The Prisoners

Footsteps drew nearer, heavy and chaotic, mixed with the clatter of iron chains dragging across the ground and stifled sobs.

At their head was Aen, the Magistrate of King's Landing Prison, a fat man in uniform. The moment he saw the Prince, he hurried forward with a fawning smile.

Behind him, ten jailers escorted seven or eight prisoners.

Every one of the prisoners was dressed in rags, with heavy shackles on their hands and feet.

Their mouths had been tightly bound with strips of cloth, leaving them able to make only hoarse gasps and despairing muffled groans.

"Your Highness!" The Magistrate spotted Aemond from afar and immediately jogged over, bowing deeply. "As ordered, this batch of condemned prisoners has been delivered for the dragon's... ah, extra meal."

His face was piled with smiles, but he did not dare look directly at the colossal creature lying nearby, whose mere breath stirred up waves of hot wind.

Aemond knew this was a tradition passed down from Old Valyria.

Condemned prisoners were fed to dragons, teaching the dragons to be cruel toward ordinary people and to regard them as food.

Under such conditioning, even the Dragonkeepers were merely ants delivering food in a dragon's eyes. Once hungry, the dragons would eat the Dragonkeepers who had cared for them their entire lives.

This ancient tradition had not been abolished even during the reign of the wise king. Clearly, that was intentional.

Vhagar watched this newly arrived group of food, a low growl rumbling in her throat.

The prisoners' struggles instantly intensified when they saw the dragon. A burly bald man twisted frantically, smashing his head into the jailer beside him.

Another, a thin young man, went weak at the knees and collapsed to the ground, only to be dragged along roughly by the jailers. The stench of piss and shit spread through the air. Someone had lost control of their bowels.

"Quiet! Settle down, all of you!" the Magistrate barked. He drew the hilt at his waist and smashed it hard into the shoulder of a struggling prisoner with a dull thud. "It's your good fortune to be eaten by a dragon! Saves the trouble of the gallows, and no one has to bury your bones!"

One gagged prisoner shook his head desperately, vague whimpers spilling from his throat. His eyes pleaded like those of a dog about to be slaughtered.

The Magistrate sneered and kicked him. "Want to join the Night's Watch now? Too late! Gag him properly!"

Aemond's face remained expressionless as his violet eyes swept over the prisoners about to perish in a dragon's belly.

He took the list offered by the Magistrate. It contained hastily scrawled records of each prisoner's crimes: robbery and murder, rape, arson, assaulting guards...

All were capital crimes not uncommon in King's Landing.

His gaze calmly passed over the names and brief descriptions of their crimes until it stopped on the last one.

"Terra," female, around twenty years old, from the Stormlands. Crimes: illegally hunting in the Kingswood, resisting arrest and murdering three nobles, including Aegino, second son of the Count of Hay Hall, and assaulting law enforcement soldiers.

Female condemned prisoners were rare, especially when their crimes involved nobles.

Aemond raised his eyes.

She was much smaller than the men around her. Her mouth was likewise bound with cloth, and her short dark-brown hair, filthy and matted, clung to her forehead, obscuring her features.

Yet she stood straight. Her wrists beneath the shackles were slender but seemed to contain strength. Though soldiers had forced her to kneel, her body was taut like a fully drawn bow, staring fixedly at the ground.

Noticing the Prince's gaze, she lifted her head. Her eyes swept over the Magistrate, then Aemond. When they finally landed on Vhagar, her pupils contracted sharply, but she quickly forced herself to lower her gaze again.

She was wounded. Dark blood scabs could be seen on her tattered clothes.

Vhagar seemed impatient for these appetizers and gave an irritated low growl.

Aemond pointed at the female prisoner. "Her crimes. In detail."

The Magistrate immediately leaned closer and lowered his voice. "Your Highness, this woman is a hard case."

"She was poaching deer in the Kingswood when Aegino, the son of the Count of Hay Hall, and two of his friends came across her."

"That she-wolf fought back, snatched one man's sword, and stabbed all three of them to death on the spot!"

"Three nobles, no less."

"She knew she'd caused a terrible disaster and fled all the way here. She actually made it to King's Landing and tried to sneak aboard a ship to escape, but the Kingdom Navy recognized her as a wanted fugitive."

The female prisoner seemed to understand the Magistrate's words. Her bound body suddenly trembled, and she raised her head. Her dark eyes peered through her tangled hair as she looked straight at Aemond for the first time.

Aemond met her eyes for a moment, then looked away and nodded to the Magistrate, indicating that he understood.

"Your Highness, shall we..." The Magistrate rubbed his hands together, preparing to order the prisoners driven to the area where Vhagar could feed conveniently.

"Wait." Aemond suddenly spoke.

Aemond's eyes fell on the female prisoner again. "Let her speak."

