The knock came like a hammer against stone.
Arrax jolted upright from the bed, his eyes snapping open as his body moved before his mind caught up, hands already shifting, nails already lengthening, before he registered that it was just a door.
Just a knock.
He exhaled and let his hands settle.
"Enter."
The door opened with the measured pace of someone who had decided they were not in a rush, regardless of what anyone else thought about it.
The man who stepped through was unlike any maester Arrax had seen within the Red Keep.
Where Pycelle was soft and theatrical and smelled of sleep, this one was sharp at every edge. Tall for a maester, lean rather than stooped, with a chain that caught the morning light in a way that suggested more links than most. His beard was close-cropped and dark with threads of grey running through it, and his eyes behind it all were a clear and attentive brown that moved immediately around the room the way a scholar's eyes moved, cataloguing, filing, moving on.
He carried books.
Not one or two. A stack of them, pressed against his chest and chin with both arms, of varying sizes and thickness, some with cracked leather spines and some with cloth bindings faded to illegibility. He moved toward the writing desk with the confidence of a man who had already decided where he was putting them and set the pile down with a thud that raised a small cloud of dust from the covers.
Arrax watched all of this from the bed.
Then, at the edge of his vision, he caught the subtle movement of white.
Barristan had entered behind the maester and positioned himself near the door, hands clasped, expression neutral, armour catching the light. He gave Arrax the smallest of nods.
Arrax slid from the bed.
He crossed to the couch and sat, pulling his legs under him and straightening his back with the practised composure of someone who had decided they were not going to look like they had just been asleep.
The maester turned from the desk and looked at him.
"Prince Arrax."
His voice was precise. Not cold, but exact, in the way of a man who had long since stopped wasting syllables.
"His Grace the King has requested that I begin your instruction in High Valyrian at his earliest convenience." A brief pause. "Which was apparently this morning."
He moved to the chair opposite and sat, settling his robes around him with one practised motion.
"My name is Maester Edwyn. I have studied at the Citadel for sixteen years and have held appointments at three separate keeps before this one. I mention this not to impress you, my prince, but so that you understand I am not easily surprised."
He said the last part with the faint quality of a man leaving a door open.
Arrax said nothing and watched him.
Maester Edwyn opened the first book.
And then he began to speak.
The words that came out were not words Arrax knew. They were something older, rounder at the edges, with a rhythm underneath them that felt less like speech and more like something geological, slow and deep and worn smooth over centuries.
Arrax listened.
He listened the way he had learned to listen in his previous life when something mattered, with the whole of his attention, not just the surface of it.
The sounds began separating themselves. Syllables detached from the flow and became individual things with weight and shape. Patterns emerged.
Edwyn spoke for several minutes without pause, clearly establishing tone and texture before instruction, and when he finally slowed and looked across at Arrax, he tapped the open page.
Vivid illustrations filled it.
Dragons, rendered in deep ink with coloured pigments, faded, but still recognisable, enormous, scaled things with wings spread wide across the page margins. Beside them, figures with platinum hair and purple eyes, standing on clifftops, battlements, and ships with black sails. Valyria in its height. The old world before the Doom.
Edwyn pointed to a figure and spoke a word.
Arrax repeated it.
Something in the shape of it felt immediately correct in his mouth, like finding a handhold that fit.
Edwyn's eyes moved slightly. He pointed to another. Spoke.
Arrax repeated it.
Edwyn began building sentences. Simple ones at first, slow and deliberate, pointing at each image as he named it in the old tongue.
And somewhere in the second hour, without fully meaning to, Arrax began responding not just in repetition but in answer.
Edwyn paused mid-sentence.
He looked at the boy across from him.
Then he asked something in High Valyrian, fully formed, a proper question with the inflexion of genuine inquiry rather than instruction.
Arrax answered.
Not perfectly. There were gaps, rough edges, moments where the grammar went the wrong direction. But the substance was correct and the attempt was not the fumbling of a beginner.
Edwyn sat back.
He was quiet for a moment in the way of a man recalculating, reappreciating.
