บท 11: sus
Aerys ran out of the hall, stopping for nothing. Baela tried to follow him, but her sister had started crying. She returned to comfort her and was crying alongside her soon enough.
With no one to stop him, he found himself a palfrey and hurried off towards the port. All the while, he kept calling for Urrax with his mind.
'Māzigon!' he said out loud, focusing on that command.
They had practiced it a lot. He would give a command, and Urrax would respond. Then he would give the command in a quieter voice until Urrax learned to respond. He had continued this until he was speaking too quietly for Urrax to listen, but she still heard it through their connection when he said it with enough focus.
And so it was this time as well when he spied her in the sky. He hurried his horse to the tallest place he could find, dismounted, and shouted for Urrax to find him. They were still working on the part about locating each other from afar. He knew they could do it, but they had yet to achieve it.
His horse started to panic as the dragon approached, and he let it run off.
Urrax landed with a thump, and he rewarded her for the good job with pats. Then climbed her and they flew off towards Ceryse's ship. The sailors screamed as he passed over them, and he delighted in their screams as he reached his destination.
Urrax landed on the captain's cabin, and the ship shook at her weight. Luckily for Ceryse, Urrax was still small and dragons are light for their size, so her ship did not capsize. But Aerys promised Urrax that they would capsize a lot of ships when they grew up.
Ceryse came running out of her cabin, and he jumped off Urrax.
"Aerys!" She yelled, forgetting her courtesies, and he laughed at managing to make her do so.
"What do you think you're doing?!"
"Time for you to earn your keep!" He called, jumping down to the deck.
"What keep?! You're not paying me anything!"
Urrax roared and Ceryse backed away, bumping into Darwin's chest. He spied a moment of delight on her face when she realized that, and she clung closer to her knight.
"What about the information you were gathering? What ships are leaving suddenly?"
"I could tell you which ships made abrupt departures yesterday."
"What about today?"
Urrax's claws dug into the cabin's roof, and the lady seemed to be getting annoyed.
"If they leave suddenly we won't find out until they are leaving, would we? I can get you that information tomorrow."
This really wasn't going as well as he had thought. It was kind of his own fault for not telling them why he needed that information.
"You at least know which ones are going to Essos, don't you?"
"Throw a stone, it'll probably land on one."
"What?"
"Half of the larger ships here are bound for Essos. Why do you think the Velaryons went to war for the Stepstones? That's the route most of their traffic comes from."
"Hey! Hey! Enough joking around! A lord has been murdered, and the murderer is getting away!"
Every person on the deck stood in shock. Ceryse gaped at him in incredulity.
Unexpectedly, it was Ser Darwin who came to the rescue.
"Forgive me, my prince. But if someone has murdered a lord, shouldn't we barricade the port and have every ship searched?"
"Barricade everything? Isn't that something you'll need the law enforcement to do?"
Darwin looked at him strangely.
"Wait. I am the law enforcement!" He thought more about it. "Huh. As a prince, I'm actually pretty high up in the chain of command, aren't I?"
"Well, in a way." Ceryse agreed, recovering from her shock. "But you don't have any soldiers except ones you can commandeer in an emergency."
He thought about that, then looked at the sailors around them.
He smiled.
"Prince Aerys, no." She protested.
His smile widened.
"Prince Aerys, yes!"
So it was that the sailors went from ship to ship, announcing the barricade, and commandeering other sailors to do the same in his name. For his part, he and Urrax flew around the harbor at a lazy pace, belching out flames as a threat, and giving authenticity to the sailors' words.
It was pretty boring work. So he ran after the first distraction he could find.
A splash of color attracted his attention, and he flew closer to find a mid-sized vessel crawling away around the coast. There was probably a name for ships of that make, like a galley or a carrack. But knowing such things was what nerds did and what he had his Darklyn minion for.
He swerved Urrax in its direction, wondering if he'd get to burn it, perhaps just a little, for disobeying him. Probably not. His authority was shaky enough as it was, and ships caught on fire at the slightest gout of flame.
He caught up to the ship easily enough. Curiously, the ship was barely moving. Traveling several leagues from the port then parking the ship near the coast. It was an effective strategy to escape scrutiny from the guards on the ground, but to his eyes in the sky, they might as well have painted a "SUS" on their sails.
He flew high above the ship then swooped down in a sheer dive, aiming for the bow of the ship. The sailors screamed in terror as Urrax's claws grabbed onto the figurehead on the front of the ship.
The vessel shook as her powerful wings beat in the air and the wooden likeness of an elephant's head broke away from the ship. They went high again, and she dropped the broken statue back into the water.
It missed the ship, but likely because Urrax wasn't actually aiming for it. Throwing things at their prey was not a part of a dragon's instincts.
The sailors pulled up their sails again and even started rowing away from him, causing him to guffaw at their ridiculous scramble.
Just then, he caught sight of two men on a dinghy, sitting still in the water between the ship and the coast. In any other situation, he would have dismissed them as random fishermen. But here, well, a ship wouldn't be waiting for some random fishermen, would it?
He couldn't make out their faces, but it was obvious when they went from shock at a dragon attacking out of thin air to panic that they'd be next.
The two men started rowing desperately to return to the coast and away from him and his dragon.
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