you wanted."
"Let's go," Daenerys ordered.
The Unsullied lifted the two bodies. To embrace the flames was the final rite of the Targaryen family.
In the boundless night, torches were lit all around them. The attendants washed Viserys and Daelore's bodies, combed their hair, and anointed them with scented oil.
Daenerys looked at her brother's face and remembered the brother he had once been, the one who had led her through those long years of exile.
Back then, Viserys's hair had been the same pale silver as hers, combed back and fastened with a dragonbone hairpin. His overly solemn expression made his stiff, gaunt features stand out even more. He had always lived in fear.
They were always in exile, from Braavos to Myr, from Myr to Tyrosh, and later to Qohor, Volantis, and Lys, drifting from place to place, never putting down roots anywhere. Her brother refused to settle down. He always said assassins sent by the Usurper were close behind them, yet Dany had never seen even half of one.
"Brother, please forgive me. You needed a crown, but the price was too high. Far too high..."
Daenerys placed Queen Rhaella's crown on Viserys's head once more. It was a small golden crown, wrought with a beautiful three headed dragon, with rubies for its eyes. In death, the Beggar King finally looked a little like a king.
The servants brought Daenerys another plain gold crown, and she placed it on Daelore's head.
"Though no one ever crowned you, I will regard you as Viserys's wife," Daenerys said. "My good sister, and my nephew or niece whom I never met."
"Bring me the dragon eggs," Daenerys ordered.
"Princess, King Viserys has no use for dragon eggs in the night lands," a servant said softly, unable to hold back. "Besides, the Lord Commander..."
Dragon eggs were beyond price. Selling just one would be enough to buy a great ship. The wealth from selling all three was almost unimaginable. The servant was not thinking of money, of course, but of the order of the true king of the Twin Cities, and whether Lord Commander Gendry knew of it.
"I think the Lord Commander will agree. One dragon egg stands for one Targaryen," Daenerys said.
She stepped up to the funeral pyre and placed the three dragon eggs upon it. Black, green, and one streaked with milky white and gold. The eggs remained with Viserys, that pitiful and absurd king.
The sound of hoofbeats shattered the stillness of the courtyard, and Gendry jumped down from his horse.
"This..." Gendry saw only Viserys's body, already once devoured by flame, and Daelore, that lovesick woman from Lys.
"Gendry." Daenerys threw herself into his arms, as though he were the last comfort left in the world.
"I know," Gendry said softly, looking at Viserys and Daelore on the pyre.
"So this was your fate, Viserys?" Gendry sighed.
A pitiful man. Gendry had thought that wine and women would wear away Viserys's will. He had never meant to kill him.
But Gendry had not expected Westeros to be the obsession the Beggar King Viserys could never let go. He had not died by an assassin's hand, but by his own.
"Prince, those dragon eggs..." Qyburn said quietly. Even as fossilized eggs, they were priceless. To burn them like this was such a waste.
Gendry silenced Qyburn with a look.
A black banner bearing a red dragon was brought over by Gendry and draped over Viserys and Daelore. There would be no more Targaryen banners after this. The age of the quartered banner had come.
Low in the eastern sky, a red comet burned. It was the red of blood, the red of fire, dragging a dragon's tail behind it.
Daenerys cast down her torch and took the torch from Gendry's hand. Then Gendry threw in the second torch as well.
The scented oil caught at once, and within a heartbeat the twigs and dry grass followed. Little flames sprang up all across the pyre, like quick red mice, skimming over the oil, leaping from bark to branch, then up onto the leaves.
A rush of heat rose from the fire and came straight at Gendry and Daenerys, gentle and sudden, like a lover's breath. But within seconds it had become almost unbearable.
The flames coiled and twisted, racing after one another as they climbed higher and higher. The air itself seemed to melt with the heat, shimmering in the dusk. Dany heard the wood crackle as the fire swallowed Viserys and Daelore's bodies.
"Two people. No, three, counting the child in Daelore's womb." Gendry watched the flames close around Viserys and Daelore as their clothes caught. Fire consumed all things, flesh and bone alike, and the two of them would remain together forever.
Two kings, Viserys and Drogo. One unborn child. One woman, Daelore. Gendry still did not know that the witch was dead.
He smelled the scorched stench of burning flesh. The pyre seemed like a waking dragon, lashing out with long tongues of flame. Huge orange fire swelled with the fierce winds of hell, making the nearby banners snap and crack. The wood hissed and burst, and glowing embers rose through the curtain of smoke into the endless black night like hundreds of newborn fireflies. The flames climbed higher and higher, beating vast red wings and forcing everyone back step by step.
Gendry looked into the fire before him. He had never seen flames so beautiful. Every tongue of fire looked like a sorcerer robed in red, orange, and yellow, with a long smoking cloak streaming from its shoulders.
"Is this some prophecy of the future? A war yet to come?"
Gendry and Daenerys saw crimson fire lions, golden giant serpents, and unicorns made of pale blue flame. Gendry saw fish, foxes, and monsters. He saw wolves, bright birds, and trees in bloom, each more beautiful than the last.
The logs, twigs, and dry grass burst apart one after another, and with a towering pillar of flame and smoke rising thirty feet into the sky, the pyre finally gave way and collapsed.
Then a sudden gale rose, sweeping away smoke and ash and tearing apart what remained inside the fire. The blaze roared like thunder. Amid the collapsing flames, Gendry and Dany heard women scream and the astonished cries of the Unsullied.
"I am the child of the storm, the blood of the storm," Gendry realized in a flash. Storms overcome everything.
Only death can pay for life.
Crack. It sounded like a stone splitting open.
Something unknown came tumbling out, bounced once, and landed by Daenerys's feet. It was a curved stone, milky white veined with gold, split open and smoking.
When the flames at last died down, nothing remained but blackened charcoal, glowing embers, and the scorched bones of a man and a woman.
Three dragons appeared. The milky white and gold one settled on Daenerys's left shoulder, while the bronze and emerald one perched on her right.
The black and red dragon hung from Gendry's shoulder, its long twisting neck curled around his chin. When it saw Qyburn, it lifted its head and stared at him with bright red eyes like burning coals.
"Dragon. Dragons!" Qyburn could not help but drop to his knees, and then everyone else knelt as well. The greatness of dragons was the greatness of magic itself.
Gendry looked at the kneeling crowd. His black dragon gave a hiss and breathed a few wisps of white smoke from its nose and mouth. At the same moment, the other two climbed onto Daenerys's back and joined its cry in unison.
The three dragons spread their translucent wings and beat the air. Then the music of the dragonkind's joined cries rang across the night sky, for the first time in centuries.