Ser Balon’s tormented screams echoed through the halls beneath the Red Keep. I was sitting outside Qyburn’s workshop on a damp stone bench cut out from the same rock as the walls. A single torch lit the passage, and the light leapt and danced with every puff of wind from down the tunnels. On the other side of the door, the former maester who was considered as skilled in medicine as the current Archmaester responsible for Healing endeavored to save my kingsguard knight.

When I entrusted Ser Baelon to Qyburn, I didn’t mean for him to become something like the Mountain did in the show. I simply had no faith in Pycelle’s ability to heal him from that cut. I’d seen the gash the dark blade left on him. It was only a passing glance, then I went to Bronn and ordered him to be taken from the pavilion, but I remember it well. Something dark was spreading out in the veins around the wound, and the mouth of the gash oozed an oily black pus, which smelled of rotten death the same as the demon.

Qyburn had been divested of his chain for experimenting with living humans, a cardinal rule in the Citadel. He’d studied the living to discover the secrets of death. If someone knew how to stave off the magical rot of that wound, it was him.

I heard Ser Balon screaming again, followed by the clanking of chains rattling against each other. It was a good thing he was still howling. It meant he was alive. That he could feel something.

The agony in his voice washed over me, but I didn’t let it affect me. I was too focused on what I was doing. I brought the small hook knife to the top of Hopebringer’s leather-less handle, right where the wooden grip met the metal crossguard, and continued to carve an egg-sized furrow into the wood. The repetitive rasp of steel scraping off strips of wood calmed me. To someone who knew what they were doing, the curved blade of the knife sliced off the wood as easy as if it was an apple.

I kept whittling away at the handle of my sword, thinking of what happened earlier tonight. The whole situation kept replaying in my mind: the sudden cold and the bitter wind, the smell of carrion and death; the feel of Hopebringer in my hands hissing as it cut through the air, keening when it bit off pieces of the shadow-demon.

The fight against the hellspawn had electrified me. To have my life on the line again, to truly be a step away from death. That’s a thrill I hadn’t felt in a long time.

After my high came down, however, and reality settled in, I had to come down here and get away from it all. My hands had been shaking when I got on a carriage back to the Red Keep. I realized that it had been close. Too close.

So far, I had been in control every day of my life as Tommen. I knew who my enemies and potential allies were, their thoughts and feelings and motivations. I knew their sins and their weaknesses; I knew what they planned and strived to do.

But what happened back in that pavilion…

As far as I was aware, there was no way I could have predicted it. It meant my actions were the cause of it. Something I did—something I changed from the original storyline, made Melisandre get on a fucking boat from Dragonstone and come birth a demon to kill me. What did that mean for my future? Could I rely on anything I knew from my previous life when it came to the show? How could I plan ten steps ahead in the game when the rules themselves had been changed?

All this doubt and hesitation, all this fear plaguing my mind… I knew I had to shove it back down. It was a weakness. So I had borrowed one of Qyburn’s hook knives and started carving the small furrow on the wood. Whatever I would decide to do about the distant future I knew not, but I knew what I had to do now.

Footsteps pounding down the hall brought me back to my cold bench outside Qyburn’s workshop. Bronn turned the corner. After transporting Ser Balon here, he’d taken some men to look for Melisandre deep in the seedier parts of King’s Landing. Now, his fancy silver-chased doublet, the same from the feast, was soot-stained and soaked with sweat.

“They found her,” he told me, still catching his breath.

I nodded calmly, my knife cutting away. Just a little more and it’d be ready. “Where?” I asked.

“Trying to sneak out the Mud Gate,” Bronn said.

“But where was she hiding? Did she have men with her?”

“A hovel by the city walls,” he said. He hadn’t come near me; he just stood there by the edge of the torchlight. “Three men were with her. And there was also the body of a man with cuts all over. Gold-cloak I spoke to said he was gutted through like a pig, too.”

I hummed. This was different. When Melisandre birthed the demon to kill Renly, she’d used Stannis’ seed, and the kingly power of his bloodline, to power up her spell, or whatever that was. But if the gutted man had been the bestower for it instead, if he was somehow connected to the demon of tonight, it would explain how it was able to fight me blow by blow like a man used to swordfighting.

“And now?” I asked.

“They’re taking her and her men to the black cells, and a couple of gold-cloaks who’d taken her gold.”

“Don’t take her to the dungeons,” I said. “Make sure she’s unarmed, then take her to my rooms. Five men will wait with her there, swords to her neck. They’ll leave when I arrive.”

“You want me to take the same woman who’s supposed to have created that… thing, to your room?” he asked.

The steel scraped against the wood, the torch flickered. The knife paused in my hand, and I looked up at him. “I’m quite sure I haven’t misspoken, Bronn.”

I saw the lump of his throat bobbing. “Aye, Your Grace.”

xxxx

I’d just fixed the last flaw on the egg-sized furrow in Hopebringer’s handle when Ser Balon roared a final time, and Qyburn came to the door to call for me.

“It’s done, Your Grace,” the former maester said. Blood and bile covered his black robes like a shroud, and his wispy gray hair clung close to his skull, slick with sweat. The only thing missing was a scythe.

“He’ll live, then?” I asked.

There was a beat of silence. “Yes, Your Grace,” he finally said. Something dripped on the floor, and I looked to see crimson hands wringing against each other. Qyburn gave me a small smile and wiped them on his robes. “In a manner, yes, he will live.”

I stood up and motioned inside. “I will see him now.”

“I believe it’s best you don’t see him, Your Grace,” he said softly, though he did not move to stop me. “He’s still recovering.”

I frowned. “What is it?” Qyburn shuffled on his feet in a way that irked me. “Out with it, man.”

“Your Grace, when he was brought to me, nothing I tried at first worked. The wound would not close, and the spread of the black oil on his veins could not be stopped. It was only after Ser Bronn recounted the events of the night that I got an idea, Your Grace. In fact, I had recently started studying it since our conversation in the cellars. Blood magic. I believe whatever demon came to slay you this night was created with blood magic.”

The same conclusion I arrived at. “And you were able to fix him how?”

“Blood, Your Grace. I used the blood of some of my other subjects.”

Fucking hell. “Has it changed him?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. I didn’t want a zombie Mountain who could turn on me at any moment protecting my back.

“Not as a man, no. He’s still there. He simply has... urges.”

I stood in silence for a moment, barely believing what I heard. “Are you saying he craves… blood?”

“Precisely, Your Grace.” His robes seemed to writhe as the light caught on it. “Blood sustains him, just as it sustained the demon that caused his wound.”

I felt a bead of sweat run down the length of my back. Qyburn, this absolutely insane witch-scientist, had created a fucking vampire.