"My prince," he said, and he had returned to the Common Tongue with the deliberateness of someone choosing neutral ground, "I have taught High Valyrian to lords, students, and one particularly stubborn archmaester who refused to admit he was struggling." A pause. "In three hours, you have absorbed more than most manage in three weeks."
Arrax felt something move in his face before he could stop it.
Heat. Actual heat, rising in the skin of his cheeks.
He looked briefly at the desk.
"Thank you," he said. His voice came out a half measure quieter than intended.
Edwyn gathered his books with the same efficiency he had arrived with, stacking them in a precise order against his chest.
"We shall continue tomorrow," he said, as if this were already decided, which Arrax supposed it was. "I would encourage you to speak what you remember aloud before sleeping. The tongue retains what the voice repeats."
He stood, inclined his head with the measured respect of a man who gave it where he judged it earned, and moved toward the door.
Barristan stepped aside.
Arrax watched them both leave.
The door closed.
He sat in the quiet of the room for a moment, one hand pressed to his still-warm cheek with a mild expression of personal annoyance at his own reaction.
Then he pulled his knees up and stared at the ceiling and began running the words back through his mind, one by one, turning them over like coins.
- That Night -
The king's private chambers were warmer than they had any right to be.
Two braziers burned on opposite walls and heavy drapes covered every window, trapping the heat within the stone room until the air sat thick and close. Candles burned in clusters on the mantle, the writing desk, and the small table beside the king's chair.
Aerys the Second sat within that chair.
He was not wearing his crown. Without it, he looked both less and more than a king, less in the formal sense, more in the sense that the face beneath it was visible, lean and sharp-boned with eyes that burned too bright for a man his age.
Rhaella sat to his left, her posture as composed as ever, her hands folded in her lap over the swell of her stomach.
Grand Maester Pycelle stood near the table, occupying the space beside a small silver tray with a cup upon it and a familiar bottle beside the cup. He poured with the careful theatrical slowness of a man demonstrating his own usefulness.
Maester Edwyn stood a few paces removed, his hands behind his back, his posture that of a man reporting, which is precisely what he was doing.
"In three hours," he said, "the prince demonstrated retention and application that I would not expect from a student of three weeks. His pronunciation carries a natural quality that typically requires months to develop. He responded to unprompted questions with genuine comprehension rather than a memorised response."
Aerys made a sound of satisfaction that came from somewhere deep in his chest.
"Ha!"
He sat forward in his chair.
"Did I not say it? Did I not say this very thing to you?"
He turned to Rhaella as he said it.
Rhaella, to her credit, smiled without showing whether she agreed or was simply enduring.
"My love," she said carefully, "I did wish to speak with you about the boys. Their fight today was—"
"Boys fight!"
Aerys waved his hand through the air as if dispersing smoke.
"You think I didn't fight with my cousins when I was their age? You think any boy with blood in him doesn't fight?" He glanced across at Pycelle as the old maester brought the cup forward. "Tell her, Pycelle."
Pycelle inclined his head with the smoothness of long practice.
"His Grace speaks wisely. Young boys of strong temperament are naturally given to conflict. It is, in many ways, a healthy expression of—"
"You see?" Aerys accepted the cup from Pycelle's hands and drank without looking at it. "Better now than later. Better they knock each other about in a yard than carry it into their adult years with steel and banners."
He set the cup down and settled back into his chair with the loose, expansive comfort of a man whose edges had begun to soften.
"A prodigy," he said, almost to himself. "My son."
Rhaella looked at Edwyn.
Edwyn met her eyes briefly, and whatever she was looking for, she seemed to understand that she would not find it in the room tonight.
"He is a remarkable child, your grace," Edwyn offered.
"Remarkable." Aerys tasted the word. "Yes. That'll do."
Pycelle retrieved the cup from beside the king's hand and set it back upon the tray, turning the bottle so its label faced away from the candlelight with the unconscious care of habit.
Rhaella folded her hands more tightly in her lap.
She did not speak again.
The fire crackled in the brazier.
Aerys, eyes growing slower at the edges, smiled at the ceiling with the uncomplicated satisfaction of a man who had decided the world was arranged as it should be.
Nobody in the room, save one, knew precisely why his edges were softening so steadily tonight.
And Pycelle said nothing at all.