The Magistrate froze. "Your Highness, this... this lowborn wretch has nothing good to say. She may offend you..."

"Let her speak," Aemond repeated.

The Magistrate did not dare say more and quickly signaled to a jailer.

The jailer stepped forward and tore the cloth from the female prisoner's mouth.

"Cough! Pah!" The female prisoner coughed violently several times, spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, then took several deep breaths of the sulfur-smelling air.

Her voice was somewhat hoarse but unusually clear, carrying the distinctive accent of the Stormlands:

"He's lying!"

She stared at the Magistrate, then turned to Aemond, speaking quickly and emotionally. "I did hunt deer. The Kingswood belongs to the royal family—I accept the punishment!"

"I'll accept the whip, the loss of a hand—anything!"

"But those nobles... they weren't trying to teach me!"

Her cheeks flushed an unnatural red with rage. "They pinned me to the ground and tore at my clothes!"

"That Aegino... he pressed himself on top of me and said he'd use his sword to teach a wild girl like me what the mercy of noble lords was!"

She began to tremble, not from fear, but from humiliation and fury. "I bit him in self-defense! I seized the sword because I wanted to live!"

"All three of them were armed. I had no choice!"

"It wasn't murder. It was self-defense!"

When she finished, her chest rose and fell violently as she stared fixedly at Aemond, as though trying to find a glimmer of hope in his violet eyes—even the slightest trace of understanding.

The surroundings fell silent, broken only by Vhagar's impatient scraping at the ground.

The Magistrate's expression turned somewhat ugly. He opened his mouth to argue, but seeing that the Prince had not spoken, he did not dare make a sound.

Aemond looked at her for several seconds.

Then he spoke. "It sounds like you're a decent hunter."

Aemond pointed at the other five or six condemned prisoners, their mouths gagged and their faces drained of all color with terror.

"I grant you a pardon."

"Kill them."

"You'll be free."

The Magistrate fell silent.

After all, he had taken Count of Hay Hall's money. The Count wanted the wild woman who had killed his son to die in a dragon's jaws, leaving not even bones behind.

Terra froze as well.

She looked at the prisoners, who were bound and gagged but whose eyes held the same panic and fear, then at the expressionless Aemond.

This was a chance to live.

Struggle flashed through her dark eyes, but in the end, the will to survive overwhelmed everything else.

The wildness that had fought beasts in the forest and fled for her life beneath noble pursuit surfaced on her face.

"Fine," she said.

Aemond gave a slight nod.

At the Magistrate's signal, the jailers removed the shackles from Terra's hands and feet, though they remained watchfully nearby with their swords drawn.

At the same time, they shoved the other five or six prisoners into a relatively open patch of gravelly ground, though their hands and feet remained bound and their mouths gagged.

What followed was cruel and primitive.

Bloody and chaotic.

Though the prisoners could not fight back effectively, their struggles and advantage in numbers still caused Terra considerable trouble.

She was no Knight and possessed none of the elegance of swordsmanship. Her way of fighting belonged to the forest and the wilderness—efficient and lethal.

Using stones picked up from the ground...

In the end, when the last prisoner stopped twitching beneath her tightened grip around his throat, she was nearly out of strength herself. Gasping heavily, she fixed her dark eyes directly on Aemond.

Aemond had watched silently the entire time, without the slightest expression on his face, until the last person fell.

He gestured to the Magistrate. "Let her go."

The Magistrate hesitated, but still obeyed the Prince's command and had the jailers make way.

Terra struggled to her feet and staggered.

To everyone's surprise, this woman who had just reclaimed her life

did not immediately run toward freedom. Instead, dragging her battered body forward several steps, she dropped with a thud and knelt stiffly before Aemond.

Her forehead pressed against the cold, bloodstained ground.

"Prince..." Her voice trembled with exhaustion and emotion. "I... I have nowhere to go. Count of Hay Hall will not let me go either."

She raised her head, her face smeared with blood and dust. "You gave me a chance to live—not just today. My life is yours."

"Please... let me serve you. I can hunt, track, use a bow, use weapons. I'm useful..."

She knew perfectly well that he had only spared her on a passing whim.

But once she left this Dragonpit, what awaited her outside might be another humiliating kind of death.

Seeing the choice this woman had made, Aemond decided that he liked clever people.

Perhaps it would be good to train her and place her at Helaena's side.

After a moment, Aemond said, "Get up."

Terra's body trembled, and she obeyed, rising with difficulty while keeping her head lowered.

He turned to his attendant, Gard. "Find a maester to treat her wounds and get her a clean set of clothes. Then take her to... Riverrun Manor."

He recalled the place his father had bestowed upon him.

Gard bowed in acknowledgment.

Aemond did not look at Terra again. He turned and walked toward Vhagar. The old dragon was clearly growing impatient with the food that had just died.