Scream Against the Storm - Perfidious_Albion - A Song of Ice and Fire (2024)

Each time the turnkey brought him water, he told himself another day had passed. At first he would beg the man for some word of his daughters and the world beyond his cell. Grunts and kicks were his only replies. Later, when the stomach cramps began, he begged for food instead. It made no matter; he was not fed. Perhaps the Lannisters meant for him to starve to death. “No,” he told himself. If Cersei had wanted him dead, he would have been cut down in the throne room with his men. She wanted him alive. Weak, desperate, yet alive. Catelyn held her brother; she dare not kill him or the Imp’s life would be forfeit as well.

From outside his cell came the rattle of iron chains. As the door creaked open, Ned put a hand to the damp wall and pushed himself toward the light. The glare of a torch made him squint. “Food,” he croaked.

“Wine,” a voice answered. It was not the rat-faced man; this gaoler was stouter, shorter, though he wore the same leather half-cape and spiked steel cap. “Drink, Lord Eddard.” He thrust a wineskin into Ned’s hands.

The voice was strangely familiar, yet it took Ned Stark a moment to place it. “Varys?” he said groggily when it came. He touched the man’s face. “I’m not… not dreaming this. You’re here.” The eunuch’s plump cheeks were covered with a dark stubble of a beard. Ned felt the coarse hair with his fingers. Varys had transformed himself into a grizzled turnkey, reeking of sweat and sour wine. “How did you… what sort of magician are you?”

“A thirsty one,” Varys said. “Drink, my lord.”

Ned’s hands fumbled at the skin. “Is this the same poison they gave Robert?”

“You wrong me,” Varys said sadly. “Truly, no-one loves a eunuch. Give me the skin.” He drank, a trickle of red leaking from the corner of his plump mouth. “Not the equal of the vintage you offered me the night of the tourney, but no more poisonous than most,” he concluded, wiping his lips. “Here.”

Ned tried a swallow. “Dregs.” He felt as though he were about to bring the wine back up.

“All men must swallow the sour with the sweet. High lords and eunuchs alike. Your hour has come, my lord.”

“My daughters…”

“The younger girl escaped Ser Meryn and fled,” Varys told him. “I have not been able to find her. Nor have the Lannisters. A kindness, there. Our new king loves her not. Your older girl is still betrothed to Joffrey. Cersei keeps her close. She came to court a few days ago to plead that you be spared. A pity you couldn’t have been there, you would have been touched.” He leant forward intently. “I trust you realise that you are a dead man, Lord Eddard?”

“The queen will not kill me,” Ned said. His head swam; the wine was strong, and it had been too long since he’d eaten. “Cat… Cat holds her brother…”

“The wrong brother,” Varys sighed. “And lost to her, in any case. She let the Imp slip through her fingers. I expect he is dead by now, somewhere in the Mountains of the Moon.”

“If that is true, slit my throat and have done with it.” He was dizzy from the wine, tired and heartsick.

“Your blood is the last thing I desire.”

Ned frowned. “When they slaughtered my guard, you stood beside the queen and watched, and said not a word.”

“And would again. I seem to recall that I was unarmed, unarmoured, and surrounded by Lannister swords.” The eunuch looked at him curiously, tilting his head. “When I was a young boy, before I was cut, I travelled with a troupe of mummers through the Free Cities. They taught me that each man has a role to play, in life as well as mummery. So it is at court. The King’s Justice must be fearsome, the master of coin must be frugal, the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard must be valiant… and the master of whisperers must be sly and obsequious and without scruple. A courageous informer would be as useless as a cowardly knight.” He took the wineskin back and drank.

Ned studied the eunuch’s face, searching for truth beneath the mummer’s scars and false stubble. He tried for some more wine. This time it went down easier. “Can you free me from this pit?”

“I could… but will I? No. Questions would be asked, and the answers would lead back to me.”

Ned had expected no more. “You are blunt.”

“A eunuch has no honour, and a spider does not enjoy the luxury of scruples, my lord.”

“Would you at least consent to carry a message out for me?”

“That would depend on the message. I will gladly provide you with paper and ink, if you like. And when you have written what you will, I will take the letter and read it, and deliver it or not, as best serves my own ends.”

“Your own ends. What ends are those, Lord Varys?”

“Peace,” Varys replied without hesitation. “If there was one soul in King’s Landing who was truly desperate to keep Robert Baratheon alive, it was me.” He sighed. “For fifteen years, I protected him from his enemies, but I could not protect him from his friends. What strange fit of madness led you to tell the queen that you had learnt the truth of Joffrey’s birth?”

“The madness of mercy,” Ned admitted.

“Ah,” said Varys. “To be sure. You are an honest and honourable man, Lord Eddard. Ofttimes, I forget that. I have met so few of them in my life.” He glanced around the cell. “When I see what honesty and honour have won you, I understand why.”

Ned Stark laid his head back against the damp stone wall and closed his eyes. His leg was throbbing. “The king’s wine… did you question Lancel?”

“Oh, indeed. Cersei gave him the wineskins, and told him it was Robert’s favourite vintage.” The eunuch shrugged. “A hunter lives a perilous life. If the boar had not done for Robert, it would have been a fall from a horse, the bite of a wood adder, an arrow gone astray… the forest is the abattoir of the gods. It was not wine that killed the king. It was your mercy.”

Ned had feared as much. “Gods forgive me.”

“If there are gods,” Varys said, “I expect they will. The queen would not have waited long in any case. Robert was becoming unruly, and she needed to be rid of him to free her hands to deal with his brother. A dangerous man.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You have been foolish, my lord. You ought to have heeded Littlefinger when he urged you to support Joffrey’s succession.”

“How… how could you know of that?”

Varys smiled. “I know, that’s all that need concern you. I also know that on the morrow the queen will pay you a visit.”

Slowly, Ned raised his eyes. “Why?”

“Cersei is frightened of you, my lord… but she has other enemies she fears even more. Her father is fighting the riverlords even now. Lysa Arryn sits in the Eyrie, ringed in stone and steel, and there is no love lost between her and the queen. In Dorne, the Martells still brood on the murder of Princess Elia and her babes. And now your son marches down the Neck with a northern host at his back.”

“Robb is only a boy,” Ned said, aghast.

“A boy with an army,” Varys said. “Yet only a boy, as you say. The king’s brother is the one giving Cersei sleepless nights. His claim is the true one, he is known for his prowess as a battle commander, and if half the tales from the east are true, she is quite right to be afraid.”

“Stannis Baratheon is far away.”

“Not so far as you may think. You may recall from our last meeting of the small council that the Swords of the Storm were in the Shadow Lands beyond the Straits of Qarth. No longer. He is much too far for tidings of the king’s death to have reached him, he should not even know of the taking of the Imp and the outbreak of war in the riverlands… and yet somehow the black banners have been sighted in Volantis. I invite you to suppose where he will be espied next.”

“Lys,” said Ned, his heart hammering with unforeseen hope, “and then Storm’s End afterward.”

“Oh yes. That is Cersei’s nightmare: while her father and uncle spend their power battling Starks and Tullys, Stannis will land with a thousand battle-hardened sellswords at his back, proclaim himself king, rally the stormlords to his banner, and lop off her son’s curly blond head… and her own in the bargain, though I truly believe she cares more about the boy.”

“Good.”

Varys’s eyes widened. “Your imprisonment must have done you more harm than I thought. Are you mad?”

“Stannis Baratheon is Robert’s true heir,” Ned said. “The throne is his by rights. I would welcome his ascent.”

“And that is enough? No matter what he has done? I do not seem to recall you fighting for Viserys.”

“That is no comparison.” Fury rumbled in Ned’s voice. “It was right to overthrow the Targaryens. They deserved to lose their throne. Aerys was the worst of them, the cruellest and wickedest of all, but he was far from the first mad king of that line. Maegor, Viserys the Young, Aegon the Elder, Aegon the Unworthy, the first Aerys… so many. So many. Other dynasties have done ill, but none so frequently as the Targaryens. Stannis is the true king. Joffrey is a bastard, and I would sooner die than let the Mad King’s line reclaim the crown after what he did to my brother and father.”

“There is every comparison! Stannis is as wicked as Mad Aerys ever was. Doubtless you’ve heard the tales from across the Narrow Sea of what is done beneath the black banners, of how the Swords of the Storm win battles in ways that are unnatural. And his deeds on this side of the Narrow Sea are worse. Don’t you know why he has not set foot in Westeros these past fifteen years?”

“That was never proven,” Ned said stoutly.

“To all our sorrow.” The eunuch was as agitated as Ned had ever seen him. “Heed these words, my lord, and heed them well. I was an orphan boy once, apprenticed to a travelling folly. Our master owned a fat little cog and we sailed up and down the Narrow Sea performing in all the Free Cities and from time to time in Oldtown and King’s Landing.

“One day at Myr, a certain man came to our folly. After the performance, he made an offer for me that my master found too tempting to refuse. I was in terror. I feared the man meant to use me as I had heard men used small boys, but in truth the only part of me he had need of was my manhood. He gave me a potion that made me powerless to move or speak, yet did nothing to dull my senses. With a long hooked blade, he sliced me root and stem, chanting all the while. I watched him burn my manly parts on a brazier. The flames turned blue, and I heard a voice answer his call, though I did not understand the words they spoke.

“The mummers had sailed by the time he was done with me. Once I had served his purpose, the man had no further interest in me, so he put me out. When I asked him what I should do now, he answered that he supposed I should die. To spite him, I resolved to live. I begged, I stole, and I sold what parts of my body still remained to me. Soon I was as good a thief as any in Myr, and when I was older I learnt that often the contents of a man’s letters are more valuable than the contents of his purse.

“Yet I still dream of that night, my lord. Not of the sorcerer, nor his blade, nor even the way my manhood shrivelled as it burnt. I dream of the voice. The voice from the flames. Was it a god, a demon, some conjurer’s trick? I could not tell you, and I know all the tricks. All I can say for a certainty is that he called it, and it answered, and since that day I have hated magic and all those who practise it, because, that day, I learnt that that is what they are. No man ever heard of a sorcerer who conjured fire by giving a heart. Tearing it out, rather. Magic is blood, my lord. Magic is pain. Magic is suffering.

“Let us not dwell on trivialities. You know what Stannis Baratheon is. I know it. We all know it. Dark rumours have been crossing the sea east to west since the day he crossed west to east. Do you want to entrust the lives of millions of children into the hands of one such as he? I took you for a man of honour.”

“I might not be,” Ned said, unmoved. He did not know whether a word of that was true, and he was not inclined to trust him. “I’ve made more than my share of my mistakes, I do not doubt. Forsaking the rightful heir because of rumours would be one of them.”

“Very well,” said Varys coldly. “You force me to use a card that I wished not to play. Tell the queen that you will confess your vile treason, command your son to lay down his sword, and proclaim Joffrey the true heir. Offer to denounce Stannis as a faithless usurper. Our green-eyed lioness believes you are a man of honour. If you will give her the peace she needs and the time to deal with Stannis, and pledge to carry her secret to your grave, I believe she will allow you to take the black and live out the rest of your days on the Wall, with your brother and that baseborn son of yours.”

The thought of Jon filled Ned with a sense of shame, and a sorrow too deep for words. If only he could see the boy again, sit and talk with him… pain shot through his broken leg, beneath the filthy grey plaster of his cast. He winced, his fingers opening and closing helplessly. He gasped at Varys, “And why would I do that?”

“Your daughter.”

A chill pierced Ned’s heart. “My daughter…”

“Surely, you did not think I’d forgotten about your sweet innocent, my lord? The queen most certainly has not.”

“No,” Ned pleaded, his voice cracking. “Varys, gods have mercy, do as you like with me, but leave my daughter out of your schemes. Sansa’s no more than a child.”

“Rhaenys was a child too. Prince Rhaegar’s daughter. A precious little thing, younger than your girls. She had a small black kitten she called Balerion, did you know? I always wondered what happened to him. Rhaenys liked to pretend he was the true Balerion, the Black Dread of old, but I imagine the Lannisters taught her the difference between a kitten and a dragon quick enough, the day they broke down her door.” Varys gave a long weary sigh, the sigh of a man who carried all the sadness of the world in a sack upon his shoulders. “The High Septon once told me that as we sin, so do we suffer. If that’s true, Lord Eddard, tell me… why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones? Ponder it, if you would, while you wait upon the queen. And spare a thought for this as well: The next visitor who calls on you could bring you bread and cheese and the milk of the poppy for your pain… or he could bring you Sansa’s head.

“The choice, my dear lord Hand, is entirely yours.”

More than twenty years before, there was a day when a singer came to the court of Storm’s End, from the bustle of the capital. He sang sweet songs, but after he had come and gone, it so happened that Stannis Baratheon fell ill.

It was only a winter chill, but he was only a young boy, too small and weak to fight it. It worsened, and before long he was confined to his bed, and often slept longer than a single night. Once, when he was pretending to be asleep, he overheard Maester Cressen telling his lady mother that he might not survive.

In the end, he did. But while he lay there in a great deep sleep, on the verge of death, he dreamt a dream unlike any dream that he had dreamt before. He stood upon what felt like a hard stone surface, hot like a furnace. The full moon shone above him, as a pretty silver disc, outshone by a great orange glow beneath his feet, as if from a vast beacon fire. There were clouds over his head. They seemed too close.

“Where am I?” he called at the top of his voice. Nobody answered.

Stannis was dizzy and afraid. The air felt too thin to breathe. He sat down, to steady himself. He was on a surface of white stone, somewhere far higher than the walls of Storm’s End. He did not like to imagine what might lie beyond it.

It puzzled him that he was dreaming of this. He had never seen or thought of anywhere like it. But he was not afraid. Sometime the dream would end, and when it ended he would be at home.

What if you aren’t?

It was a voice that Stannis did not know. “Don’t be silly,” he told it, turning around to speak to it. It was a crow, keeping level with the height of his face, flapping its wings in the distance. “Of course I will be at home. I am at home, really.”

How sure are you of that?

He had thought he was. “Certain,” he said, willing himself to believe it.

Very well, child, said the voice, sardonically. Then you won’t object to this.

The crow flew away.

He was alone. It still felt strange to breathe; he had to take more breaths than usual. But he was not going to say he had been wrong. He had said that he would be at home, and so he would do it. He would make sure that he would be.

Defiantly Stannis stood, walked to the edge of the white stone platform and dared a glance downward. The ground was so far away! He gazed at it with wonder. There were fields like little squares smaller than the thickness of a fingernail, and houses that were tinier still. His eyes kept going inward, coming ever closer to looking straight down. Then they were straight down. Below the shining beacon, below hundreds and hundreds of feet of stone, a sheer drop, he caught a glimpse of something far beneath him, something black as pitch that oozed with ancient malice, and he shrieked, and he shielded his eyes, and he stumbled away.

It was cold to be so high. Stannis shivered, and wrapped his arms around himself for warmth. There he stayed for a long while. How long, he did not know. He did not dare look down. The drop was far and terrible, though not so terrible as what lay beneath. Why was his lord father not coming? Why was Robert not coming? If this were a nightmare of being trapped in endlessness, it should end at the moment of horror, as did all nightmares. Why was he not waking up? Why was he not at home?

“Where am I?” he called, louder this time, tearfully. “Somebody come!”

Nobody answered.

Had anybody heard?

How was he going to get home?

But somebody had heard. Claws gripped his shoulder.

Fly, said the voice of the crow.

“I can’t fly,” wept Stannis. “I’m going to die here.”

How sure are you of that?

“Very,” said Stannis.

You said that before, the crow pointed out. You were wrong. Try.

“I was wrong. Now I’m right.”

Oh gods give me patience, said the crow. Suppose that you aren’t going to die, child. How will you get home?

“I won’t.”

Suppose you knew that you already had. How would you guess you had done it?

“Climbing.”

The crow’s head turned down. Really?

“No,” he admitted. “How do I get home?”

Come with me.

Stannis did. The crow flew ahead of him. It led him to the very edge.

Look down.

He did.

The houses below were thin as fingernails, and yet the world below spread away from him, huge and sprawling far away. There was a city below him, he could see, but from this height it was like a city of ants. The stone of most of the tower was fair, but beneath it was a greasy matte blackness that drank the light and let none leave it. It made his skin crawl just by seeing it.

Look further.

He looked further, and saw the vast stretches of the mainland, green and golden fields dotted with tiny towns, going far, far, far. He glanced to his right, and saw the single tower of Storm’s End, at the coast, in the distance, unreachable.

Not there, the crow said. Look north. Look further.

He looked further. How could he see so much, in black of night? Surely he could not, in the real world. But he did. Somehow the dream-light of the tower’s beacon was enough for him. He looked beyond, and saw green fields give way to frozen tundra, and an enormous wall of ice at the end of the world.

The end of the world? The crow snorted. Hardly. If only it were… Look further.

He did. He looked north past the Wall, past a dark menacing forest, past rivers of ice, past a land so cold that there were not even the tiny shapes of trees and animals, only featureless white… and he looked past that, past everything, to the uttermost north, and the white was marred with blue, and his eyes were met by pale blue as bright as stars, and he knew those eyes were looking straight back at him.

He screamed.

Now you see, said the crow.

“What are they?”

The Others, the crow said matter-of-factly. They dwell in the Land of Always Winter. They are coming for the realms of men. You will learn what I can teach, and you and I are going to stop them.

“You are mad,” said Stannis.

Am I?

He looked at the crow, hovering in front of him. There was another eye between where there should have been two. The crow’s third eye regarded him steadily, shining with otherworldly knowledge.

“Maybe not,” he admitted.

Somebody has to, said the crow.

“I see,” said Stannis. “Show me.”

Only if you live, said the crow. You cannot be here forever. Are you going to get home?

“Yes,” said Stannis.

Then you have to fly.

“But I can’t fly.”

Jump, and fly. Or you can die here. What other choice do you have?

Stannis jumped, and he flew.

The tall tower fell away into the distance, and the crow followed him, and the crow flew into his face. Its beak bit at his forehead. Stannis shouted with surprise, and the world dissolved around him.

When he woke up, he saw Maester Cressen’s kindly face, smiling with relief. “My lady!” the maester called. “He’s awake!”

“Maester Cressen,” Stannis asked him, “I had a dream when I could fly. Can I fly?”

The maester stroked his forehead gently. “No, child. You’ll never fly. But it… it is pleasing beyond words that you have woken.”

But his forehead felt hot where the three-eyed crow had touched him, though he pressed a hand to it and he could feel no eye there. He resolved, I will try anyway.

And so he did. He dreamt of the three-eyed crow many times afterwards, and listened to what it had to tell him, of what could be done, of what should be done and of the enemy that must be faced. They were interesting dreams, though he was never quite sure if they were real. He tried to tell his lady mother once, but she knelt in front of him so she could look into his eyes and told him solemnly that it was not wise to dwell on what could not be and to live in dreams. Stung, he did not tell anybody after that. It was not doing anybody any harm. It could remain his little secret.

There came a time, a few years later, when Robert was gifted a gyrfalcon called Thunderclap who never missed her strike. Robert was delighted with her. Stannis watched, and admired, and wanted one himself. His father said he would not have one yet, for he was younger than Robert, but he still wanted one.

