The King of Winters

Untitled Part 21

Rhaegar

The palace was a stony island in a sea of grey. 

It took Rhaegar half his strength to climb up. By the time he reached up he was gasping for air. His muscles ached, and he felt as if he had the beginnings of a fever. That day, he remembered. Everything had started with that day. The rocks had scraped his hands raw when he had stayed safe against them. They are better than they were, though, he decided as he picked at a broken blister. 

The palace loomed larger from up here. The Braavosi had taken to calling it Dragonstone, after the ancient citadel which was the ancestral seat of the Targaryens. The building looked nothing like Dragonstone, but the people called it so after all this was the first time the Braavosi were seeing a dragon. Smoothened stones and brushed marbles formed the building; stones and slabs of marbles higher than any normal man. All throughout the sides gilded panes were set making the walls glimmer in the light. Though it was called Dragonstone, the palace never felt home. 

Each morning, from the western ramparts, the king would count the sails on the grey-green waters of the Braavosi lagoon where the narrow sea and the Shivering sea met.

Today he counted five-and-twenty, though some were far away and moving, so it was hard to be certain. Sometimes he missed one, or counted one twice. What does it matter? A man only needs ten fingers to strangle the life out of one. All trade in Braavos had stopped, and the fisherfolk did not dare put out into the bay. The boldest still dropped a few lines through the grey-green rivers of Braavos, though even that was hazardous with a killer on the loose; more of the ships and cogs and others of the kind remained tied up in the Purple Harbor and the Ragman Harbor.

From his castle he could see water everywhere all running throughout Braavos like the nerves would to a man. Beneath his palace, a slender thread glittered briefly against the light of the rising. A stream. Small, but it would lead to a larger stream, and that stream would flow into some little river, and that little river would join itself to a canal and all the canals in this city of Braavos would lead to the Long Canal, the broadest of all the waterways in Braavos. Once he found the Long Canal he need only follow it downstream to the Purple Harbor. And there he would find the whoreson who had tried to kill him the very first day he entered Braavos. Or rather that's what everyone told him except they never did anything of what they told. Rhaegar had been too occupied with everything that was happening around him and was too stupid to hear their words. He should've called back his men and send them upstream the Long Canal and dispatched them off to every canal which broke off it in search for him. If the man was half as clever as the warrior he was he would've gone upstream that way he could've turned their search a hundred times harder and could've wasted most of their time with the endless branch canals of the Long Canal. In the end he did just that, fooling all of them. 

All the while they were searching in the downstream for him the son of a bitch had managed to sneak his way upstream and then up through some canal and then to a river and then to a stream and hence he might have ended up at some end of this endless city. And now they might want to sweep off this entire city in order to find him.

And searched him they did but they could not find him. Two days have already past and still, there was no word about the assassin. His archers promised him that their shots had been sure and there was no way a man could escape from that. Still, Rhaegar did not see or hear about a corpse strewn with arrows. He had asked the Lord Commander of his Kingsguard to sent men to all the maesters in Braavos. Even if the arrows hadn't managed to kill the assassin it would surely bleed him to death or fester the wound further into infection unless he finds a right maester to mend it. There was no desired outcome in that part as well. No one came to the maesters with an arrow shot. Still, the King kept his faith that someone would bring him the butchered body of the bastard.