(...)Amidst the stews of Flea Bottom, Prince Daemon’s go-between found
suitable instruments. One had been a serjeant in the City Watch; big and
brutal, he had lost his gold cloak for beating a whore to death whilst in a
drunken rage. The other was a ratcatcher in the Red Keep. Their true names
are lost to history. They are remembered (would that they were not!) as
Blood and Cheese.
“Cheese knew the Red Keep better than the shape of his own cock,”
Mushroom tells us. The hidden doors and secret tunnels that Maegor the
Cruel had built were as familiar to the ratcatcher as to the rats he hunted.
Using a forgotten passageway, Cheese led Blood into the heart of the castle,
unseen by any guard. Some say their quarry was the king himself, but
Aegon was accompanied by the Kingsguard wherever he went, and even
Cheese knew of no way in and out of Maegor’s Holdfast save over the
drawbridge that spanned the dry moat and its formidable iron spikes.
The Tower of the Hand was less secure. The two men crept up through
the walls, bypassing the spearmen posted at the tower doors. Ser Otto’s
rooms were of no interest to them. Instead they slipped into his daughter’s
chambers, one floor below. Queen Alicent had taken up residence there
after the death of King Viserys, when her son Aegon moved into Maegor’s
Holdfast with his own queen. Once inside, Cheese bound and gagged the
Dowager Queen whilst Blood strangled her bedmaid. Then they settled
down to wait, for they knew it was the custom of Queen Helaena to bring
her children to see their grandmother every evening before bed.
Blind to her danger, the queen appeared as dusk was settling over the
castle, accompanied by her three children. Jaehaerys and Jaehaera were six,
Maelor two. As they entered the apartments, Helaena was holding his little
hand and calling out her mother’s name. Blood barred the door and slew the
queen’s guardsman, whilst Cheese appeared to snatch up Maelor. “Scream
and you all die,” Blood told Her Grace. Queen Helaena kept her calm, it is
said. “Who are you?” she demanded of the two. “Debt collectors,” said
Cheese. “An eye for an eye, a son for a son. We only want the one, t’ square
things. Won’t hurt the rest o’ you fine folks, not one lil’ hair. Which one
you want t’ lose, Your Grace?”
Once she realized what he meant, Queen Helaena pleaded with the men
to kill her instead. “A wife’s not a son,” said Blood. “It has to be a boy.”
Cheese warned the queen to make a choice soon, before Blood grew bored
and raped her little girl. “Pick,” he said, “or we kill them all.” On her knees,
weeping, Helaena named her youngest, Maelor. Perhaps she thought the boy
was too young to understand, or perhaps it was because the older boy,
Jaehaerys, was King Aegon’s firstborn son and heir, next in line to the Iron
Throne. “You hear that, little boy?” Cheese whispered to Maelor. “Your
momma wants you dead.” Then he gave Blood a grin, and the hulking
swordsman slew Prince Jaehaerys, striking off the boy’s head with a single
blow. The queen began to scream.
Strange to say, the ratcatcher and the butcher were true to their word.
They did no further harm to Queen Helaena or her surviving children, but
rather fled with the prince’s head in hand. A hue and cry went up, but
Cheese knew the secret passageways as the guards did not, and the killers
made their escape. Two days later, Blood was seized at the Gate of the Gods
trying to leave King’s Landing with the head of Prince Jaehaerys hidden in
one of his saddle sacks. Under torture, he confessed that he had been taking
it to Harrenhal, to collect his reward from Prince Daemon. He also gave up
a description of the whore he claimed had hired them: an older woman,
foreign by her talk, cloaked and hooded, very pale. The other harlots called
her Misery.
After thirteen days of torment, Blood was at last allowed to die. Queen
Alicent had commanded Larys Clubfoot to learn his true name, so that she
might bathe in the blood of his wife and children, but our sources do not say
if this occurred. Ser Luthor Largent and his gold cloaks searched the Street
of Silk from top to bottom, and turned out and stripped every harlot in
King’s Landing, but no trace of Cheese or the White Worm was ever found.
In his grief and fury, King Aegon II commanded that all the city’s
ratcatchers be taken out and hanged, and this was done. (Ser Otto
Hightower brought one hundred cats into the Red Keep to take their place.)
Though Blood and Cheese had spared her life, Queen Helaena cannot be
said to have survived that fateful dusk. Afterward she would not eat, nor
bathe, nor leave her chambers, and she could no longer stand to look upon
her son Maelor, knowing that she had named him to die. The king had no
recourse but to take the boy from her and give him over to their mother, the
Dowager Queen Alicent, to raise as if he were her own. Aegon and his wife
slept separately thereafter, and Queen Helaena sank deeper and deeper into
madness, whilst the king raged, and drank, and raged.
Svårt att glömma ens om man vill.
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