He happened to be wandering in the forest, watching one of his lord father’s hunts, when he saw a goshawk that did not fly away from him. He came closer, instantly enchanted, none the less so when he saw she had a broken wing. He begged his lord father and promised to do everything for her himself, and Lord Steffon permitted him to keep her. He named her Proudwing. He fed her, and tended her, and she would perch upon his shoulder or flutter about him, as the mood took her. Even when he was as old as Robert had been when he received Thunderclap, and he was offered another bird, Stannis refused. Proudwing was his, and he would make it so that she could fly.

One day he returned from one of his attempts hawking with her. He had been unsuccessful. Robert was learning from the master-at-arms in the yard, who always praised Robert’s skill and strength of arm.

Yet none of that stopped Robert from stopping and turning as soon as he espied his younger brother. “What did you catch hawking today?” he asked, bright-eyed.

Stannis was, as usual, empty-handed. Cheeks burning, he had to say so.

“Oh well,” said Robert. “You should try another bird, Stannis. I don’t think you’re bad at it. You just won’t catch anything with Weakwing.”

Tears shone in Stannis’s eyes. He turned on his heel and ran away. He could not wait for Robert to be away in the Eyrie.

Afterwards, his great-uncle Harbert found him alone in a cold room high in Storm’s End’s sole tower. “There, there,” Harbert said, striding forward long-legged to embrace him.

“Robert was cruel,” said little Stannis, warmed by his great-uncle’s arms.

“I heard. He didn’t mean to be,” said Harbert. “Listen, child. I know you have grown attached to that hawk of yours, but this is too much. You’re ten now, closer to a man grown than a new babe, and a man grown, a Lord of Storm’s End, cannot be seen to cry.”

“Father is Lord of Storm’s End, and Robert will be after him.”

“So we must hope, but that might not be so. There are sometimes accidents. You are of House Baratheon, and ours is the blood of Durran, who defied the gods themselves in his pride. You’re young yet, but you cannot be seen to make such displays of weakness as crying in front of the men. You hear me?”

Harbert’s comment was gently worded but that did not take away from its sting. “I understand,” said Stannis, sniffling. “I… I don’t often, you know I don’t. I’ll do better.”

“I’m sure you will,” Harbert said. “And that begins with this hawk.”

“I’m keeping Proudwing,” Stannis said fiercely.

“You shouldn’t. Stannis, you’re a sweet child, but this matter of the hawk is making you look like a fool to our retainers. Your hawk scarcely flies. She never goes any higher than the treetops. Do you believe that is appropriate to a Baratheon of Storm’s End?”

“She will fly higher!” said Stannis, stamping his foot. “She will!”

Harbert said softly, “Child, of all the things I know of you, I never knew you to be a liar.”

The accusation hit hard, especially from genial Harbert who so rarely spoke such things.

“Am I?”

“Yes. You are lying to yourself. She will not fly higher. She was too badly hurt, and now she is crippled, and she will never hunt again. In your heart, you know this.”

Stannis managed a tremulous nod. “So we’ll release her?”

“She would starve,” said his great-uncle sharply. “That would not be merciful. The kindest thing to do at this point is to put her down.”

Stannis watched as his great-uncle did it. He hated the sight, but the least he owed to her was that. Whatever else he was, he was not a coward.

Their family dinner was solemn that night, and breakfast was solemn the day after. A week later, he and Robert went hawking with their lord father. Stannis watched Thunderclap soar and bring Robert a fat reddish juicy grouse, his heart filled with sorrow and envy. He watched his brother’s jubilant laugh and his lord father’s proud smile.

Proudwing would never fly like Thunderclap was flying.

Sitting straight-backed on his horse, his eyes traced Thunderclap’s every move. She danced on the winds with speckled white wings, and her every movement he resented. It was so unfair that she could fly when Proudwing could not…

He slipped, and he went flying.

He stumbled a little at first, but soon the wind was in his face and flowing beneath his arms. A force rushed up to meet him, hard and angry and pushing out, out, out. He ignored it, did not weep, did not falter, pushed on through the pain. He danced in the sky, and he was happy.

He slipped out again, and returned to how he had been. “She just went up and down and in circles!” Robert was telling their lord father excitedly. “I’ve never seen her do that before!”

Stannis saw the falcon above, looking for prey, and his brother below, and paid heed to neither of them. He relaxed the reins; he had been gripping them too tightly. It’s real, he thought with wonder, the dreams are real, the three-eyed crow is real, the Others, what I can do, it’s all real…

He did not know how to feel. His sense of triumph was a powerful thing, and he knew that Thunderclap was his now, his, his gyrfalcon, more completely than she had ever been Robert’s. And yet… No, child, he recalled, you’ll never fly.

Stannis knew better now. The maester lied to me.

“You understand, Robert,” his lord father said, “the weight of that responsibility?”

Robert’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes, Father. I’ll do you proud, I swear.”

His father smiled. “That, I will see when I return. Be well, and be mindful of those matters I have warned you of, especially Lord Penrose’s damn fool petition. I expect he’ll try to present it again in my absence.” He turned to Stannis. “Put your heart into your training and heed what your brother tells you.”

Stannis bowed his head. “Yes, Father.”

His lord father gave him a nod and turned to walk to the docks.

His lady mother lingered, seeing something in his face. To a burst of protest from Robert, she clasped both her elder sons to her chest. “Never fear. I know we’ve not been away so long before, but it will be over before you know it. Volantis is far from here but it’s no den of barbarians. We’ll be quite safe. And in the meantime you’ll have each other.”

Stannis wanted to speak to her, to tell her not to go, to tell her that his brother Robert was nothing like having her at home. He would have done so, even with Robert right here to listen… but he dared not face her quiet disappointment. He was silent.

His mother studied his face for moments longer. “Take care of your little brother.”

“I will,” Stannis promised, thinking of little Renly, whose first nameday had been a fortnight ago, as Robert gave his own louder assurances. He watched his lady mother turn her back on him and walk away.

Lord Steffon and Lady Cassana Baratheon boarded their ship. They stood there on the deck, his lord father tall and broad with a mane of hair as black as coal, his lady mother short and round and lovely-gowned and kindly-eyed. His mother’s head was resting on his father’s shoulder. Their arms were intertwined. The wind blew soft and steady, and the Windproud was borne away.

He might have stayed there longing till the day of their homecoming, but Maester Cressen and the guards escorted him and his brother back into the castle as soon as the ship had left its dock. Robert chattered for a while about meaningless things, talking simply to talk, as if that could fill the yawning abyss of absence. Stannis let him. At last, Robert tried, “Would you like to go into the woods and bag a hart?”

Stannis looked up. “I’ve never much liked hunting deer. You speak so frequently and fondly of every little thing that ever happened in the Eyrie, I’d have thought you might remember.”

Robert flushed. “How was I supposed to know?” he complained, lip curling. “It has been a long time.”

“It has,” Stannis agreed, inclining his head, and thought, Too long. Lord Jon and Ned Stark have made you like a stranger to us. “If I may be excused?”

With an irritable wave of a hand, Robert allowed it, and Stannis retreated to his own chambers. He locked himself in his innermost chamber, once, twice, thrice, to be certain that he would not be disturbed, and then in an instant he was a thousand miles away.

The wind was cold against his feathers as he dived towards a distant speck. It swelled and swelled in his sight, racing towards him… tried to run… failed. He plucked it up with his claws and beat his wings with vigour, and with that sudden straining impulse he was swooping up and away.

An instant—and a thousand earthy smells assailed his sensitive nose. There was snow all over the ground, but he could still smell what lay underneath. He padded forward on soft paws, quiet, purposeful, following a faint trail of scent that might lead him to prey that could be eaten to make milk for the young ones.

Another instant—and he was bigger and stronger, strong enough to bear the heavy weight upon him. He walked wearily down a familiar dirt-path, knowing every inch of it but still carrying on. There was something tight around his neck. The sooner he came, the sooner he could stop, and sleep, and have an apple.

Another instant—and he was Stannis Baratheon, second son of the Lord and Lady of Storm’s End, standing upright. It pleased him to notice that. He had touched their thoughts lightly, seeing what they saw without fighting against their minds and taking control; for if he had taken control, he would not know how to act and live their lives as they could. It was not as if he were exclusively an eagle or a fox or a horse. He had been many things. He had to be so delicate that he was only partly there, and the fact that his man’s body had not fallen was the proof of it. He had not lost control of his man’s self as he dwelt in beasts. His thoughts had been in both places. No mere skinchanger, he had been told, could consciously shift between the minds of multiple beasts a thousand miles away with such delicacy… but he was not a skinchanger. He was something more.

From the day he slipped into the form of Robert’s falcon, Stannis had known that his dreams were real. Thenceforth he had listened attentively to whatever the three-eyed crow had to tell him. He had been taught many things in the four years since—to direct the winds, such as to guide the sails of a ship or make an arrow’s shot fly further and harder and truer than ought to be possible; to weave glamours with the power to deceive the human eye; to receive dreams and to command them, to create them and send them to others—but his favourite of all was skinchanging. All power required sacrifice, the crow had told him. With skinchanging the sacrifice was that the shift of thoughts went both ways. Spend time as a beast, his mind influencing its, and its mind would influence his, making him more eaglelike or foxlike or horselike. Use it too much, especially if it were too much with a single beast, and it would alter his nature to be like its own. It was his favourite because that was mild compared to the price that other magics demanded.

He further practised what had been taught to him, despite the price, and then he went to bed, and slept, and permitted himself to dream.

He dreamt that he was walking in a howling gale in some snowy place in the far north. He was well accustomed to it by now. He had been here so many times that he could navigate it in his sleep. He was not at all surprised to see a black shape hovering in front of his face.

“Greetings, crow,” Stannis said. “What is your name?”

You know I’ll not tell you that. The voice that he associated with the crow was only thoughts inserted to his head, he knew, not any sort of physical sound coming from a mouth, but somehow it was flavoured with amusem*nt. Yet you ask every time. You are a persistent little boy, aren’t you?

“I’ve seen four-and-ten namedays!”

I’m so sorry, said the crow, you’re veritably ancient, I confess it. I take it your day’s working has gone well.

“Yes.”

Good. Now I may tell you what I dared not tell before: you will soon be ready to proceed with your training.

“Ready for what?”

Ready to use the eyes of the heart-trees.

That notion delighted Stannis. Of all the workings that the crow had spoken of, none had so captured his imagination as the heart-trees, whereby a greenseer could see through eyes carved into white weirwood, all over Westeros, to look at things that were past and things that were happening now and even to catch glimpses of things yet to come. Other men of might—First Men skinchangers, Qartheen warlocks, aeromancers of Asshai—could do the other things that he could do, he had been told, but using the power of the heart-trees was what made a greenseer a greenseer.

There was just one difficulty. “I thought you said you couldn’t teach me that until I was with you,” said Stannis. “You said I would need to take the black, then disappear ranging beyond the Wall, and I would have to come and find you here.” He gestured around him. “What’s changed?”

What has changed? I thought you knew better than to think of the world in such linear terms. No true greenseer’s actions are determined solely by the past. It is what will change. You’ll soon be free to go to the Wall. The crow’s three eyes were dark and gleaming. Tell me, Stannis Baratheon: do you always want to know more than you know, no matter what it is that you may learn? Such knowledge is a terrible burden, and in this case it isn’t necessary for you to bear it.

“I’ve no need of tricks,” said Stannis. “If you didn’t want me to know, you wouldn’t have raised the subject. This test of yours is hardly subtle. Tell me and be done with it.”

This is no trick. I tell you because I do not know which you will resent less: not being told now, and discovering it then, or being told and discovering it now. Would you curse me for leaving you ignorant or curse me for the knowledge?

Stannis said, “I want to know.”

I thought you would say that, the crow said. Very well. Your mother and father will not forbid you from taking the black because they’ll not return from Volantis alive.

The words felt like a punch to the stomach. Stannis blurted out, “You’re lying.”

There was only sadness in the crow’s voice. If you feel you need to believe that.

His heart thumped in his chest. Tears stung at his eyes. Mother… He croaked, “How?”

A storm. They will reach Volantis, and they will sail away, and they will be struck by a storm within sight of Storm’s End in Shipbreaker Bay, and their ship will be broken.

“A storm,” Stannis murmured. “You told me once that you summoned a storm, when you were younger, to stop an army from crossing the sea to aid your enemies. Is this… I mean… Will this be your doing?”

No. I would not. I am not so cruel as you believe of me. But it will happen, nonetheless.

He thought of his mother’s smile. He thought of the last hug she had given him.

“No.”

You can’t stop it; it will happen no matter what you do. All you will cause yourself is grief, the crow said urgently. A greenseer can see what is yet to come but not change it… Stannis! Listen to me, Stannis…

But the dream sent by the crow was dissolving all around him, snow and trees blending into a pale mist and thence to nothing. He was master of his own mind, no mere thrall of the crow, and he would be master of his own destiny.

After a succession of meaningless magicless dreams, Stannis Baratheon awoke.

He told no-one of his intent, and practised magics. Not skinchanging; that would be of no use to him here. Other magics. He skinchanged into rats and dogs and cats around the castle, and birds from outside, and brought them to his chambers. They served as his sacrifices. He had to cut their throats, and with their blood upon his hands he called upon the wild winds and through the blood that he had spilt he forced them to serve him. At first he summoned simple gusts with small dead mice, but he needed more, much more. He had grown proficient in his years studying under the three-eyed crow, and with his power he would thwart the storm and steer his mother and father home.

Sometimes Robert summoned him to dine together, and he did not refuse his elder brother, but he took no pleasure in it. He had no wish to listen to his brother babble on about everything he had seen and done with Ned Stark in his time away, nor to listen to Robert’s awkward, clueless questions about his own life. His elder brother was only here because their lord father was away and he had to act as Lord of Storm’s End, no matter that he was inattentive. This period—only a few turns of the moon—was the longest time in which Robert had dwelt continuously at Storm’s End since his departure to the Eyrie years ago. Soon he would be gone again, back to the Eyrie which he so plainly preferred, and then Stannis would be without him. Stannis had no trust in Robert’s attempted closeness and wished he would stop trying. It was obvious to Stannis that he meant none of it.

In time, Robert understood his tone and stopped inviting him. He dined alone thenceforth, while Robert laughed with lickspittles calling themselves friends and little Renly was tended to in the nursery. He liked it better that way, when his brother did not pretend to hold affection that clearly did not exist.

On the day the Windproud drew near enough to Storm’s End to be almost in sight, Stannis knew at once. For weeks Stannis had delved into the thoughts of seagulls, ever-so-lightly, ever-so-briefly, once in every hour of every day, so that he would know when the time had come that his lady mother and lord father were near home. Moons before, when he first learnt of the crow’s prediction for his mother and father, he had summoned the birds he had formed bonds with to the woods around Storm’s End. From the length and breadth of Westeros, all across the Seven Kingdoms, they had come, the several birds whose skins he had often worn, some of them for years. He had kept them in the woods for a while, feeding them at his window.

Now, one by one he made them come to his window, his companions, knowing him, trusting him, and he cut their throats.

It pained him piteously to do it. He knew them well. How could he not? He had been them. He had walked on their legs, flown on their wings, warmed their eggs, lived in their lives. He understood, to an extent, how they thought and felt and acted. Each and every one of them he was strongly attached to. It would have been easier to slay any beast of the woods, for he could easily find one and force it to come to him… easier, but poorer by far in effect. That was the cruelty of it. He needed to hurt himself; he needed his own pain. Many times the three-eyed crow had told him about what it meant, in sorcery, to pay a price: Sacrifice is never easy, Stannis. Or it is no true sacrifice.

Once his grisly work was done, Stannis rushed up to the balcony at the top of the single gigantic tower of Storm’s End. Robert was already there. “It’s them, Stannis, look, it’s them!” Robert was saying, pointing excitedly. Stannis did not listen. Before he even started to run upstairs, he was at work.

Above the sea, above Storm’s End, the wind was streaming. It had been a southerly wind, quite fierce, but Stannis reached out and tried to hold it with his thought. It was like wrestling a whale. The air howled against him, a titanic natural force, a power of the world.

He put his own power against it and tried to make them match.

Robert, blissfully unaware, was going on about all the things he wanted to tell his lord father. Stannis gripped the railing so tightly that his nails were carving lines into his palms.

I bind you! By blood and suffering I bind you!

Any fool could talk to the wind. To rule it was another matter. He had flown with his companions long and far, knew the nature and the value of their lives, and now that was no more. He drowned himself in his own hate of what he himself had done, embracing it, exulting in his agony, letting it swell to fill his mind and fill the world.

He sought to pull the wind around.

It fought back. The winds of the world were vast and tempestuous. They stirred seas and shook nations. They were fully in contact now, the wind over Storm’s End and the boy whose magic was attempting to impose order upon it, and he had known no greater struggle. If he could keep a distance, it would have been awe-inspiring, mighty forces striving for control over the sky. As it was, all that he felt was pain. A mindless force far larger than himself sought to break him for his defiance, and if he succumbed it would crush his thoughts like an ant beneath a boot and leave him as a mindless husk of a man. He fought it. He was dimly aware of Robert chattering beside him. It mattered nothing. He placed his will against the world and did not move…

…and the world bent to his will.

He flew, and all the land and sea for miles around were spread beneath him. There was nothing to touch with his fingers, nor any hard ground holding him up, nor even an updraft under his wings; it was as though he were falling freely. The strongest sensation he could feel was birds passing through; they felt like tiny fingers lightly tickling his skin. A flex, an exertion of will, and a great current of air came flooding westward. For the first time in his life, Storm’s End seemed small.

Somehow, in some insignificant part of his vastness, he could hear a voice shouting. He reached out to one of the absurdly tiny mortal forms at the top of Storm’s End and possessed it. Moving it felt like moving a skinchanged beast, save that this one had no native mind to contend with. “Don’t worry, Robert,” he said with a wide smile. “They’ll be with us soon.” He only just retained enough presence of mind not to shout at his elder brother: Don’t you see? Don’t you see?!?

As his eyes could see, the sudden easterly wind had filled the sails of the Windproud. Steady and strong, it bore them over the water towards Storm’s End. His mother and father’s ship was pulled over the surface of the water, sailcloth flaring, growing larger, coming close…

The wind shifted.

He felt the impact of it jar his bones, if he had had bones. The sheer force of it was tremendous. Curiously there was no pain, nothing to indicate resistance to his magic. The wind was moving, but not against him.

Then he understood; it was continuing to be pulled around.

Again the wind shifted. The change came sooner this time. Then again, then again even sooner than that, and then again… turning and turning and turning, around and around and around…

Stop! he called to it, to himself. Stop now! Be still! He brought to the fore his memories of his companions’ sacrifice and focused on them, let them swell, let them grow, and sent forth the blood and mess and mental pain and terrible finality to control what he had wrought.

But he was not the master now. The wind kept moving, pulling, turning, not against him, not even in spite of him but utterly ignoring his effort of will. His hold had not been broken. He was the wind. And yet he was not the master of himself. He felt as though he were running at great pace despite urging his muscles to be still. It was like nothing he had felt before. Stop! Stop! he commanded, but it did not stop. How? How was it going so wrong, when he did not feel a resistance force working against him?

And then he understood. He had cast his working and assumed his place in the sky, but his sacrifice had not been enough to bind the magic he himself had unleashed, to control what he himself had become.

The air was circling now, and he felt the sea stir at his touch. Cold air rubbed shoulders with hot, and he knew because he was both of them. Thunder rumbled, knives of lightning flashed like daggers falling from the sky, and the waves grew higher, higher, higher, ever higher…

Distantly he was aware of a voice screaming, a voice which did not sound like Robert’s. “No, no, no…”

Carried up and down, the ship was swaying violently. The waves were too tall. He knew what had made them so. How could he not? He felt every touch of the water being roused by the wind as if it were brushing against his belly. High winds howled their challenge and the sea tossed and turned like a trembling tortured beast beneath the slash-strokes of his fingers.

He conceived a thought. Out. Out. I must go out. Mayhaps that will stop him. He thought of himself, of what it felt like to have arms and legs and feet and hands. Did he even remember? Had the world always been like this? He could not focus on it. The sensation was too strong. He was higher than the Hightower, more enormous than a mountain, and at his touch the sea was screaming.

The Windproud was lifted by a great wave, foundered, and turned upside down.

“Mother!”

The storm still raged outside Storm’s End. Gradually Stannis came to notice that there were no sparks of lightning passing through him, and no waters writhing underneath. He was in one place, only one place: standing on a balcony in Storm’s End, sobbing, clutching his brother in a tearful tight embrace.

He was free, back in his man’s form again, where he belonged, but what did that matter? He could not bring himself to care, when he would never again see his lady mother’s smile.

He stayed with his brother Robert, weeping together, for a time. He knew not how long. The next that he would remember, he was being led to his chambers by Maester Cressen.

For the first time since that dread moment, he found coherent words. “I’m sorry.”

“Hush,” soothed Maester Cressen, running wrinkled fingers through hair as black as Stannis’s sin, “hush, boy. I’m so sorry for what you must endure. Ofttimes the gods are cruel.”

“It wasn’t the gods’ fault,” Stannis sobbed, “it was mine… I was bad, the worst, no man more accursed… sorry, maester… I wish what you told me wasn’t a lie… I wish I couldn’t, couldn’t… I wish I was nothing… I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Maester Cressen told him firmly. He held the maester’s hand tight, wanting to believe. “Stannis, some things no man can control. Men can be mighty, and men can be wise, but even the mightiest wisest kings do not command the waves. They are natural forces and they answer only to the gods. It is not for us to reason why. All that we can do is scream against the storm.”

There are no gods, thought Stannis. Any just god would have stopped me. What is attributed to gods was done by a man. There is only power, and those too mad to refuse to seek it.

He thought to say more, but he looked up at the old man’s kindly face and could not bear to tell him. I wish you were telling the truth, maester. I wish I could believe that.

That night, Stannis lay awake in his bed, his every thought consumed by thoughts of the Windproud foundering. He was guilty, he knew. He had done it. He had felt the wooden hull as solidly as if it were being scooped in his own hand. He and Robert had to grow up without a mother and a father now. Gods, so did little Renly, who had never had the chance to know them. He had taken them away from him. Was there any more monstrous sin? Everything good and beautiful had perished in Shipbreaker Bay, and he had done it himself, through his sorcery.

He almost wished to die—why should such a miserable creature as himself live?—but then it occurred to him how Robert would feel. Robert would not know why, unless Stannis told him, and that would only cause Robert more misery. He is my brother. I can’t do that to him. Not after I have already done this.

He could never undo what he had done to his family, Stannis decided, but he could begin in some measure to atone for it. He would dedicate himself unceasingly to serving his family. He would do for them as best he could. The maester had lied to him, but it would be a better world if the maester’s words had been true, so he would try to act as if they were. Still wet with rainwater, shivering, staring at the ceiling in his bedchamber, he vowed, “Never again. Never again.”

That night, for the first time since he had been told the dreadful truth of what he would do to his mother and father, Stannis did not use the skill the crow had taught him to command his dreams. And so he dreamt of the snowy wooded hill beyond the Wall, the place where he had dreamt a thousand times before of the three-eyed crow, the last greenseer, his teacher in sorcery.

You see what has come of not heeding my teachings, said the crow, sharp claws cutting his shoulder. You cannot make prophecy fail by refusing it. Fate is not so easily denied.

Stannis opened his mouth, an angry retort on his lips, to tell the crow that if the crow had not prophesied their deaths to him then he would not have caused those deaths. Then he closed it. He should not take part in such talk. Such speech was not for him now.

He said, “No.”

No? In your arrogance you believed your knowledge to be greater than it is, and so you made a terrible mistake. Do you fail to understand this?

“I understand,” said Stannis. “Your lessons have done more ill than good, by far. I choose not to be the monster you helped me to become. I should never have tried to be a greenseer, and I never will again.”

You fool, you are needed, and I’ll not let you throw it all away because of one mistake. Yes, you’re a kinslayer, from a certain point of view. Your duty matters more than that. I’ve shown you what lies in the heart of winter. You know what is coming. A greenseer must help to stop it. Do you think there are many like you?

“No, but I am not the one you need. Find someone better.”

There is no-one else!

“No-one?” said Stannis, arching an eyebrow. “In all the world, no-one? I don’t believe that.”

One man in a thousand is born a skinchanger, the three-eyed crow said, and one skinchanger in a thousand is born a greenseer. And it is not obvious to me who I should seek. The best I can do is to send dreams to one who lies near death—they must be near death—and try to open their third eye as I opened yours. Of the dreamers who experience this, most lack the potential to be greenseers, or the strength of will to reach past the material world; most of them die, instead of flying. Few are blessed with your gift, and fewer still can be awakened to it.

“When you sent me that dream,” Stannis said, “I wish I died.”

There was silence for a long while.

The world needs you, the crow said at last.

“My family needs me,” said Stannis. “I owe my life to them for what I’ve done. I can’t be what you want me to be for the world. I cannot. I tried, and all it led me to was ruin. Send dreams to me as long as you want, but it will be of no use. I’ll not stop you. I’ll not use what you taught me. I’ll not be what you want me to be.”

I have no-one else.

“You’ll find someone else. Some witless fool of a boy who thinks he knows what he’s saying when he says he wants power. The world has no lack of them.” Stannis laughed bitterly. “Take heart. I doubt you can make as much of a mess of him as you’ve made of me.”

Robert did not stay long. He fled to the Eyrie, abandoning his younger brothers in their grief while he took solace from his friend Ned Stark. Stannis did not condemn Robert. How could he? He had done more harm to the Baratheon family than Robert ever could.

So he stayed, and he did the tedious work of governing on his elder brother’s behalf, and he looked after little Renly. Robert was Lord of Storm’s End in name, despite his youth, but preferred to spend his days as if he were still a boy, whiling the years away in the Eyrie. It fell to the even younger Stannis to act as Lord of Storm’s End in truth. Maester Cressen advised him, but it was he whose words the stormlords heeded, while Robert fled from his lordship to grasp at fading boyhood. Stannis’s younger brother Renly grew big and strong for his age, a cheerful black-haired blue-eyed boy who was the very image of Robert and of his lord father. He would run around Storm’s End with other boys of lower rank and similar age, shouting that he was a knight or a great king or a hero of ages past or a dragon. Stannis allowed it, though he was never so lax with anybody else. He indulged his little brother. He wanted to see Renly smile.

He could not forget the years of his life he had wasted chasing dreams, nor could he forgive himself for what had become of it. That canker of guilt never left his mind. But he could try to move on, and for a time he did.

Then the Tyrells came.

Hunger gnawed at Stannis Baratheon’s stomach as he woke. It had not been the first time today. Despite the warmth and softness of his featherbed, he had slept in fits, stopping and starting, lying for long hours awake and in pain thanks to his body’s hopeless demands for what it could not have.

This time, however, the sun had risen, so he stood up with a sigh and dressed himself and donned his armour, with the help of his squire, Quenten Peasebury. The boy was suitably obedient, but his presence still felt unreal to Stannis, for it had been less than a year since the failed campaign against the Reachmen invading the stormlands, so he did not think of himself as a knight. He did not consider it appropriate to wear finery; instead he chose a simple surcoat all in black, a Baratheon colour less extravagant than gold. He did not bathe. Fresh water was too scarce. He put his eating dagger and a scabbard at his belt and strode downstairs from the single tower of Storm’s End to inspect the night watch on the curtain wall.

Armed and armoured, Stannis circled the great curtain wall of Storm’s End with solemn mien, speaking to captains in each part of it, shaking their hands and hearing their worries. His men in the night watch were bleary-eyed, gaunt and stinking, but they saluted nonetheless when he came, and their captains all informed him that there was nothing they had seen. It was the response he had expected, but he came every day regardless in order to hear it from them. Talking to them face to face was the least he could do for the loyal men who might die for him at any day, should Lord Tyrell decide that the garrison had been starved long enough to satisfy him.

Keeping his visor down to set an example to his men, Stannis looked down beyond the curtain wall that marked the outermost extent of Storm’s End. He watched for a long while. A hundred feet of pale grey stone below and eight hundred yards of earth distant—out of range for even the most proficient of Rainwood longbowmen—the Reachmen were awakening. They could be heard even from here in their great half-circle of a camp, around Storm’s End and ending only at the coast. There was no escape by sea; the fleet of Paxter Redwyne the Lord of the Arbour kept watch night and day, allowing nothing to reach the beleaguered garrison. Around that camp, knights were riding horses; heralds sounded a reveille; pages rushed around the camp, bearing messages and supplies of water; grooms cared for their horses; camp followers emerged from thousands of tents; archers were fletching arrows; soldiers brandished weapons, such as a strong pike wall that surrounded the camp; herdsmen kept a hold on livestock of every sort; and, above all, the scent of food wafted from thousands of cookfires into the air. Men around those cookfires laughed and chatted to each other as they broke their fast, whereas there was to be no breakfast in Storm’s End at all, only a poor dinner and a poorer lunch. The smell of it alone made Stannis’s mouth water. Bread that was not stale, and hearty vegetable soup, and chicken and beef and suckling pig… the Reachmen had it all, and Lord Mace Tyrell meant him to know it, and meant his men to know it, so the Lord of Highgarden boasted of his Reachmen’s meals in the hope that Stannis’s own stormlanders would mutiny and murder him. And worst of all, that was not their food. It was the food of the stormlands, laid prostrate before them, conquered and occupied by the Reachmen after their victory over Robert at Ashford. How many of the smallfolk of the stormlands were going hungry at this very moment, because of the Reachmen’s greed? He knew not. Though in his heart Stannis knew he could never have won the campaign in the stormlands after Robert retreated at Ashford with much of the stormlands’ strength, such was the enemy’s advantage in numbers, and though he believed he had fought well given his disadvantages, the humiliation of his defeat at Lord Mace’s hands still rankled. He had been forced back to Storm’s End, and now, because of his failure, his enemies were boasting of how they were gorging themselves on the food they had stolen from the people whom he and all Baratheons were sworn to protect.

Stannis hated Paxter Redwyne. He hated Randyll Tarly. He hated Mace Tyrell. He hated every single one of those men feasting outside with greater passion than he had ever hated anyone except himself.

They would not be here forever, Stannis knew, or at least wanted to believe he knew. Robert had not been defeated utterly by Randyll Tarly at Ashford; he had gone away to join his strength with his allies further north. The great lords Arryn and Stark were formidable friends, and ere they parted ways Robert had informed Stannis that he entertained high hopes of Lord Tully joining their struggle as well. With their combined strength, Stannis hoped, Robert would defeat the Mad King’s bannermen and come back home to save the day at Storm’s End… especially if Storm’s End remaining untaken were to force Lord Mace’s men to stay here, keeping most of the strength of the Reach away from Robert’s battles in the riverlands.

Robert would win his war. Robert would break that arrogant host outside the walls of Storm’s End, if Stannis held out long enough. Robert would come home. Stannis told himself these things every day. He wanted to believe them. He had to.

With a final venomous glare at the fleet and army squatting outside his walls, Stannis descended the curtain wall, passed through the castle yard and entered the tower at the heart of Storm’s End.

He spent the rest of the day inspecting soldiers, overseeing the changing of the guard and speaking to captains and stewards and quartermasters. Their supplies made for grim tidings. They had no lack of swords or arrows or mail or wine, but the food situation was truly dire. Ordinary meat had long since run out, cats and dogs too, and they had finished eating the horses a moon past. Nowadays they subsisted on crusts of stale or mouldy bread, scraggly scraps of vegetables, and rats. Rat was the only meat still available in the castle. Dozens of men who had once held other occupations were now tasked as rat-catchers, not for cleanliness but for food. Feeding several hundred men on rats was no easy task, especially since the little beasts were hard to catch…

I can catch them. I can find them in a way from which they can never hide.

Stannis banished the treacherous thought. He had sworn a vow. He would not go back to his old ways. He had no trust in his self-control to stop at skinchanging; if he broke his oath he would return to other workings of sorcery than that, to things greater and more terrible. He had followed that path once before, and though it seemed wide and welcoming at first he now knew what it led to in the end. The waves sweeping away the Windproud at my fingers… Power came at a price. That price must not be paid.

Never again, he told himself. Never again. Never again. Never again. He did not speak of it aloud, as though his sin would cease to exist if he stayed silent.

Unsettled, Stannis resumed his discussions with leaders in the garrison and drew up further preparations for what must be done if, as he feared, no help arrived for another turn of the moon. Cut off from the outside world by the army outside shooting down ravens, he had no way of knowing the course of the war. Those preparations were not pleasant. He had already stopped feeding the failed mutineers who had been imprisoned in the castle dungeons; he had too little food to spare. Now they were dead, and he had not let them be buried despite the protests of Septon Danwell. Maester Cressen had quietly advised Stannis that, unless relief came soon, the dead traitors would be needed for eating.

Even the thought of that made Stannis sick, though not as sick as the thought of what he had done before his vow. He wondered whether he heeded the maester so much because of the man’s wisdom, real though it undoubtedly was, or because of what would not have happened if he had trusted the maester’s words before.

Stannis headed to the feast hall, which could be found near the bottom of the tower, where it was thickest. The hall was cavernous, with enough space for the whole garrison and more, though half the garrison were on the inner and outer walls, ready to repel an attack. The other half had already had dinner; Stannis himself had overseen the changing of the guard there. Even now, in the most restful part of the day, there could be little rest. Men ate with their armour on and their weapons close to hand, only their helms removed, and there was a stream of dozens of men within sight and earshot of each other, so that there could soon be all hands to the walls if the Reachmen chose this moment to launch their assault.

This inactivity had long taken its toll on Stannis and his men. A bloody mess though it would surely be, with great risk of death and defeat, he often found himself wishing that the Reachmen would give up waiting and attack Storm’s End. That would place less stress upon him than day after day after uncounted day of endless waiting, ready for a fight.

Despite that, and despite Mace Tyrell’s foul ploy of feasting on fine food outside the walls, his men queued up in good order to eat their tough-as-old-boots bread and watery broth and scraps of rat-meat and cheese. Stannis sat at the head of the table with his brother Renly at his right hand. Once a happy little boy, Renly had become a gaunt shadow of a child. Stannis slapped Renly’s hand away when his brother tried to take some of his own meal. He took no greater a portion for himself than he allowed to his men, and he waited in line for his food with everyone else, rather than striding to the front to claim a lord’s share. This siege had taught Stannis much about trust and who was or was not worthy of it. His old master-at-arms, Ser Gawen Wylde, who had taught Stannis how to use the first sword that the smith Donal Noye had ever made him, a man he thought he knew and could count on, had tried to sneak out of a postern gate along with three other highborn knights. Meanwhile, most of the lowborn men of the garrison, survivors of his failed campaign to defend the stormlands from Lord Mace’s invading army, men whom he had scarce exchanged two words with prior to this siege, had remained true to House Baratheon, spitting on all the temptations the Tyrells had offered. Stannis greatly esteemed such men, and though he did not say it, not wanting to risk implying to them that their loyalty was anything but the proper and expected and ordinary course to be undertaken, he could not have been prouder of them.

After dinner, Stannis stood and meant to leave until he felt a light tug at his hand. “What is it?” he asked his brother.

“I want to talk,” said little Renly.

“We’ll speak upstairs.” He gathered that it was not something that could be said in the earshot of the garrison, else his brother would have already said it.

“I want to talk here.”

“Can you say it in the earshot of the garrison?”

Renly shook his head.

He hardened his voice. “Then it will be upstairs.”

His brother made no further argument. He picked Renly up in his arms—the boy was very thin and correspondingly light—and took the boy to his own chambers, formerly Robert’s. Robert had taken up residence in the lord’s chambers, so Stannis had started sleeping here. He did not want to live in the place where he had so often practised his old ways.

“Now then,” he said, depositing his little brother on an armchair in the comfort of his chambers, “what is it?”

Renly burst out, “I’m hungry.”

“We are all hungry,” Stannis said, unmoved.

“I thought you’d listen to me,” said Renly plaintively, sounding betrayed. “I talked quiet, this time.”

“Just because you didn’t make a hideous scene, undermining my authority in front of my men, does not mean you always get your way. That is the least you must do. It is not enough on its own. You won’t get more food.”

“I need more,” Renly insisted. “It hurts, Stannis, it hurts me in my tummy and it makes it hard to move and when I go to the privy my poo looks strange. Please. Please. You’re hurting me when you give me less, it really does hurt, I’m not japing. That man who came in the boat last week, the one the bad men caught, he wanted to give me more.”

“He was only a smuggler,” Stannis said dismissively. “He didn’t try to get past Lord Paxter’s fleet just for the sake of helping us. He came to take lots of our gold, since we have so little food we are desperate and would have to pay whatever price he demands. He died for Robert’s gold, not for us.”

“I got less than half what you took. Why can’t I have more?”

“You’re less than half my weight. That’s why I give you less. Do you think you alone are starving? Every man of us is, I as much as any other. We all need food; I merely give it out justly.”

“Not justly. I listened to some big men, Stannis, they said you and me take not much, we could take more. They said most lords take more.”

“Yes,” Stannis admitted.

“Then why not?” There were tears in Renly’s wide blue eyes. “I’m really really hungry, Stannis. I’ve never been so hungry. Please. Why don’t you give me food, when other lords will? Do you hate me?”

“Of course not! You are my brother! Never question that! If I had food enough to give, I would give it in a heartbeat. But all the men need food, not only us. Everyone is feeling what you are feeling. If I take more for you or me, they’ll want more too, and we do not have more to give them, so long as the Tyrells besiege us.”

“Then make them go away.”

He sighed. “If only I could.”

“You must,” his little brother demanded. “They weren’t here always. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“They came, because the war came.”

“Yes.”

“Then stop the war, and they’ll go away.”

That simple childish reasoning chilled Stannis’s thoughts. “We must not.” He knelt in front of the armchair so that he was low enough to look his brother in the eye. “Listen to me, Renly. You have another brother, Robert. Remember him; he came here from Gulltown moons ago, and he spoke with you and played with you for a little while. If he loses Storm’s End, his bannermen will lose confidence in him, and the Tyrells will be free to march against him with all their strength. We dare not let that happen. We have to hold strong to keep our brother safe.”

“What about keeping us safe?” cried Renly.

“The walls will do that.”

“They don’t stop us starving!”

“They do not, but we must endure it. Robert is our brother, our elder brother. He is the head of our House. We have a duty to serve him. If he loses Storm’s End the war is as good as lost, and if the war is lost, the Mad King will b… kill him cruelly. We need to protect him, Renly, just as you would protect me. You want to protect our brother, do you not?”

“I’d protect you,” Renly said.

“And Robert,” Stannis prompted. “You’ve not seen him as oft as you have seen me, but he is our brother still, our blood, our kin.”

“No matter what he’s done?”

“No matter what he has done,” Stannis confirmed, feeling relieved. He understands at last.

“That’s not right,” said Renly, stamping his foot. “I only saw Robert for a few weeks. He came here for our soldiers and went away again when he got them. Before, I didn’t see him for years. I think you didn’t, either. Did you?” Stannis tried to think of what to say, but before he could speak, his brother saw the answer in his eyes. “Right. We shouldn’t starve for Robert. He wouldn’t starve for us.”

“You’re wrong,” Stannis growled.

“No I’m not,” said the small boy, with a small boy’s confidence.

Stannis’s voice rose further. “Robert does care. He is our brother.”

“If he cares about us, then he doesn’t want us starving. So let’s not.” Renly leant forward. The bright blue eyes set in his bony hollow-cheeked face were alight with hope. “Let’s go to the men outside, Stannis, just you and me. You can stop the war, and make them go away. Then we’ll get to eat again, and it’ll stop hurting us so much.”

Stannis wanted to. Until his brother told him he had never known how much he wanted to. He loved little Renly more by far than Robert. Self-preservation and love combined to pull him the same way with the force of a flying dragon.

Only one thing held him back, and that one thing was hard as iron: his duty. I owe my life to my family. No loyal service I can ever give will make up for what I have done.

“He is our brother,” Stannis said simply, and there his answer was.

His younger brother’s face twisted with anger. “You’re so stupid. We’re going to die.”

“We may,” Stannis said, trying to keep his voice down. He could not. His voice was rising in response to Renly’s.

“We are,” Renly spat, “and it’s for nothing.” Words flew from Stannis’s brother’s mouth like daggers, all of them aimed at his heart. “Robert doesn’t love you, you big dumb ox. Everyone knows that. The cooks know that. The stableboys know that. How don’t you know that? I’m your brother, your real brother, not Robert, and we’ll die because you care about him more than me. Septon Danwell said the Father was just, but there’s nothing just about that. Why are you so stupid? I wish I was someone else; I wish I wasn’t a Baratheon. If I was on the other side, I bet Mace Tyrell wouldn’t be so stupid; it would be better to be his brother. I hope you die so someone else commands, then he’ll surrender and we can get food, then you’ll see you were wrong, you’ll be sorry.”

The rant ended. Renly Baratheon was panting, taking short, sharp breaths. His bony little face was flushed with rage. Stannis Baratheon regarded him in silence.

“Stannis,” his brother said, “let’s not fight them. It hurts so much. I need to eat. Please.”

“Come, Renly,” he said. “There’s something that I think you need to see.”

Without waiting for a reply, he plucked his brother up in his arms and carried the boy out of his chambers. He was already near the top of the single tower of Storm’s End. He went higher. Nobody disturbed him. At last he reached the place he meant to find, a place he had not set foot for several years: a room with a balcony that overlooked Shipbreaker Bay.

Stannis stepped out onto the balcony. He feared no archers; at this height, they were far out of range. Harsh ocean wind blew straight at his face. The cold dug in like a knife. He welcomed the pain. It was different to the pain of starvation, and a suitable reminder of what he remembered from this place.

He put down his brother gently. The boy clutched the railing and shivered.

“I didn’t mean it, Stannis,” Renly said. “I was angry. I don’t want you to die. I never have, really. You’re my brother.”

“I know.”

“I only want something to eat,” Renly continued, encouraged by that assent. “Anything. I won’t fuss. Please. We can surrender, then we can eat again.”

“I understand,” Stannis said, and tossed him over the railing.

He looked down. A small shape plummeted into the waves with a scarce-visible splash. The wind swallowed his brother’s scream.

Thunder was roaring and winds were shrieking outside when Maester Cressen went to seek the Baratheons.

His boys’ bedchambers were empty. That fact troubled Cressen. He would have expected them to be there, trying to sleep. Then a certain memory rose to his mind, and he knew where his boys would be. Poor boys. They would not forget their memories of a night quite like this.

Cursing the stiffness of his knees, Cressen shakily climbed the stairs to go even further up in Storm’s End’s single spiked-fist tower. Nobody came to help him. No servants dwelt habitually here. At a level almost at the very top, he stopped and pressed against an unlocked door. It resisted for a time, then his pushing told and it swung open all of a sudden. He had to grasp its handle to keep himself upright.

In front of him, facing away, stood a tall thin boy of about twenty namedays, clad in black—one of the boys who were the closest he had ever had to sons.

“Maester,” murmured Ser Stannis Baratheon, and Cressen almost jumped out of his skin. He had not known that the boy knew who was there. “Tell me this. Why do maesters swear not to marry or rule lands or sire children?”

What an odd question. It took Cressen a while to think of how to put his answer. “Our order is to serve, not rule,” he said. “If we did not so swear, that would lead to maester dynasties; and if we were to rule, that would do harm to our true purpose, to provide wise counsel and to widen the boundaries of knowledge.”

Stannis nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Just so.”

“Are you considering attending the Citadel, ser?” Cressen was surprised to hear it, but not so surprised as he might have been for another. Stannis had long been a quiet boy, not so raucous as his brothers, and frequently reclusive. That had receded in recent years, but if he had been asked half a dozen years ago he would have taken it in his stride. “You’d be an able student, but if so, I advise you to consult your brother ere you make the final decision.”

“Fear not. That’s not my intent.” There was a hint of humour in that first phrase, a wryness that Cressen did not like. “I merely thought to compare. Men are born with many paths open, but to follow one path, you must go out of sight of others. To gain anything worth gaining, you must sacrifice something else. Sacrifice is never easy, maester. Or it is no true sacrifice. That is the way in all things, not only this.”

“That is one way of considering it,” Cressen said cautiously. Unlike with Robert and Renly, there were times when he felt he did not understand Stannis Baratheon’s thoughts at all. “Do you know where your brother is?”

“I’m afraid not. We parted ways before the storm.”

“I see.”

He did. It would take a blind man not to. Outside the castle built by Durran Godsgrief, a fearsome storm raged. Waves lashed about like whips, knocking the ships this way and that. There was no rhyme or reason to it. As Cressen could feel on his face, chill winds blew unpredictably every which way, ruining any effort to escape by sail. They drove up the waters into a frenzy, ripping, tearing and sinking ships and dashing them against the rocks. It was strange to watch. Cressen was no less starved than anyone else in Storm’s End. He too had been on meagre meals, thanks in great part to the fleet outside, a menacing spectre looming high over his life and likely shortening it… only for the aforesaid fleet to prove pitifully powerless against the unimaginably greater wrath of nature.

Cressen was pleased for his boys to see the gods aid them, but he was not pleased for himself. Like many maesters, he had been born in Oldtown. Those men outside were likely closer kin to a boy born to the Reach than were the stormlander boys whom he had raised. He was an old man now, of better than sixty namedays, old enough to know that the desperate men drowning outside the walls of Storm’s End were not so very different to the desperate men starving within them.

A great three-masted ship with lovely burgundy sails fell from the crest of a wave and was driven with sudden fury into a shallower part of the sea. She struck a great rock with tremendous force and it broke her keel. With a rending crash of splintered wood, the big ship collapsed into dozens of pieces. Plenty of sailors were killed by wood or rock in the impact. Plenty more spilt from her decks to drown in the unforgiving ice-cold water.

“That was Paxter Redwyne’s Arbour Queen.” Cressen had never heard Stannis speak in quite this tone. It sounded as if he were utterly delighted and yet utterly relaxed, as if his pleasure and excitement were great indeed but they were somewhere else, not here. His voice mixed languid laziness with hints of thrill. “The fleet that starved us is sinking, and a good captain goes down with his ship. It wouldn’t be fitting for him to escape their fall, don’t you agree? And the Reachmen who invaded us are cowering in their tents, pounded by the wind and pissed on by the rain as they watch their dreams die all around them.” He is guessing, Cressen thought. The Tyrell army was not visible from here. “How very appropriate for Mace Tyrell. That flowery fool had no idea what forces he was dancing with.”

He cannot mean that. He cannot mean what I think he means. “You mean the gods?” Cressen tried, hoping to believe it, wanting to believe it.

Stannis Baratheon turned around. Dark blue eyes gleamed in his gaunt and bony face. “Who do you think I mean?”

“Some things no man can control.” It ought to have been a confident assertion. It came out like a prayer. Cressen spoke quickly: “Natural forces answer to the gods, only to the gods. Surely you don’t think yourself the master of this storm.”

A smile flickered across starved thin lips. “It seems they teach so little at the Citadel. The storm is a force of nature, yes. It has no lord. It answers only to itself. I am no mere master of the storm. I am the storm.”

The smile faded.

“This storm and the last.”

In the days after the storm, each day brought a new crop of bloated corpses washing ashore. After a week, among drowned Reachmen beyond count, an eagle-eyed sentry espied the body of a child in Baratheon colours.

Most of the garrison agreed that young Renly had jumped, unable to withstand the lack of food. His brother made a great show of sadness, retreating to the castle sept for days. Cressen would have liked to believe it.

Only… he still remembered his last conversation with Stannis Baratheon. The boy had seemed giddy and strangely loose-tongued, as if most of his thought lay elsewhere. Sacrifice is never easy, maester. Or it is no true sacrifice.

Cressen put his head in his hands. My boys… Stannis, what have you done?

They could not withstand the storm. Lord Paxter Redwyne’s fleet was gone, the fine war galleys sunken with their master. It amused Stannis to stand on the walls in the morning and watch more corpses come in with the tide. So many dead Reachmen. For much of the siege he had dreamt of killing even one; now there were, perhaps, enough for him.

The siege of Storm’s End was ended, though that strutting fool Mace Tyrell had not the wit to comprehend it and was remaining outside the walls. The Reachmen had placed their fleet here, rather than keeping it at home to guard against the ironborn as was custom, and they would not have done so without purpose. Storm’s End was too vast to be besieged by land alone. A ship could sail right up to the shoreline under the shadow of Durran’s walls, devoid of any fear of archery. Fearless of the absent fleet and desirous of the gold of Storm’s End, many captains did so. A few times the Tyrell dogs had tried to come closer to the castle, within range, contrary to their previous caution, in the hope that they could prevent the castle from being resupplied. Brutal volleys by Baratheon men, still perched in shifts on the walls with unceasing vigilance, had taught them better than that.

There were no more courses of rats and scraps of watery soup. Stannis supped richly, now, on mutton and carrots and suckling pig, and granted his soldiers even greater rations than they had had at the beginning of the siege. Some days he even allowed dinner cookfires to be held near the outer walls, so that they would send smoke filled with tantalising flavours to the noses of the Reachmen. That was one of the few pleasures he had.

The food was rich and plentiful, yet to Stannis it could have been as austere as the meagre meals he had scrounged on during the last, hardest parts of the siege. He scarcely tasted it, and he felt sick if ever he ate much.

A thin and grim-faced shadow stalked the halls of the Durrandon kings, unhindered by the tedium of company. His loyal stormlanders blessed the gods for the breaking of the Arbour’s fleet and loudly praised the valour and indefatigability of their castellan, with words that would have pleased him well a few weeks past and now meant naught to him. He listened to, but did not hear, their compliments. He let them cloister around him, offering their respect and their suggestions to Lord Robert’s castellan at Storm’s End, and often he did not recall their names. All of it mattered so little. Those who mattered were not with him. Cressen, that old fool, seemed to have taken fright on the day of the storm; Robert was away warring; and Renly…

No. He preferred not to think of the brother that had betrayed them all.

With Renly’s murder he had forsaken his vow and once more taken up the arts of sorcery. The three-eyed crow had ruined all by telling him of the fate of his mother and father, and had thus lain waste to a promising path. But that path had proven the only way to keep his elder brother safe. Storm’s End would have fallen elsewise. The Tyrell army outside the walls prevented any resupply by land, and the Redwyne fleet’s blockade had been too thorough. Nobody had pierced it. They did not have enough food to last much longer. The taste of food did not please him but he was not starving any more, and nor were his good stormlanders. With Renly’s death, not mere beasts but a boy with the blood of the Storm Kings in his veins, he had placed the missing piece of the puzzle whose previous failure had killed his mother; he had done a deed so dreadful that its echo could control the mightiest magic he could conjure, chaining the world’s winds to do his bidding. Through that sacrifice he had brought hope to the Baratheon defenders and death to his enemies.

All at the price of his little brother’s scream.

He went to the sept, often, for appearances. He had no faith in its gods; if they had power, they should not have let him do what he had done to his mother and father. But it would not do to be seen as apostate. He knelt there often, for peace and quiet, listening closely to the septon’s words about the Seven Who Are One and how they loved and guided their flock of mankind, and thought, If only it were so.

It was some weeks after the storm he had called—Stannis could not say precisely when—when Lord Mace Tyrell dipped his banners.

At the time Stannis was in the single tower of Storm’s End at the time, rising high into the sky like a gauntleted fist, but he frequently flitted into the thoughts of birds and beasts and so he was aware of it before anybody told him. The sight of it left him so taken aback that he withdrew from those thoughts and ran straight to the nearest window to see it with his own eyes.

It is true, he thought, breathless with excitement. What a coward. A year I have endured here, unbroken, and Lord Mace pulls down the rose as soon as a stag arrives to trample on it. He took the form of a bird and flew forth to look beyond the horizon, and, sure enough, he saw a host with Baratheon banners fluttering overhead. He has returned. He has come. He has come home for me.

Stannis rushed to his room, giddy as the boy he had once been. He barked his orders to the servants and saw to it that he was clad in his finest clothes and that the great hall and the kitchen were prepared for a great feast, with wild boar and Dornish red. (He would not drink Arbour wines nowadays.) There was no time to listen to the babbling of men trying to speak to him, only to give commands. He had had enough of pretending to heed the petty concerns of courtiers. This mattered more. Storm’s End must be at its best for the memories of his guest. All would be as Robert desired it, ready for the warmest of welcomes. Stannis’s faith had been rewarded. Well, not the breaking of the siege—he had had to do that part of it himself—but everything else. He had ruled Storm’s End on his elder brother’s behalf for those long years between his lord father’s death and the beginning of the war, and then he had assisted his lord brother in the mustering of men and the calling of banners for war. Then they had parted ways on a clean, crisp winter’s day, and Robert had promised with a great laugh that it would feel like less than a moment ere they would see each other again. It had been hard, dangerous work, yet it had been so easy to be swept up by how swift and busy and glorious it all was. He had failed to repel the Reachmen from the stormlands and in a sad stream of retreats he had been forced back to Storm’s End, but he had held the castle, and Robert had triumphed, ready to return to him.

At last the hour arrived, and men from the host outside walked through the Tyrell host, whose soldiers parted timidly to allow them. His soldiers opened the main gate—not wholly, only enough to let a small party of a dozen men through, lest this be some form of elaborate trap—and they entered. In the courtyard of Storm’s End, surrounded by soldiers, Stannis awaited them.

Not one of them was his brother.

Stannis’s smile vanished from his face. His hopes, risen so high, fell sharply. Who dared to interrupt this moment? If this were a Tyrell trap he would make them beg for the fate of the Redwynes.

“Ser Stannis Baratheon, castellan of Storm’s End,” the leading man said, “greetings. I am Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North in your royal brother’s name.”

Eddard Stark. The thought felt like a punch to the gut. He has not come. All those moons, that whole year, he had hoped and dreamt and pledged to himself that all would be well when Robert came home, and instead Robert had disdained Storm’s End and sent the man he liked to speak of more than he spoke of his brothers.

My hopes were hollow, thought Stannis Baratheon. My only salvation came from myself.

“Are you well, ser?” said Lord Eddard, breaking the silence.

Stannis failed to restrain a snort of hollow laughter, and strangled it at once. Even Eddard Stark was more concerned for him than Robert was. “Why, nothing is amiss, my lord.” Nothing but dying dreams. “Come. We have a feast prepared for you.”

Mace glanced behind him. It was full dark now, past sunset, but in the starlight he could still see a glimmer of pale grey stone where the top of the tower of Storm’s End rose tall and terrible into the sky.

“Pass the word around,” Mace said. “We halt.”

It took a while for his commands to reach throughout the great host of the Reach, but they did. Soldiers swore and sighed with relief, and tents sprouted all about him like mushrooms after a heavy rain. Ordinarily the men would sit about the cookfires for a while after eating, talking to their comrades in arms and fletching arrows and sharpening their swords, but there was none of that today. The men ate sparsely and swiftly, though they still had no lack of food thanks to the bounty of the Reach, and went to sleep soon afterwards.

The standards of Mullendore, Merryweather, Hightower, Rowan, Cuy, Ashford, Tarly, Oakheart and dozens more flew in the air above him. They were drenched wet and sopping, but for all that he might make a show of it their prettiness mattered nothing whatsoever to Mace; what mattered was that he retained the allegiance of the Reach. Winning that allegiance, gathering the whole strength of the Reach behind him, had been his achievement, a feat unmatched among his ancestors the Lords of Highgarden since Lord Lyonel fought in the Young Dragon’s Dornish wars. If it had come to battle, even the great rebel host under Lord Eddard Stark would not have had an easy victory. Robert Baratheon bore no grudge against Mace, as far as he knew. He had been careful to keep it that way. The new king had no good cause to move against him, so long as he was reasonable and bent the knee now that the war had been decided; it would cost Robert dearly for a submission he could gain easily by peace.

Mace had judged this chaotic moment ill-suited for grand ambition, for Westeros was greatly divided and he suspected that whoever won would make many powerful enemies, so he had sculpted his plans not to take power but simply to put House Tyrell in the best position to survive, no matter which side won. His plans had succeeded. House Tyrell had shown itself to control the Reach more thoroughly than it had done for well over a century. The other Great Houses’ estimates of his House’s ability to command its unruly bannermen would rise accordingly, and that would be a boon for his descendants. Robert Baratheon sat the Iron Throne, having deposed the dragon kings, but the House that Aegon the First had raised remained in Highgarden despite the fall of his less capable descendants, undiminished, strong, and ready to seize some future opportunity that may be more to their liking.

And yet…

He had come here with a fleet, and his cousin Paxter commanding it. He left with neither. That did not feel like victory.

Mace still vividly remembered that day. He had been far from the worst of it, sitting in a tent, pissed on by the rain but in no true peril. But Paxter, poor man… Mother be merciful, that must not have been a pleasant way to die.

Weather alone it may be. There should be no hesitation in ascribing it to that. This entire kingdom that he was riding out of was famous for its storms. But it would gladden Mace’s heart, regardless, were he never to return here.

He had marched his host past sunset in the hope that he and his men could sleep out of sight of the single tower of Storm’s End, but it was too tall, and still stubbornly soared over the horizon. That comfort was denied him. He would sleep under its shadow tonight.

He dreamt, of course, of the storm that had descended shockingly swiftly upon him. The day when the winds had gathered without warning, screaming from a hitherto-cloudless sky. The day when thunder roared and lightning fell so plentifully that he had never seen the like. The day when the waves transformed in minutes from anthills to mountains, rising from the wind-whipped waters to smash sailors’ bones and ships’ timbers alike asunder…

This time he was not watching from afar. He was on the Arbour Queen, speaking with Paxter, as he had done many times before. Her sailors shouted curses and prayers as they desperately tried to bail out water and to keep control of where she was going. It was fruitless. The enormous wave that he had seen from afar plucked her up on its crest; Mace felt the sheer force with which it scooped up the great war-galley like a toy, an impact of water on wood that made his bones tremble; and it hurled the ship viciously onto the protruding rocks.

The warship broke like a glass. Mace clutched at a piece of wood, but was torn away by the fury of the blow. He soared through the air in a terrified moment, only just long enough to comprehend the horror of it, and then slammed into the churning waters.

The blow struck him hard enough to snap bone, and Shipbreaker Bay felt colder than the Wall. The two duelling sensations ran through his body and made mincemeat of any other thought. He would have cried out, but he had no speech. The water surrounded him and dragged him down, and he could not breathe, breathe, gods, he could not breathe…

Oh no you don’t, came a soft whisper.

A grip of steel picked him from the water, like a child holding an olive between his fingers. Sopping wet, freezing cold and brutally beaten, he glided smoothly and slowly up out of the sea, held by something he could not see. Higher and higher he rose, forced to look down, watching his own men perishing beneath him, looking as small as the carven toy ships that he liked to give his sons.

He rose higher, up and up and up. Mace struggled against the terrible grip and found no way of stopping its resistance. He screamed, but his voice vanished in the vastness of the storm.

At last he came to a halt. The impossible grip let go, and he collapsed. For a terrifying moment he was in freefall; then he struck hard stone and cried out from yet more broken bones.

Shivering, sopping and sobbing, he reclined there, a battered beaten thing. Gradually he became aware that he was on a balcony, and that he was not alone. A door was behind him. Beneath him, the balcony was wrought of pale grey stone, and Shipbreaker Bay was far beneath him. Above him, facing away, stood a man.

The man was gaunt and slender, and garbed all in black. His head was hooded. Nothing about him was not black, save only for his hands. His thin, skeletal hands were red and dripping.

Did you think you could escape me? said the same voice that had whispered. It did not come from the man with the red dripping hands. The voice was everywhere and nowhere.

“No,” Mace wept, “never, no, please…”

You will never escape me, the voice promised. Nowhere in the world is hidden from my sight. Flee as far or near as you please, perhaps to a place where none have even heard of Storm’s End. It will avail you nothing. You may think yourself safe for a time, while I attend to other things… but there will come a day when your dreams turn to dust before your eyes.

Mace tried to stand. His legs could not sustain him; they collapsed beneath his weight, and his body struck hard stone, and a fire of pain consumed him, and he cried out in agony.

In the waking world you think yourself a lord of hosts, yet you are nothing, thundered the voice from the sky. You are sightless, powerless, an ant beneath my feet. All that you can do is scream against the storm. The man with the red dripping hands turned around. His face was a hollow-cheeked waste. He smiled. And I promise you, you will scream.

The last time Ser Stannis Baratheon had entered King’s Landing, he had been a little boy. Now he was a knight, a castellan, a sorcerer, and he came at the head of an army. Eddard Stark and a small party of highborn companions had left them at night along the way, in secret, and by agreement of the other commanders it fell to Stannis, as the brother of the new king, to lead the great host of westermen, Valemen, stormlanders, northmen and rivermen back to the capital whence they had come.

Stannis wished that Stark had gone away a few days earlier. If he had, it would have been child’s play for Stannis to arrange a skirmish of outriders, guiding events with orders below and eyes above, and then the Tyrells would have had their day of reckoning.

That pleasure had had to be delayed. Not too long, of course—the Tyrells would doubtless betray Robert and it would be better to kill them before they had the chance—but Robert had commanded him to come at once, and Stannis would not disobey him.

Pink granite walls rose high before him, and two towers framed the huge arch of the River Gate. The gate was so wide that Jon Umber, Brynden Tully, Lyn Corbray and Tygett Lannister could ride beside him all at the same time, while Robert’s uniformed men, brandishing polearms, lined both sides of the road. There were seven such great gates in King’s Landing, which Stannis judged as pious as it was unwise. Storm’s End had fewer and smaller ones, which made it more defensible.

Casually, without losing a whit of his balance on his horse, he swept the city with an eagle’s eye—or rather, several eagles. Many of its houses were ashen ruins. Men were still at work even now, repairing the damage that the city had suffered when it had been taken by Lord Tywin’s treachery. When Stannis had been a small boy, King’s Landing had seemed magnificent. Now, as a man grown, he perceived that its walls were not as tall as Storm’s End’s, nor anywhere near as thick and stout, and the gentle riverbed terrain would make it easier to dig tunnels through the earth beneath them than it would be at Storm’s End, wrought of and upon stone. And one thing remained constant from his recollection: the stink of sh*t assailed his nose so powerfully that he would have retched if not for having smelt worse things in the siege, from reeking dying loyal men who had sickened from the starving.

Pathetic, thought Stannis. Three-hundred years and the best the Targaryens could make was this? It’s more fit for a pigsty than the seat of a great lord. So far have they fallen from the days of Aegon the Conqueror.

Contemptuous and silent, Ser Stannis rode along River Row with his commanders beside him. It felt strange to see black-on-golden banners of his House upon the Red Keep’s flagpoles while he remembered red-on-black. He had always known Robert would rule Storm’s End one day, but Robert as king…? Now that was something else. Stannis was not sure how he felt about that. After his lord father died, his brother had thrust the governance of the stormlands into his own younger, untested hands in order to play at boyhood for a few years longer in the Eyrie. That did not speak well of Robert’s virtue for statecraft. But Robert had been very young too, only a scant year his elder. If he had had a foster father to flee to, so that he could grieve without having to immediately assume the heavy burden of responsibility, Stannis did not know whether he would have done the same.

He may not know what to do, he thought, but I will help him, as I helped him in the stormlands for the past five years. And if he makes enemies, for whatever the cause, then I will destroy them, each and every one, till no man dares to raise a hand against him.

Baratheon men lifted the great bronze portcullis, and he rode into the Red Keep to meet the king.

A groom took his horse, and he was escorted into the fierce square squatting form of Maegor’s Holdfast, whose defensibility even Stannis’s critical eyes approved of. He was given a room to refresh himself for a few hours from the hardships of the road, and afterwards he was led to the Great Hall. As he stepped forth through the oaken doors he saw that the high, narrow, subtly tinted windows were made of new stained glass, depicting stags in the woods and warhammers on the Trident instead of the deeds of House Targaryen. The dragon skulls that had snarled around the room were gone. The walls of the Great Hall felt empty and bare without them.

The guards who had escorted him made their excuses. The room could have seated a thousand if it had the chairs for them, or held even more. It held two. Stannis’s footsteps echoed on the stone as he walked towards a throne of swords.

The man sitting on it was clean-shaven, with close-cut black hair and blue eyes, bigger and brighter than Stannis’s, on a face unmarked by any great scar. He was dressed ornately in black and golden silks, in which Stannis was unaccustomed to seeing him—for he preferred rougher wear—and he had grown, mayhaps, even taller than he had already been. But he was not utterly changed; it was him; there could be no mistaking it.

“Brother,” Stannis called across the room, rejoicing in the sight. Relief coursed through him. “I… I cannot say how… how glad I am to see you again, in such good health.”

Robert studied him intently, eyes widening.

“Gods be good, Stannis, how are you alive?”

Stannis had almost forgotten. He was not such an artifice of skin and fleshless bone as he had been before the storm. “It used to be worse,” he said in his defence. “And to answer you, the Tyrells did this, to me and to many of your loyal men. They withstood valiantly for you. You should be proud of them.”

“I am proud of them,” King Robert said. He sighed. “Seven hells, Stannis, I know you hate Mace Tyrell. So would I if I were in your shoes. But he has bent the knee to me, and I’m no Aerys. For that, I will leave him unmolested.”

It was a blow, but not an unexpected one. Lord Eddard had told Stannis of his brother’s position. “So be it,” he said, bowing his head. “He is no Baratheon man; he hates and disdains all sons of the stormlands. He will betray you one day, I am sure of it, and I will be there to kill him when he does.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Robert said with a wry twist of his lips. “You’re well?”

“Well enough,” Stannis said honestly. “It was hard, bitterly hard, but I survived. I held on for you, and one of the storms of our homeland came to save us and scatter our foes.”

Robert nodded slowly. “I heard Renly fell.”

“I’m a man grown,” Stannis said. “Renly was a child. When we all were starving, he had not the strength to hold on. He chose to fall into the sea; he did not want to live as a besieged Baratheon.”

He spoke the words easily. As far as Stannis was concerned, it was not even a lie.

Robert closed his eyes with grief. “Poor child,” he murmured.

“My heart grieves for him,” Stannis said. “I wish he’d chosen otherwise.”

Silence fell heavy between them.

It was the elder brother who broke it. “Where are Ned and his men?” Robert asked at last. “Maester Cressen didn’t know.”

So that’s who he’s been talking to. Stannis had wondered how Robert knew of Renly. “He and his party went south. He told only myself, the Blackfish and a few select others, so that the commanders of the army would not think he had been forcibly taken. I argued against it; I told him he should have brought an army with him; but he believes the Lady Lyanna must be somewhere in the Reach or Dorne, and he has gone, discreetly, to look for her.”

“My bride. Would that she were here now. Mayhaps she would have some idea of how to help me.” Robert looked pained. “Trust me, Stannis, pray to all the gods that they never curse you with a crown. I’ve been king less than a year and I already despise it. I am surrounded by lickspittles and snakes, men who’d praise the scent of my sh*t if it could help them get a moment of my time to listen to their damnfool petitions. It isn’t even just the lords. Lord Tywin is as grasping and presumptuous as any of them, and won’t stop going on and on about that pretty daughter of his, yet he’s no worse than some of the guildmasters. The dyers and the masons, especially… ugh. Jon helps a lot. I don’t know where I’d be without him. But I need my queen to give me comfort at my side.”

“I hope she returns to you soon.” Stannis seized the opportunity. He had never been good with words. Here was something he understood. “I… I do not… I don’t know about comfort, Robert, but I can try to help you. I can lighten your burden. You can trust me, rely on me.”

“I hope so,” Robert said softly. “What would you have of me, then, Stannis? The stormlands?”

“No!” Stannis was horrified. “When I say I would lighten your burden, I don’t mean to steal what is yours by right. I am not grasping. You are king, yes, but you are also Lord of Storm’s End by blood right, as our lord father’s eldest son. There are older laws than kingship. By the blood that runs in both our veins, I owe you my utmost obedience. I am not here to seek favours from you, Robert; I am your faithful servant. Believe that.”

Robert studied his face. “I do believe it. What do you ask of me?”

“Only to let me serve you well,” said Stannis. “The realm bleeds, Robert. The Targaryens still hold Dragonstone. With Lord Tywin’s fleet burnt to cinders, the realm possesses no defence at sea strong enough to confront the royal fleet or the rebellious ironmen. And the Tyrells squat in Highgarden, doubtless plotting our grisly ends: a weed that must be cut before it chokes your reign. Needs must all those things be put to rights. I ask you for no honours or lands or titles, only that you let me help you, as your loyal household knight. You need do naught but give the order. Send me to Mace Tyrell or Balon Greyjoy or Viserys Targaryen and in your royal name I will destroy him.”

“For the last time, Stannis, I’ll not let you destroy House Tyrell,” Robert said with a sigh, as if Stannis were being tedious. “That’s the only true choice among those three you offer me, and I have no doubt that’s by design.”

“Your trust in that man dismays me… but no, it is not.”

“We’ve no fleet,” Robert said bluntly. “The ships of Gulltown and White Harbour aren’t nearly enough. Until we build one, Balon Greyjoy and the dragonspawn are untouchable.”

Stannis allowed himself a little smile, colder than the Wall. “Doubtless Paxter Redwyne thought himself so.”

“What do you mean to do?” asked Robert. “Do you mean…” He trailed off.

“Just trust me, Robert. You need not worry how it is done. The septons teach that the Seven are one, and the Smith breathes the wind, and the Father favours the just. Do they not?”

“They do.”

“Well, there is justice in your cause. The winds sank the Redwyne fleet for sailing against us. I am confident they’ll sink whoever they need to.”

Robert was trembling. “Gods… good gods. I hoped… I never… Cressen was right, gods damn you. He was right.”

“Of what?”

“You called the storm,” Robert said. “The storm that slew Lord Paxter and sank his fleet. I can see it in your face, don’t you dare to deny it.”

Stannis saw no use in lying. “I did. I was taught how in my dreams, and I’ve been dreaming of these things since we were children.”

“Since we were children,” Robert repeated, and shuddered. “Gods. Would I be the price for a storm to slay Viserys Targaryen?”

Stannis recoiled in shock. He knows!

“You don’t even deny it,” Robert snarled with disgust. He stood up from the Iron Throne and walked down its steps, looming over Stannis. His was the dread figure of a king, proud and tall. “How could you, Stannis? How could you?”

“He betrayed us!” Stannis roared. “That’s why! In his last words he spat on your name and begged me to betray you to the dragons! He said he would rather be a Tyrell since they had food and we had none, and he hated our family!”

“He was a child!” Robert reached out with a claw-like hand and plucked Stannis into the air, gripping him by the neck. “He was starving and he wanted food! He was your brother! You consort of demons, you murderer of kin, you monster!”

Stannis writhed against his brother’s grip. His legs could find no purchase on the ground. He had a shortsword at his belt, but his brother’s other arm was tightly wrapped around his own; he could not reach it. Robert’s mind was inflamed by rage and purpose; he could not be skinchanged, and there were no other men or birds or beasts nearby to help. And gods, Robert was so strong. Stannis’s struggles grew more feeble and eventually died away. One twist of that gigantic hand and his neck would snap like a twig.

It was a strange thing, to realise that he had no way at all to prevent himself from dying.

“Are you going to kill me?” he gasped.

“Gods, am I tempted. But no.” Robert let go his grip. Stannis crashed against the throne room’s floor and pain shot through his legs and chest. “Whatever else I am,” his elder brother said with blood-boiling contempt, “I will not let myself become you.”

Stannis struggled to his feet, bruised and humiliated.

“You will not trouble my realm and murder my subjects ever again,” King Robert commanded. “From this day forth you are banished from the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Don’t test me, Stannis. Come within eyeshot of my shores and you’ll be pursued as an outlaw. Any man, woman or child who sees you will have free rein to crush you like the snake you are.”

Stannis was too proud to beg, but he came close to it then. He lifted his eyes in appeal. “Everything that I have done, I’ve done for you.”

“I know,” Robert said, “and there is nothing in the world that more disgusts me.”

Hot tears fell from Stannis’s eyes. On that note, without retort, he spun on his heel and strode away.

Those were the last words he and his brother ever spoke to one another.

On his journey across the Narrow Sea, Stannis brooded on his brother’s words. Not Robert’s, but those he had exchanged with Renly.

“If he loses Storm’s End the war is as good as lost,” Stannis had said, “and if the war is lost, the Mad King will kill him cruelly. We need to protect him, Renly, just as you would protect me. You want to protect our brother, do you not?”

“I’d protect you,” Renly had retorted.

Renly had wanted to leave Storm’s End with him, to abandon their absent brother:

“I only saw Robert for a few weeks. He came here for our soldiers and went away again when he got them. Before, I didn’t see him for years. I think you didn’t, either. Did you?” Stannis had wanted to deny it, but his younger brother had seen the truth on his face before he had time to think of a reply. “Right. We shouldn’t starve for Robert. He wouldn’t starve for us.”

Stannis hated the thought with a passion. He despised it and sought to banish it from his mind, but his banishment was less thorough than Robert’s. He remembered Robert preferring his friends in the Eyrie to his brothers, and Robert’s thoughtless mockery of Proudwing, and Robert ignoring Storm’s End in the war and after it, and the smile of the brother who had never mocked him and always looked up to him, the brother whom he had raised almost like a father, the brother who had loved him and been loved. The thought remained, and festered:

Was he right?

No. No. No. He dared not turn back, dared not falter, dared not allow that doubt to eat away at his thoughts. His course was set and could not be undone. He had a duty to Robert, as the younger brother must defer to the elder. He was Baratheon, of Robert’s House, more than he was Stannis Renly’s brother; that mattered above all.

He had to believe that. He had to.

Stannis crossed the Narrow Sea upon the first ship he found, with naught but the clothes on his back and the gold and sword that he bore with him. He ate little and slept less. The sailors dared not question or disturb him. He stood in silence at the side of the ship, wearing the skins of eagles, gazing down at what Robert had taken from him.

When the ship passed beneath the Titan, he learnt that she had been heading for the Free City of Braavos.

He wandered through the city half in a dream, taking little note of his surroundings, observing dockyards and alleyways and marketplaces, alike and unalike to the world he knew. Sometime he came to the Iron Bank, which was more reputable than backstreet moneychangers, to give his pouch of Westerosi dragons for a heavy bag of small square iron coins. Afterwards he shed his clothes and bought Braavosi garments, and settled in a warm inn for the night.

Awake or aslumber, it scarcely mattered. His thoughts were far away, flitting about on swift wings spread above the home that he had left behind.

He knew not how long he was here, but when he was growing so thin that even he could not ignore his hunger, he withdrew from his eagles’ thoughts and ate four dinners in an hour. He threw up much of it. The pain pulled him to where he was; its fire provided clarity. He would never return to Westeros, save mayhaps in his dotage, if Robert’s son were merciful. He would receive nothing from the brother for whom he had broken himself. He had to make a life for himself here, for he could not reclaim the one that he had lost.

Stannis came, then, to the minds of his birds and summoned them to him. When they circled the skies above him once more, he departed from the inn and walked the streets of Braavos. He purchased a house there, one that could keep him in what he considered adequate circ*mstances, and he dwelt there for a time. His servants tended to him, and with their presence he found within himself a feeling beyond anger and hatred and loss: a sense of irritation that he could not understand some of the words they spoke to one another. Though somewhat alike, the tongue of the Braavosi was further than any of the other Low Valyrian dialects of the Free Cities from the High Valyrian that his lord father had taught him as a child. This displeased him, so he hired a tutor to teach the words to him.

Thus he remained, for several moons. Folk of Braavos chattered in their cups of the thin young man who lived in a grand old house beside the Green Canal from which he never departed, only sending forth servants to buy and sell and do his bidding. Stannis was not unaware of this. He had many eyes and ears beyond his own, and dwelt within them frequently. He simply did not care. What mattered the chattering of shopkeepers? He had been despised by higher men than them.

In the end, however, it was a crude concern that forced Stannis’s hand. The gold he had happened to have with him on that day in the throne room, as the brother of a high lord, was a substantial sum to common folk, but it was not unlimited. From the wages of his servants and the purchase of the house, he had little of it left to him. Nor could he replenish it. He had not the means to buy a plot of land to be farmed on his behalf and thus to live as a minor lord somewhere in Braavos’s vast sprawling hinterland. He refused to inflict such a biting insult to his own House as to let a son of Lord Steffon of Storm’s End descend to be a petty tradesman. And it was not in his nature to beg for an allowance from Robert—not after what Robert had done to him. He was no whipped dog at the king’s feet, pleading for morsels to make the bitter draught of exile more bearable. Banished and forsaken though he may be, he was still a Baratheon, and a Baratheon had his pride.

That left to him only one recourse. It was not, precisely, honourable, but not unthinkable for a son of a noble House. Even princes in times past had sometimes taken up the occupation. Stannis, as a highborn man of the Seven Kingdoms, had been taught of war at the feet of his lord father, and so he determined to practise it.

Bestirring himself in his birth form, Stannis rose and left the old house on his own two feet, making his way through Braavos. Lately he had been eating enough to sustain himself, for a change, and he perceived the signs of it in his form, which had grown somewhat less skeletal. The Braavosi, as a people, were not fond of extravagant colours. Most of them dressed in dark hues, shady greys and blacks and midnight blues and deep purples. That suited Stannis’s temperament. He bought a boat and upon it he sailed from canal to canal through the city of a thousand isles.

The evening was cool and misty, lit by a pale half-moon in the sky that danced over the rooves of manses, markets and temples in dazzling and bewildering variety. One could easily lose oneself there, drifting aimlessly amidst the endless waterways. Few were conducting their business at this hour; most here were couples, warmed in the dark by the bright fire of young passion or the softer and more constant hearth of long-shared comfort.

Yards distant and yet worlds apart, a lone slim shadow passed among the lovers, swift and with certain purpose.

On the other side of the city, he found a squat redbrick house, well-guarded. When he told the guards at the door of his purpose, one entered. He sat outside, willing to wait. It transpired that he would not wait long. Two of the guards motioned him within. He followed.

The two guards led him through torchlit corridor after torchlit corridor. Stannis had not expected such a long and winding path. Such a matter ought to be ordinary for them. Surely they were not unfamiliar with recruitment.

At long last the guards came to some others, and they opened an ornate maplewood door to a room that assailed his nose with sweet-scented torches. Stannis crossed the threshold without hesitation. There were four men inside, other than himself. One was a tall pale bald man with gold rings on all his fingers; another was the biggest man Stannis had ever seen, a great red-bearded broad-shouldered brute; another was a stout figure with greying dark hair and a face that was a solid mass of scar and muscle; and the fourth was a short thin man with a hooked nose, lean and wiry.

“Greetings, captains,” Stannis said in accented but understandable Braavosi.

The scar-faced man spoke in perfect Andal. “Greetings, Stannis Baratheon.”

So that is why. Stannis supposed it had been naïve to imagine that they might not know who he was.

“Greetings,” he said in his own tongue, “Captain Tyleo Anastis.” He addressed the scar-faced man. “Captain Gemilio Nikar.” The tall pale man. “Captain Philenio Zometemis, whom men call Bloodbeard.” The great brute. “And Aro Isattis, commander of the Company of the Cat, whom they call Handtaker.” The lean man who stood in the centre.

“So you do know who we are,” Tyleo Anastis said. “You also know why you’re speaking to us, and not to some lowly recruiter.”

“My blood,” said Stannis.

“Yes.”

“That matters little now,” Stannis said. “By royal decree I cannot return to the Seven Kingdoms, and I’d be a fool to try. You needn’t fear that I am Robert’s man. I will serve as well as anyone, when I join you.”

“I know your intent,” said Captain Nikar. “Why should we let you? Westerosi lords don’t tend to be obedient.”

“I can obey,” said Stannis. “I’ve spent most of my life obeying.”

“Obeying a lord, now king. That is a different matter to discipline.”

“Only if I let it. I will not.”

“You’re a prince,” the scar-faced man said bluntly. “You’ve lost what little money you had by wasting it on frivolities, living beyond your means. Why should we trust you not to desert as soon as you’re down in the muck with men born far beneath you, in a sh*t-stained camp besieging some town somewhere?”

“I was not born a prince.” Stannis was unmoved. “I can endure hardship. At Storm’s End we ate rats and I did not falter.”

“Understand, you’ll not be paid more than other men of my company,” Handtaker said in a voice as slow as it was soft. His grasp of the Andal common tongue was halting. “You are not a lord here. Your brother, mayhaps, he pay great ransom if someone captures you. I laugh at him and attack anyway.”

Stannis bowed his head. “I understand, commander.”

Handtaker’s voice sharpened, and turned to Braavosi. “Do you? If any man breaks a contract with the Company of the Cat, I take his hands, I salt his wounds and I leave him to wander, to gnaw on bones and such scraps as he can scrounge until sickness or starvation takes him. When the war breaks out again and we’re fighting on the Rhoyne, I can afford no exceptions. Discipline requires it. Men do as I command because I am more feared than my enemies.”

Stannis very much doubted that was the only reason. The free companies of the east were not unknown in the Seven Kingdoms; some had been used on both sides of his brother’s war, and other wars beforehand. Even on Westerosi shores, Handtaker was notorious. If it were only for discipline, strange indeed that it was said he liked to cut and salt every stump of a hand himself.

He said nothing of it, only, “As you say, commander.”

“No exceptions,” Handtaker repeated. “If you break your word, I can’t not punish you, for the sake of my other men; but if I punish you, that sets me in blood feud against the king of the Sunset Lands. You’ve never been a sellsword. You’re a pampered son of a noble House. You can’t know what our way of waging war is, not until the day you’ve done it, and once you’ve seen it, your willingness may weaken. You tell me, Stannis Baratheon—how could your sword be worth the risk of your brother’s wrath?”

“Because I offer you more than my sword,” said Stannis. “I’ll prove it to you, on the very day you ask it of me.”

Captain Anastis seemed curious. “You still have friends in the Seven Kingdoms?”

“No,” Stannis said. “You’re here for the war on the Rhoyne, I understand—but you’re sellsails as well as sellswords, aren’t you? You also fight at sea, around the Disputed Lands.”

“We do,” said Bloodbeard. “What of it?”

Stannis Baratheon’s thin lips quirked. “More than you know,” he promised. “Give me what I require, and the winds will never turn against you.”

The Narrow Sea winds were fierce and cold on the day Eldon returned to court. Black stags danced on sails flaring as they blew. He could hear the chatter of sailors, frequently interspersed with swearing, as they set the ships at anchor and moored them to the wharf. Eldon was in high spirits.

The king and queen were waiting to greet him, along with all the court. “Uncle!” King Robert boomed as Eldon stepped out onto the pier. “What news do you bring to me?”

“Victory, Your Grace,” Eldon said, and almost flinched at the intensity of the court’s cheers. He was beaming. Finally it was over. The war was won.

Almost three years had passed since Robert had risen up against the Mad King. It had been long, hard, and rife with defeats. Ashford was still a bitter word to Eldon’s mouth, bringing back memories of the occupation of the stormlands. The Trident had been a perilously near-run thing, much as men liked to imagine otherwise. And most recently, Eldon rued the day of the Great Raid, when the Targaryen fleet had issued forth from Dragonstone for the first time in over a year, catching the complacent defenders of King’s Landing by surprise, and had put the docks and the fleet being built there to the torch. They had fled quickly afterwards, and some of the ships had been saved, but the attempt had roused another feeble attempt at rebellion in the crownlands. Robert had crushed that one, like the last, inside two turns of the moon. Nonetheless it had shown the newness and fragility of House Baratheon’s grip on the crown.

Eldon’s nephew embraced him, and he winced at the clap on the back from the king’s tremendous strength. King Robert stepped back and turned to his court. “House Targaryen is ended!” he proclaimed. “The dragonspawn are done!”

“Long live the king!” called the court.

It was the moment they had been waiting for. A deafening cascade of trumpets blew in triumph and heralds shouted the names of the returning heroes as they stepped off from their ships. First King Robert welcomed each of his valiant captains and knights home to Westeros. Those of the common men who had distinguished themselves came afterward. A king could order a fleet built, but he needed sailors to man it, and most of them were men of Gulltown, White Harbour and Greenstone. The fleets of those lordships had been the foundation on which the new royal fleet had been built. Of the noble Houses of the realm, the Lannisters and Hightowers had sizeable fleets too, but those dared not venture out of port, for fear that the greater Iron Fleet would pounce on them and rip them to pieces. For this endeavour, westermen and Reachmen had not been available.

Robert watched each man return and said similar words to each, one by one. He knew some, but not even he was gregarious enough to know them all, or near it; most were strangers to him. When the last of them had set foot ashore, he kept looking, as if expecting someone else to be led before him. No-one was. His smile widened.

While the king was busy, Eldon spoke to his goodniece, the queen. Cersei Baratheon was very lovely, and she must be a woman of eminent good sense, for Eldon knew that he had her to thank for his appointment as master of ships. Like many in the stormlands, Eldon and his father were worried about Lord Jon, the Hand, amassing too much power for himself. Of the king’s small council, excluding the doddering old Grand Maester, the meaningless powerless eunuch and the mighty but largely silent Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, every single one owed his allegiance either to Lord Arryn or to his wife’s family, the Tullys of Riverrun. The Hand, the master of coin, the master of laws… all were Valemen or rivermen, and the men with whom they had filled the king’s treasury and the king’s courts were similar. Word had spread throughout the city from the Red Keep’s servants that Lord Jon had meant to make his vassal Lord Gerold Grafton master of ships as well, and his lickspittles on the small council had spoken for it, and no-one had gainsaid him… until the queen leant over her husband’s shoulder and gave him a well-timed reminder that Lord Gerold’s cousin and predecessor, Lord Marq, had fought on the wrong side of the war, though Gerold himself had been won over and served Robert afterwards. That play to the king’s mistrust had won the day and thus caused Eldon’s own appointment.

It was understandable for the bannermen of the Hand of the King and his lady wife to profit from the change in dynasties, for they had supported it, but not to such a grotesque extent as this, at the expense of the king’s own bannermen being excluded. King Robert should have spoken up to prevent it. That he had not was an inauspicious sign for his future reign. Faced with such an apathetic king, it had been wise for Eldon’s goodniece the queen to confide in an experienced knight as eminent as himself, and Eldon was resolved that he would do his best to help her stop the lord Hand from getting too greedy. Gods knew his nephew would not do it.

Once the heroes had been welcomed home in an elaborate ceremony that began at the seaside and ended in the Red Keep, Eldon fell in beside his nephew, who led him to a private chamber in Maegor’s Holdfast. “How was it done, Uncle?” King Robert asked him.

“With difficulty,” Eldon answered honestly. “We had more ships than the Targaryen fleet, but they had many, about two-hundred by my guess, and—if Your Grace will pardon my speaking—their sailors were a great deal more seasoned than most of ours. We formed up in three battles, myself in the centre, Lord Wyman Manderly on the left and Lord Gerold Grafton on the right. The Targaryens did the same. They didn’t go—”

“Who were the enemy captains?” the king interrupted.

“Lord Lucerys Velaryon in overall command,” said Eldon, “with Lords Guncer Sunglass and Ardrian Celtigar at his left and right.”

“I see.”

“As I said, they didn’t go far from Dragonstone. They were defending the shoreline. The battle raged for half a day, then Lord Lucerys took his galley to the rear of his fleet and they headed for shore. His centre pulled back too, and, afterwards, the flanks, one after another.”

“Retreat!” exclaimed King Robert.

“It seemed so,” said Eldon, “but it was a trick. We pursued them, of course; the men were so eager for that, they didn’t even need to be told. We were distended, then they struck at our foremost ships with burning brands when we were close. It was chaos. Straight after—they must have planned it—their left flank moved to envelop us. They came within an inch of it, but they counted on us panicking more than we did. My captains were admirable. We kept order well enough, and kept our heads, and by the end our numbers told, and their ships were captured or sunk. I dedicated my efforts to saving as many of our men as I could from the burning ships once I knew the day was won.”

“Gods, I wish I could have been there,” the king said wistfully. “We won, Jon needn’t have been so worried. It sounds a magnificent victory.”

“You are kind, Your Grace.”

“I’m honest,” said Robert. “Enjoy the celebration feast. You’ve earned it. Tell me, what of the island?”

“It’s yours now,” Eldon said. “We put to land after the day was won at sea. The garrison had lost heart after the sea-battle. They had no wish to die for a defeated dragon. We took Driftmark, too, and Claw Isle as well. The Narrow Sea is a dagger at your throat no longer. The Targaryens no longer possess any land in Westeros.”

Eldon had thought that would gladden the king’s heart. He was mistaken. “What do you mean, ‘possess’? How can a dead man possess anything?”

“We didn’t find them. Viserys and his sister fled from Dragonstone before our host arrived. But Your Grace, that’s a trifling matter. Their support is gone, they no longer have the strength to—”

“Trifling?” Robert roared. “You think it trifling? For generations the Blackfyres harassed the realm! Now the dragonspawn will follow their bastard cousins’ lead, without a doubt. Mayhaps it’ll take generations to crush them, too; or mayhaps Viserys Targaryen will succeed where Bittersteel failed, and win back the crown for the Mad King’s line.”

“He is only a boy, Your Grace! Alone he is nothing! It’s his men and ships that we had cause to fear! Those are gone; the islands of Blackwater Bay are ours, Your Grace; I defeated the Targaryens, I won the battle for—”

“You killed a bunch of f*cking dragonseeds,” Robert snarled. “D’you expect me to give a f*ck? I didn’t send you to brag about slaughtering some f*cking poor sailors, I sent you to kill Targaryens and you haven’t killed a single one, not even brought them back here if you were too squeamish for it!”

“I have served Your Grace well.”

“What sh*t. If you did, Viserys Targaryen and his sister would be dead.” The king stood. “Well, you failed. If we’re to defeat the ironmen, let’s hope my new master of ships isn’t as incompetent as you.”

Fuming, Eldon took his leave from Maegor’s Holdfast—but not before speaking with the queen.

The ruddy jaws of sunset were slavering over the horizon when the raven, flying northwestward, reached Seagard. Jason espied it from out of the window where he was dining with Marianne and the children. The sight pleased him little. It might be some ordinary proposal from his peers or vassals or instruction from his liegelord, but he suspected it would be more word of the war in the east, or of the war in the west. Robert Baratheon had long been enthroned, and yet war was still raging all about them.

Jason and his peers had hoped it might be different, when they rose in arms against Aerys Targaryen, years ago.

He was smiling as little Patrek eagerly recounted his training in arms. That tale was rudely interrupted when Maester Edmyn burst into the room. “Good heavens, man, have you no patience?” Jason exclaimed. “I did tell you that our family dinners are not to be disturbed. I will deal with whatever it is once we have supped.”

The thin young man had the grace to look a little sheepish. “I beg your pardon, my lord,” he said. “You’ll want to see this.”

Maester Edmyn thrust a letter at Jason, who plucked it and moved it further from his eyes. Lately he had found it hard to see things that were so close. Holding it there, he saw the seal.

Gods.

“Alyn, see the children to their beds, if you please,” Jason said. “Marianne, I’d have you remain. We must speak.”

His children protested. “I’m not a baby! I can hear, I’ll be good!” cried Bellena, the oldest, but Alyn was an old hand with children and ushered all three of them out.

Perhaps he would tell them a story. This was the second generation of Mallisters the old manservant had helped to raise. Jason hoped he would. It would distract them from the worries of their lady mother and lord father.

“How ill are the tidings?” Marianne asked him. “Another reverse in the wars, I take it, requiring more of our aid. As if the occupation of the Arbour weren’t humiliation enough… Go on, open it. Let us see what more Riverrun would have of us.”

“Not Riverrun,” Jason said. “King’s Landing.”

Marianne blinked. “Mother be merciful.”

No good news had come thence for a long time now.

Jason broke the crowned stag seal and held the paper to the candlelight. He read it, then read it again, incredulous. His blue-grey eyes went wide.

“The attack on Dragonstone,” Marianne guessed. “Has it failed?”

“I cannot say,” said Jason. “I do not jape, I… I am invited to ride to court, whereupon I am to lead a fleet against the ironmen and serve His Grace as master of ships.”

“The ironmen? The ironmen? Surely there is some mistake. Doesn’t he mean the boy Targaryen?”

“I would have thought so. It seems not. The king’s letter says Ser Eldon Estermont failed in his duty at Dragonstone—I’d believe that, that prickly proud old fool—yet there’s no mention of attacking the place. And moving the royal fleet away from King’s Landing, now that it’s been so painstakingly rebuilt… Madness,” Jason fumed. “Robert should not rest easy till every single one of the Mad King’s brood is freezing in the seventh hell where they belong.”

“Mayhaps King Robert merely wants the taste of victory.”

“Mayhaps so, but it is folly nonetheless. He means to fight the weaker of his foes, ignoring the threat of the stronger. At this rate, there will be another uprising in the crownlands by the moon’s turn.”

“And rivermen’s blood will be spent to crush it,” said Lady Marianne.

Her lord husband nodded grimly.

“What I do not understand is why me,” he said. “There are other men well-placed for that duty. If Eldon Estermont has lost royal favour, why not Lord Grafton, the natural successor? His late cousin’s allegiance in the war, I suppose, though he himself fought valiantly for us… but if that, why not Wyman Manderly, who served under Ser Eldon when I didn’t?”

“Jason my sweet,” Marianne said, “I fear you are blind to truths you don’t want to see. You are Lord Hoster’s bannerman, and Mallister held true to Tully when the Mad King was overthrown. And Lord Hoster is the lord Hand’s goodfather. Consider the master of coin, the master of laws, and the men they have appointed. Each and every one owes fealty to Lord Jon or his goodfather. With your calling, Lord Jon need only make a new master of whisperers and then nigh all of Robert’s court will be his.”

“But why? Lord Jon is playing with fire. I doubt the stormlords will be pleased. They are already deprived of a lord in their ancestral seat and ruled from King’s Landing, since the king had a quarrel with his brother who ruled them for years. Ser Eldon was one of theirs too. This cannot go on; the king needs to intervene.”

“Why else? Power. The lord Hand may tell himself that everything he does he does for the good of king and realm, but I daresay he likes the taste of it.”

“Mayhaps he does, but he makes that too plain to other men’s eyes. This dismissal will sow bitterness, I’m sure; and if I’m Ser Eldon’s successor I’ll be in the midst of it all.”

“So do not go,” she urged him. “Plead inexperience. Seagard is vulnerable, and the whole of the lands of the Trident are guarded from the ironmen here. If it should be taken, the Trident will be open to the same reaving that has befallen the Reach since the Arbour fleet sank and the Shield Islands fell. Lord Hoster might well support you for the safety of his dominion.”

“All of that is true. I’ll have to make Ser Harrold my castellan.”

“Harrold Shellfoot is a good man, but he is not a Mallister and he is not a lord, nor does he know how to be. I’d let him lead a battle, certainly, but not a campaign. It is not the same.”

“It isn’t,” Jason agreed. “Yet I must do my duty.”

Marianne awaited him at the portcullis at morn on the next day. They had argued fiercely, and she was not reconciled; yet when she bade him farewell in her long white dress, pale and lovely, she was dry-eyed.

“Gods speed, my lord,” she said to him. “I will pray for your swift and safe return.”

“If the Warrior should grant,” Jason said. He could not help but add to her, “Take care,” before he rode away.

The royal fleet set sail a few weeks after his arrival at King’s Landing. It was bound for the Arbour, to liberate the island from the ironmen. That was a fair day; the breeze was gentle and the sun was shining. A cheering crowd of cityfolk awaited Jason and his men as they put out to sea. Nobody was fond of ironmen. They had been stealing ships, raiding the coast and harassing King Robert’s realm since almost the moment his reign began, when Balon Greyjoy had crowned himself and set the docks of Lannisport aflame.

Lord Balon had won himself no friends with his excess of indiscriminate cruelty, attacking Reachmen and westermen alike. At this very moment, a great host, led by Lords Hightower and Tyrell, was encamped in Oldtown, ready to retake the Arbour as soon as the Iron Fleet was no longer in the way. Those Houses were hardly the greatest allies of the new dynasty; against the Mad King’s dogs, Jason would trust them no farther than the distance of a boot to a face; but that would not stop them from lifting their swords against the ironmen when the ironmen had seen fit to attack them. If they were victorious, Fair Isle would be the next target, linking up with the fleet of House Lannister, and then they would go to Pyke and teach the ironmen a lesson they would not soon forget.

House Targaryen in the Battle of Dragonstone had possessed more ships of war than House Greyjoy did right now, if Lord Varys told it true, and House Targaryen had been defeated. On land and sea alike, King Robert’s men had the numbers. Nonetheless, Jason was uneasy about this campaign, not for fear of Lord Balon but for the circ*mstances in which he had acquired it.

Jason had never liked Ser Eldon Estermont, but he had been astonished to learn that Ser Eldon had actually won the battle. Going by that, the king’s dismissal did not seem fair, it seemed like petty spite. That was more than a little concerning. If one master of ships could fall to a capricious royal whim, why not another?

If his fate was to be like Ser Eldon’s, he would simply go home, and he would see Marianne and Bellena and Patrek and tiny Lysa again. He would be glad of the respite. But if that was how the king rewarded men who won battles for him, Jason shuddered to think what it would be like if he lost.

His heart was lighter when they were further from King’s Landing and nearer to their goal. The ironmen were a worry, but a worry of a different sort. All folk of Seagard knew exactly what to do about ironmen, as Jason’s lord father had taught him and his father had taught him and his father had taught him back to nigh the dawn of days. ‘A good ironman,’ the old saying went, ‘is an ironman with iron in his throat.’

Jason was no fool new to the sea, blundering about blindly with the fullness of his strength. Before he came to the Arbour, he stopped off the coast near Starfall—taking care to remain alert, in case the Dornish should prove even more treacherous than they were reputed, such as to help ironmen against honest folk—and he sent forth some of his smallest, swiftest ships. They were to scour the sea around the Redwyne Straits and the Whispering Sound, from the shoreline to as far from it as any man dared sail, looking for ironmen. It would not do to be surprised by an unexpected enemy. Ironmen were never clever, men said, nor were they ever wise, but the more dangerous of them could sometimes possess a certain low cunning.

Eight out of nine of his scouts returned, and when they informed him of what they had seen, Jason’s lips stretched into a smile. He summoned his captains to his flagship, the Lady Lyanna. “In their greed the ironmen have blundered,” he said, and told them the word he had received. “They have no more than a hundred-and-fifty longships. They’ve put their strength to menace the westerlands and the Reach at the same time, too far from one another. If they were less ambitious, more sensible about the limits of their strength… but no. If so, they would not be ironmen.”

“We should attack at once,” urged one of his captains, Lord Branston Cuy. Jason had attempted to raise men of several of the Seven Kingdoms, not just the Trident and Vale; the king’s councillors could be fair and respectable even when the king and his Hand were not. “Strike hard and early while they have not yet noticed we are here.”

“No,” said Jason. “They know we’re here. One of our ships did not return. It could be bad weather, of course, or Dornish perfidy, but it would be unwise to count on that; if we were wrong, we’d face catastrophe. We must assume we have been seen, and act accordingly.”

The royal fleet of House Baratheon put out to sea and headed for Oldtown, staying far enough from shore to avoid the rocks but close enough that their galleys were not at too terrible risk from the tempests that ruled the far open sea. As they drew near, Jason stood on the deck of Lady Lyanna, speaking orders for strong-voiced men, acting in turns, to relay to the fleet. The waters of the Whispering Sound were as foggy as they ever were. The Smith had blown his breath kindly; the winds were favourable today, taking them north as they wished.

Before aught else, the shining spires of Oldtown came into view. There were audible gasps across the ship. It was the most beautiful work of mankind that Jason had ever seen, wrought all in stone, not timber, and much of it of fine white marble. Towers and septs soared into the sky. Above them all the mighty Hightower rose like a white leviathan a thousand feet tall, dwarfing the lesser towers like a knight to a babe. From its peak issued a dazzling orange light that defied the fog and set the whole city aglow.

Jason and his fleet sailed on. As they came close, they espied the narrow forms of ironmen’s longships, gliding in front of the port like a swarm of locusts. So they came, Jason thought. He had feared that they might not. The ironmen were outnumbered. If they had allowed the royal fleet to take Lord Tyrell’s army to the Arbour, the army’s task would be much easier but finding and destroying them would be more difficult.

Some of the sailors punched the air and cheered at the sight. The enemy was caught and trapped. Lord Jason remained impassive.

“Send word to the Whitewing, the Smith’s Servant, the Arrowswift and their squadrons. Have them count the enemy’s numbers and retreat if they come near. I will not venture forth blindly. I must know whether they have the same number of longships as the scouts thought—truly their longships, not other ships painted in Greyjoy colours while the real ironmen lay in wait for an ambush.”

That sober warning drew the excessive exuberance from his men. Let us not count our chickens before they hatch. They waited.

When his small swift ships reported back, Jason could hardly believe them. He had not imagined that the fearsome Greyjoys who had been menacing the realm for so long could truly be stupid enough to do something like this. The ironmen lived their whole lives at sea. Surely they ought to know that for a smaller fleet to get stuck in a narrow inlet that left it unable to flee from a larger fleet, yet not narrow enough to prevent the larger fleet from deploying its full numbers, was the worst tactic they could use.

Yet it appeared they did not.

“Approach carefully and retain formation,” Jason ordered. “Keep them penned between us and the city. If we give them space to escape they might still be bothering us for years.” He thought of the two failed assaults on Seagard, of the men that he had slain there and the men that he had lost. None of his own kin, few as they were, but good and honest men sworn to his service. Today you’ll be avenged. “This ends. Here. Now.”

The Lady Lyanna swayed beneath his feet as the royal fleet sailed down the Whispering Sound.

In the distance the longships grew. They were lesser in numbers than the royal fleet, and small, too, compared to King Robert’s warships. They tried to sail to the edges of the sound, perilously near the shore, but Jason’s captains barked commands all across the line and the royal fleet fanned out, blocking the ironmen’s escape. Every royal ship faced forward, intent to kill ironmen.

Nearer. The longships grew so large in Jason’s sight that he could make out the shapes of their sea-monster-sculpted prows.

Nearer. He began to hear the ironmen’s shouts to one another in their desperation, a babble drowned out by the noises of the sea.

Nearer…

A lookout’s voice rang out from the mizzen-mast of another ship, clear as a whistle. “Ironmen from the aft!”

Jason whirled around. “Aft ships turn!” he roared. “Aft ships turn! Brace! Brace for impact—!”

Within minutes, thin daggerlike shapes slid out of the fog. As they came nearer the light of the Hightower pierced their disguise, revealing hundreds more longships arrayed across the horizon, banners of many colours whipping back and forth in the wind above.

Jason’s heart leapt into his mouth.

No, he thought, no, no, no, it can’t be…

The royal ships were still turning. The two enemy fleets—and this must be the whole strength of the iron islands, not just the Iron Fleet of House Greyjoy—crashed into the royal fleet like a hammer and an anvil. Facing away from the main strength of the ironmen, too spread out to confront an enemy of strength so close to their own, well-prepared to fight a completely different sort of battle, the ships of King Robert were caught awry.

“No,” Jason said aloud, unable to surmount his shock. I was so careful, I took every precaution, I checked all but the far deep, there were no reinforcements within the distance any ship made by man can sail from shore…

They closed the gap. The ironmen’s ships struck his own and ironmen poured off them. Big bearded brutes they were, with maces and axes and, for some of them, plate armour.

Plate armour. Who in the gods’ names wears full plate on a ship? Who does not fear drowning?

An infestation of ironmen boarded the Lady Lyanna. With a cry of defiance, Jason drew his sword and rushed to them. He came against a burly ironman, huge even for that race, with a vicious axe and expensive plate painted with a kraken.

Their leader, Jason thought with desperate hope, a Greyjoy, I must slay him, this day must be turned around…

Jason was a skilled swordsman. The young Greyjoy was strong as an ox but he was nowhere near as practised and nowhere near as fast. Jason danced about the man’s skull-crushing blows, darting in with cuts to the elbows and knees where one part of the plate armour joined another.

A sharp pain erupted in his back.

Jason fell to his knees. The agony was unbearable. He wished to be anywhere but here, and thought of home, of Seagard, of the family waiting for him. Marianne, I’m sorry.

The great Greyjoy brute grunted like an animal, eyeing him with some surprise. For all of Jason’s best efforts, he seemed little-hurt. “You should not have done that,” he rumbled. His voice was deep as an ocean chasm.

“Victarion, since when have I paid any heed to what you think I should not do?”

Dainty footsteps tapped around Jason’s fallen body and a wet red right hand lifted his face. Jason caught a glimpse of his killer. For a moment he hardly believed it. It was a pale, slender, handsome man with a wide smile that he almost would have thought kind, until he looked into the eyes: one blue, the other black and glittering.

“You tried to be careful. You were afraid,” said Euron Crow’s Eye. “But not nearly afraid enough.”

The pavilion shuddered beneath a steady, heavy beat of raindrops, pounding down, loud as the drums of an army. Drop-drop-drop-drop-drop.

As was his wont, Captain Nikar spoke bluntly. “It won’t work. We won’t catch them by surprise.”

“And why not?” Ommo Pomistis said in the same Braavosi tongue. “We’ve been running away for a moon’s turn. They won’t expect an attack now, of such audacity.”

“Nevio Adarys knows his work,” Nikar said with a sneer that made his face, an artwork of scars, look even uglier than usual. “The Company of the Rose might be full of fools—I don’t know them well enough to say—but Adarys will be in command. Count on it. The Norvoshi would be fools to say elsewise. He’ll have watchers all around his camp, all day, all night, no matter where he is, and he’ll have his pikemen well-drilled to get up fast, form up and fight off an assault ahorse. Unless he’s slipped a lot since I fought with him at Vardos.”

Handtaker spoke softly. “He hasn’t.”

“Then what else do we do?” the younger captain demanded. He appealed to Handtaker. “Commander, we can’t stay here. The Baure isn’t enough; it’s scarce even a river, just a stream into the Lesser Noyne; you can walk right across with your head above water, unless you’re short as a Volantene’s co*ck. And our men are too tired from the chase, their mood bitter from the retreat. Fight here and we give the Gallant Men and Company of the Rose exactly the battle they want.”

“Any better ideas?” Nikar asked him. “Retreat north to the Hills of Norvos, better land to mount a defence, good… except that then we’re not in their way any more. They march right past us and join with the Stormcrows and the rest of the Gallant Men. Then they head to the plains of Ulymos and set the landowners’ precious fields aflame, avoiding all the cities, till the landowners force the Braavosi host there to come out and engage them—you know they will, they are that stupid—and get slaughtered. Then Braavos has lost the war. No, we need to hold them east. The Baure isn’t ideal but the Lesser Noyne is to our east and all the lands west of us are even more open. It’s the best chance we’ll get.”

“A night attack is a better idea than marching to our slaughter,” Pomistis said defiantly. “And it will be a slaughter. The Gallant Men detachment we can face, but with the Company of the Rose too… they have twice our numbers and our men are in no condition for a hard fight.”

“This is war, not counting sheep,” Bloodbeard rumbled contemptuously. “They have to fight a river-crossing. We’ll hold.”

Pomistis drew his sword. “Who are you calling boy?”

“Enough!” Handtaker’s voice cracked like a whip. “Put away your steel.”

The younger man looked around. The five burly men behind Handtaker had drawn their weapons. He sheathed his sword with a mutinous look.

“You’ll apologise to Bloodbeard for threatening him.”

Pomistis looked even more mutinous at that, but he obeyed.

“Bloodbeard, you’ll apologise to Pomistis here for that slight.”

Bloodbeard was incredulous. “Commander—”

Handtaker did not say a word. He was unarmed. He was far less than Bloodbeard’s bulk, strength, height and weight. His beady eyes fixed themselves on his captain.

Bloodbeard quivered. “I’m sorry.”

“Excellent,” Handtaker said. “The decision has been made. What remains to us is to execute it. Feran, word from the scouts?”

“They’ll be upon us tomorrow afternoon,” said the Myrish captain. “They’re camping in Nyrelos for the night, so they’ll approach us from the east-northeast. Most afoot, most armed with sword and spear, plenty of archers. About two-thousand of them are Gallant Men. A thousand Company of the Rose. The last thousand from smaller free companies.”

“And do you agree with that, Sunsetlander?”

All eyes fell upon Stannis Baratheon.

“The scouts are right, this time, commander,” Stannis said.

Captain Feran bristled at that, but Handtaker said simply, “You are certain?”

Stannis replied only to the commander. “As certain as if I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Good,” Handtaker said. “The two of you concur.” He gave a warning glance to both Stannis and the Myrman.

None of the other captains dared to speak more after that, but Stannis saw their unfriendly eyes upon him. He knew he was not trusted. He had only been a man of the Company of the Cat for six years, fighting in two wars on the Rhoyne and one in the Disputed Lands, and already Handtaker had chosen to make him a captain.

“I will command the reserves,” Handtaker said, “and I’ll commit them wherever the line seems particularly weak. The line must be held, all along the river. It will delay them and make them more vulnerable to us but the Baure isn’t deep enough to stop them on its own, not at this point in its course. We must be ready to counter wherever they try to cross. They go north, we do. Is that understood?”

“Yes, commander,” the captains of the Company of the Cat said in unison.

“Lorumis, the centre is yours. Bloodbeard, you’ll take our right flank, in the south. Gemilio, the left, the north. The rest of you will be disposed as follows—”

He listed captains who would serve with their men under Captain Lorumis’s command, and that of Captain Zometemis whom men called Bloodbeard, and that of Captain Nikar.

Finally he named the captains of the reserves, and half-way among them he said, “Sunsetlander, your men will watch over the captives.”

The captives. Stannis saw Bloodbeard, Feran and several others smile. There was not a less prestigious post that could be granted.

“Yes, commander.”

He allowed nothing of what he felt to show upon his face.

In his place in the reserves, behind the left flank of Handtaker’s host, Stannis briefly raised his visor to wipe a hand across the sweat upon his brow. Again. He was roasting in his armour. Stormlander-born, he did not think he would ever be accustomed to Essosi summers.

Stannis stood atop a small mound that he had ordered his men to make, his eyes, dark as the deep sea, fixed in the east. The Company of the Cat stood nearer, on what had been green grass, turned to mud by the boots of sellswords. Beyond them, the river Baure flowed with its surface below the level of most of the ground, in a little valley it had carved across the land in ages past, when it must have been deeper. South went those waters, shallow now, though hundreds of feet wide, from their source somewhere in the western Hills of Norvos to their joining with the Lesser Noyne. Stannis knew the commander meant to make use of that valley’s slope here on its left side, as best he could, to slow down the enemy and make them vulnerable.

Yet that slope was neither steep nor high. He did not think that it would be enough.

Across the river, shields shining in the sunlight, marching in good order, came the detachment of Gallant Men and the lesser free companies that marched beside them in service to Norvos. So great a free company were the Gallant Men that they had eight-thousand sellswords as a whole. In contrast, the Company of the Cat had only three-thousand at full strength, and they were not at full strength now. Handtaker had tasked Captain Tyleo Anastis with leading a thousand of his men away, to fight a campaign further south.

They had never been meant to face such a great force, not in the sure-sounding pronouncements of the war councils, where hardened sellswords had to pretend to respect the wisdom of preening Braavosi fools who had never seen war from the comfort of their manses. The Braavosi have got too greedy, Stannis thought, drunk on the victories they never saw, the victories we won for them by our sweat and blood. If Braavos had accepted its gains and made peace half a year past, there would not have come that dreadful day when the Iron Shields were shattered at the gates of Norvos, the day when everything changed.

Today it will change again.

Stannis hefted the longbow he had taken from the corpse of a Summer Islander he had slain, wrought of the wood peculiar to those isles. Men said the bows of the Summer Isles were better than those of Westerosi make, even those of yew or weirwood, lesser only than dragonbone. Stannis did not disbelieve them. With a motion smooth as silk, he plucked a long and narrow-headed arrow from the quiver at his belt and put it to the bow.

He pulled back the bowstring so far and so hard that his fingers screamed at him. He gazed upon the Gallant Men and Company of the Rose men with four assessing eyes, an action as familiar to him as breathing now, and judged his shot.

He wondered what would become of him if he failed on this day. Would he be taken captive, when the sellswords bought by Norvos overran those bought by Braavos and destroyed the Company of the Cat? Would he die in battle? Would he be executed here, or in Norvos? Would they try to ransom him from his brother? He hoped not; Robert would laugh and tell the bearded priests he would not pay a copper, and Stannis could not bear to suffer that indignity. Better to die and be done with it.

To die in a faraway land… he had oft considered it. He would be dying for Braavos to subordinate Norvos and control the lands of the upper Rhoyne. Strange, for a stormlander boy to die for the mastery of a foreign land where folk with strange names spoke in strange tongues, when it mattered so little to him…

In truth, Stannis’s sympathies lay more with the Norvoshi. Every son of the stormlands knew what it was like to lie next to a titan while trying to avoid being its vassal in all but name. The axe-guardians of the bearded priests of Norvos had fought admirably whenever they took the field, whereas Braavos’s own men had not, and Braavos’s war effort was faltering due to Braavosi arrogance. It did not feel right that he was fighting to make the Braavosi triumph.

No matter. Stannis had never fought for what he believed was right, else he would have gladly served King Aerys, as he would have done if the head of the rebellion had been anyone but a Baratheon. He had fought for his brother, until his brother had betrayed him, and afterward he had fought only for himself.

He let the first arrow fly. By the time the fletching cleared the bow, Stannis already knew the shot was perfect.

Nevio Adarys did not see the first man fall. He stood near the middle of his host, preferring not to hold the van, lest he move forward too easily and be blinded by a trap, nor the rear, lest he be too far from a great number of his men. As he was, his own detachment of Gallant Men were behind him, and the Company of the Rose and other small free companies stood in front. The combined host of sellswords serving Norvos stood on a muddy plain of trampled grassland beneath a clear early-afternoon sun overhead, marching westward to the river Baure, behind which stood his foes, as he had known. Only the noise of his men’s boots and chatter could be heard today. Not even birdsong disturbed them; the little birds that usually thronged around these parts had fled, doubtless due to the presence of a family of eagles. All seemed as it should be, all seemed in order, until one of his captains of the van fell.

At first Nevio did not realise what had happened. There was a commotion somewhere in the van, among the Plains Lions he thought, and he leant forward and stared, looking to find the source of it. Lots of Plains Lions were huddled about something on the ground. Nevio looked for the commander of that free company, and could not see him. But Plains Lions captains were trying to restore order. Nevio saw one such captain, Hanarro Nemel, a stout burly man in full plate, muscling among the men, moving to the front, calling men to follow, to gather around him, shouting commands, moving every moment…

All of a sudden a long arrow protruded from the eyehole of his helmet, and he fell.

Nevio was an old hand at his trade. He remembered the way Captain Nemel had been facing at the moment of his fall; in an instant he calculated where the arrow must have come from—the west—and traced a line with his eyes. There had been no-one in front of him. There was only hundreds of yards of empty plain, hundreds of yards of river beyond it, and, beyond that, the Company of the Cat.

That made no sense; the arrow could not have come from there. Where had it come from? There must be a hidden enemy, mayhaps another host the scouts had failed to see.

Another arrow flew. He saw it perfectly this time, its flight unbelievably swift, an arc straight from somewhere in the enemy army to his own. It struck a captain of the Company of the Rose—also fully armoured, also moving—through the eyehole of his helmet and he fell dead at once to the ground.

That sight sent a chill deep in Nevio’s heart. Impossible. Not even the longbows of the Sunset Lands had nearly such range, nor such unimaginable precision. That is no bowman.

But his foe, the monstrously-reputed Handtaker, did have a man in his free company who came from a land renowned for archery. And who, it was said, could do things that lay not in the province of man…

More arrows flew, and more men fell. Now some of them were common sellswords, not captains. There was agitation in the van, he could tell from the increasingly frantic orders being shouted. “Hold the line! Hold the line!”

Nevio made his decision in an instant. He had not thought his host was in range of enemy archery, but they were, that was plain to see now. His men would not stand here walking calmly westward, being shot at and making no reply; and he would not give orders that would not be obeyed.

“Forward!” roared Nevio at the top of his voice. “Keep order! Start the run! Forward!”

The van would start running soon in any case. He could not stop that, not with the arrows falling down upon them, haughtily disdainful even of full plate. Better not to resist that tide but to swim with it. He had to ensure his van could not be parted from the rest of his host, as was probably Handtaker’s intent.

The men of the free companies serving Norvos broke into a run. Their sergeants shouted orders, keeping them in line, preserving discipline, making sure they would smash into the Company of the Cat like a single hammer instead of a shower of pinpricks. His host grew faster like a boulder rolling down a hill, the hard work of the sergeants paying off and welding the host into a whole, ready to smash into their foes and win their way across the river.

The foremost of his ranks made it to the east bank of the Baure. He watched them walk down the gentle slope of the river valley, not even needing to climb, and rush into the water with their weapons at the ready. Now they were close enough that a whole hail of arrows fell upon them, but they moved forward in defiance of it. Their faces were hot with wrath.

Handtaker’s men on the west bank lowered their spears and pikes, pointing.

Running at the head with vengeance in their hearts, the Plains Lions scrambled out of the river and up the slope and crashed into the enemy centre. There was a hideous screech of steel. The foe fought from above on the slope, jabbing at them with polearms, trying to press them back into the river Baure. The foremost men in the Company of the Rose, a little way behind, joined them. Other free companies struck at the Company of the Cat’s northern and southern flanks, and others went further north or south than that, seeking to draw away Braavos’s sellswords’ reserves and pull out the Braavosi lines so that the greater numbers of Norvos’s sellswords on this day could tell. If all went well, the Company of the Cat’s lines would be spread thin enough to make some place weak enough for his reserves—who had stayed back, not charging with the rest—to punch through.

Now Nevio’s own men—in the middle of his host, well behind those foremost ranks—made it to the river. The mud squelched beneath his armoured legs as he ran, and even on this hot summer’s day the water was a shock of cold.

He ran on. The water level rose, covering his feet, his lower legs, his legs, his hips, his belly, his chest. The arrows of his foes pelted him now, and many of his men—for not all could afford full plate—fell screaming, their blood colouring the water.

Grimly resolute, in the reddening Baure, Nevio ran on.

The centre! His men were winning there. Nevio had fought many battles and his experienced eye could already see it now. His sellswords had struck the enemy centre with tremendous force and the Company of the Cat men there were being pushed away from the bank. Many had perished, but more were coming to replenish them, scrambling out of the river.

The centre is buckling!

Even as the water crawled up to Nevio’s neck, in the deepest part of the Baure, he could not restrain a shout of exultation. The weary Company of the Cat men, exhausted by the long pursuit westward that had taken them here, were breaking under the fury of his van, unable to restrain them. Now Plains Lions and Company of the Rose men were fighting not in the river valley but on level ground, rising out of the river Baure like the merling hosts of legend.

A tall, thin enemy captain was shouting commands. It availed him little. Nevio saw his men push forward, encouraged by their comrades, more arriving every minute. The men acted as if they were the reserve, ignoring the less vulnerable flanks and piling into the centre where they could climb to level ground…

A rushing noise from the north filled Nevio’s ears.

He did not recognise it, he ignored it, he pushed onward, onward, onward… he had not even committed the reserve yet and victory was already within his grasp…

“The river!” somebody was shouting, no, not somebody, everybody, someone was bodily shaking him, “the river, the river, the river—”

Nevio looked to the north.

Upstream on the Baure, a howling wall of water rolled towards him. Where he stood, the Baure was slow-flowing, shallow and calm; but upstream it was a terrible torrent of monstrous size. Further upstream yet, where the river bent, it looked shallower than it was here, as if it were being emptied; and all its water bore down on him, fast and huge and rising, rising, rising, rising…

In an instant he understood. The van was on the west bank, fighting the Company of the Cat. The reserves were on the east bank, not yet having crossed the river. And the middle of his host was still in the water.

Nevio’s heart leapt into his mouth as his army’s cries of triumph turned to terror. “Get out!” he yelled as loudly as he could. “To the west, to the east, I don’t care, just get out of the river! Get out! Get out!”

It was no use. The roar of the approaching wall of water, high over their heads, was so earth-shakingly vast that it drowned out his voice. Almost no-one but himself could hear him. Nevio Adarys screamed a scream that was swallowed up and silenced by the raging river as it swept his host away.

Gemilio Nikar walked through a hell of fire, steel and screams. Houses were alight all about him, and the helpless townsfolk who lived in them were crying out as invaders took their possessions and their dignity.

Ignoring them, Gemilio turned a corner, whereupon he found Aro Isattis, whom men called Handtaker nowadays. The commander of the Company of the Cat was holding council in the middle of the street in the sacked Norvoshi town of Nyrelos, with the implacable self-assurance of a man who did not fear the chaos all around him because he knew the makers of that chaos feared him.

“Ah, Gemilio,” Aro said, “do join us.” The circle of armed men parted, letting Gemilio take a place. “What word of our foes?”

“The Company of the Rose no longer exists,” Gemilio told his commander. “The small free companies that marched with them, too. Overall the enemy took about two-thousand dead, we reckon, and six-hundred and twenty-seven captive. Hard to tell, though. We can count the ones we slew, but not so easy the ones the river took.”

Gemilio suppressed a shudder at that. He was a killer, and knew it. He had spent his life since boyhood with war as his trade. He knew the ways of horse and foot, of flanking and encirclement, of fort and open field, of bow and pike and lance and sword. Yet in all his life of killing he had never seen anything like what Aro’s Sunsetlander had done, the river swelling to blow away a host of men like leaves in an autumn wind.

“Naturally,” Aro said, after a short pause. “And the Gallant Men?”

“The Gallant Men have been badly mauled, but they were at the rear, so only half a thousand of the lost were theirs, and the men who survived were all theirs, not the lesser companies. As for those that got away, they’re Feran’s task, not mine.”

“Indeed. Feran?” Aro directed his gaze to the Myrish captain of scouts.

“Most of them deserted,” the Myrman said. “About a thousand of those, my men say. They’re running away north, northeast, southeast, south… They’ll rape these lands so hard half of the children born here next year will be their sons and daughters, but we don’t need to give a sh*t. They’ll be no threat to us. A core of, we think, about four-hundred have kept good order and are marching for the Lesser Noyne. They’re more of a concern, but they’re moving too fast to rally the others. We reckon they’re just trying to get away from us as fast as they can.”

“Understandably,” Aro murmured with a little smile.

“I told you: give me all the captives, not a handful, and I would work wonder and terror such as the world has not seen for a thousand years.” The man who strode down the road towards them was tall and broad as an ox, clad in steel plate armour so bloodstained it was more red than gleaming, and bearing a bow of hue like burnt gold. “Commander, did I lie to you?”

“It was as you promised.” Aro Isattis’s composure was absolute, undaunted by the murderous appearance of the man who had killed a thousand men or more without lifting a sword. “Impressive work, Sunsetlander. I was not certain you were capable of it.”

“I once was not.” Captain Baratheon reached their circle and was granted a place therein. He paid no more heed to the raping, pillaging and burning of Nyrelos all around him than Gemilio or the other sellswords did. Every man of them had been in the midst of such things before, more times than they could count. “My time in this place has not been wholly wasted, commander. It never is, when there are secrets to seek.”

“And which secrets made this?” asked Gemilio.

“The river-magics of the Rhoyne, that once drowned armies and imperilled all but the Valyrians.” Baratheon’s lips twitched upward, a flashing smile like the twist of a knife. “Lost, some would say, but not entirely forgotten.”

“To the Gallant Men’s misfortune,” said the commander. His voice held solely amusem*nt, not a trace of pity. “And the Company of the Rose, less significantly. You have served me well in this, Sunsetlander. Your brother’s loss is my gain.”

At that mention, Baratheon pressed his lips together, dark blue eyes glinting. He hated any mention of his brother, Gemilio knew. That was probably why Aro mentioned him so often when Baratheon sounded over-proud.

“Robert is no concern to the Company, commander,” the Sunsetlander ground out through his teeth.

“Indeed. Now let us move on. Lorumis, your men had the bitterest part of the battle. What is their condition?”

“Poorly, commander,” the Pentoshi captain said. “We lost three-hundred, dead and wounded. We expected worse, and it easily could have been, but the men are discontent. They’ll need a few good hard sacks, with plenty of wine and women and loot, to assuage their anger.”

“They’ll have them,” Aro promised. “The Gallant Men’s remnants don’t worry me overmuch. We can afford to delay here for a little while. Gemilio, yours?”

“Our losses weren’t as bad as the centre’s,” Gemilio said with a respectful nod to Ranio Lorumis. “They were gripped by panic when they—”

“Stop them!” A weeping young man, mayhaps twenty, ran out of a house, following a group of sellswords who had emerged carrying bags of loot. His chest was still covered but his breeches had been ripped to shreds, showing his bottom, and there was white all around his mouth. “Stop them!” he screamed, pointing at the sellswords who had stolen from him. He was looking at the circle of men in finer armour, the commander and captains of the Company of the Cat, and his hoarse voice and pleading eyes were full of appeal.

The higher-ranking sellswords merely looked at him, making no move to follow them. Weakling, Gemilio thought with contempt.

The young man realised he would be given no help. “You monsters!” he wailed in Norvoshi. “You sons of whor*s!”

“I cannot say you’re wrong about my mother,” Aro mused in the same tongue, eliciting laughter from the sellswords. “But I do dislike your tone. Kill him.”

The young man’s eyes widened and he turned to run. He was not nearly fast enough. Swift as a snake, Baratheon drew an arrow to his burnt-golden bow and loosed it through the young man’s throat. Blood gushed out. The raped man gave the faint beginning of a gurgle and stopped moving.

“Back to work,” Aro said briskly. “We’ll have an easy fortnight, that the Company may recover. Sack Harvos, Marenos, Rimnos and Lecos for a start; we can move on to others later. Feran, have your men ride far and around. I doubt there are any other hosts in the vicinity but it wouldn’t serve to get complacent.”

Feran nodded. “It will be done, commander.”

“We’ll gather more wood for arrows and spears and we’ll do what we can for the wounded. Any other requirements?”

“The Company can sleep here tonight,” Pomistis suggested, “properly guarded, of course. The men will like that.”

Soft-hearted boy, thought Gemilio.

“We’ll set up camp well outside Nyrelos,” the commander said. “The men might like it, but the people here hate us and some of them would do their best to kill us in our sleep. They’d fail, of course, and we’d kill them all, but the commotion would wake us up in the night and mean we get less rest. Anything else, captains, for your men?”

There was not.

“And you, Sunsetlander. What of your… particular requirements?”

“I fletch the arrows I kill with, commander,” Baratheon said. “I’ve no lack of those. But if you please, could the Company take more captives?”

The blood all over his armour left little doubt as to why.

They marched over the marshland, six-thousand boots pulling out of the mud. Stannis rode at the head with the other captains, at Handtaker’s side. The commander’s dark eyes were fixed intently forward above his hooklike nose; it made him appear like a great hawk, scouring the plains for prey. Behind him were the men of the Company. They were men of every kind: small dark Braavosi, silver-haired Valyrians, big sunbronzed Dothraki, men of the blood of Yi-Ti and Qarth and Old Ghis and a hundred other races. Only a few were from Westeros, and none of those were men of breeding. They were no less coarse and greedy and cruel than the others. Stannis had learnt that lesson long ago.

For all their lack of grandiosity, were he a man to wager, he would have wagered on them against any comparable host from his own homeland. Westerosi hosts were led by knights and lords with a surfeit of pride and a lack of knowledge, for wars in the Seven Kingdoms were rare. Stannis himself had never seen a battle when he was first placed in command of a great host. At the time, that had seemed natural to him. With retrospect, he shuddered to think of his inexperience. The Company of the Cat would never have allowed such. These men may not be good men—Stannis suspected that if they had been born in Westeros most of them would have met the Wall or the noose—but they were battle-hardened killers, one and all, and every man of them had spent much of his life at butchery. He had little doubt that the free companies that fought the great wars of the east, if enough could be gathered, could have swept aside the host of Mace Tyrell that had besieged Storm’s End in a day.

That thought—and the thought of Highgarden sacked and despoiled, the Tyrells’ fields in flames—summoned a smile to his thin lips. One day, he told himself, wishing, hoping, dreaming. One day.

The boatmen awaited them at the east end of the lagoon. Handtaker spoke with them curtly; iron coins exchanged hands; and soon they were aboard the ship that would take them to Braavos. On the other side of the lagoon, facing the sea, the great form of the Titan could be seen from here. It was more gigantic than almost anything made by the hand of man Stannis had seen, though to a boy born of Storm’s End it seemed rather small. It had withstood a thousand Narrow Sea storms, and it bristled with murder holes and archers and catapults.

Yet the Titan faced only the seaward side. Pretty though it was, it was a work of pride more than aught else. The true walls of Braavos were made of wood, and came now before him.

One, another, another, another… dozens… one could see no end to them? Hundreds upon hundreds they were; Stannis could not have said how many. Braavos of the Hundred Isles lay enclosed in its lagoon, and that lagoon swarmed with purple-painted warships. Stannis had often seen the fleet of the Arbour, the greatest in the Seven Kingdoms. The Braavosi fleet must have had more than twice that number. Only the Volantene fleet came close, and it was no equal of Braavos. The fleet of the Secret City was unsurpassed and unrivalled by any known to man, save only in ancient days when red-and-golden ships had sailed beneath the dragon banners of Old Valyria.

Watched keen-eyed by the sailors of those ships, by their leave, the Company of the Cat passed into the city.

Everything in this place is done to excess, Stannis thought. There were no knights, little lords and leaders of men who also had a role in war; there were the men of the free companies, who dedicated their whole lives to it. There were no septons but priests of a thousand gods, each more bewildering than the last. There were no king’s laws, but the laws of countless city-states, most of them tributaries to other cities, and at the apex of them all the Free Cities that acknowledged no yoke save that of their own men. There were no highborn ladies, or at least not such as Stannis knew them; there were magisters’ wives and concubines, who sometimes seemed worlds apart and sometimes scarce distinguishable to him, and the courtesans, whose bizarre veneration was like nothing in the Seven Kingdoms. There were no castles, but magisters who dwelt in manses so palatial they put the Red Keep to shame. There were no lords; magisters were somewhat like them, but there seemed no clear distinction between a low magister and a high merchant, and surely that must be awry. Leaders of men should not lower themselves to dabble in silks and spices.

Wrought awry though it may be, Essos was resplendent in its decadence. The Free Cities were greater and richer and more peopled than King’s Landing, every one. The same could be said of embarrassingly many of the lesser cities that paid them tribute. Wars were without end, the Free Cities ever-partaking in dances of hate; if men were not slaying one another on the Shivering Sea, the free companies might voyage as far as Slaver’s Bay in search of blood, and somewhere they would find it. The heat made the most scorching summers of the Seven Kingdoms seem temperate. The rivers were broader and faster-flowing than the Trident or the Blackwater. The unimaginable expanses of plains dwarfed even the fullness of the riverlands and the Reach, and to the east of those, the Bone Mountains overtopped the Mountains of the Moon, the tallest in Westeros, as a man overtops a child. The riders of the barrowlands, most famed of all those who dwelt west of the sea, were no equals of the horsemanship of the Dothraki. And when he delved into crumbling temples and tombs and secret places, the histories that were remembered on the Rhoyne stretched far further backward than any written in the Seven Kingdoms, full of tales of bravery and woe and bloodshed. The men were fierce, the manses rich, the women lovely (and audaciously dressed), the lands vast in breadth and in time… even the food felt like tasting fire.

No matter how long Stannis had to stay, he knew he would never feel at home here.

The Company’s ships drew closer to the harbour, where a large group of Braavosi were gathered awaiting them. Anchor was dropped. Men began to disembark. Gemilio Nikar—a pale old gold-ringed captain, tall, though not as tall as a Baratheon—shook Stannis briefly. “We’ll leave soon, Sunsetlander,” he growled, giving a short glance ashore. “Be ready.”

Stannis heard him. He did not bother to reply. Largely ensconced in the skins of his eagles, soaring high above, feeling the wind on his many wings and gazing over the endless little isles that emerged like pearls from the lagoon, Stannis wondered what would await him here. He had heard great things about Essosi feasts, but had never before enjoyed the banquets the mighty of the Free Cities reserved for their own. The Company of the Cat had been amply honoured and rewarded after crushing another slave-revolt in some anonymous province of Myr, for that was a common occurrence for the employment of the free companies… but while the commander and his captains were invited to dine with the noble lords of the blood of Valyria, the men were gingerly permitted entry to one of the lesser manses and given a meal somewhat better than the usual foraged stuffs. Stannis knew not what to believe. Lately raised to captain, he had never set foot in such halls for himself, nor in any other place so fine, since his departure from his own hall here in Braavos early in his exile.

Would there truly be such a selection of dishes as he had heard from the other men? Every meat mankind had ever thought to eat, along with fine wines and fresh fish and tarts of unbelievably exquisite making, course after course after course such that not the most gluttonous of men could ever hope to finish it all? Would there truly be feather-beds for the captains of the host, and scented baths, and beautiful dancing girls, and simpering servants scurrying after their every need?

It had been years since Stannis had dwelt in such comfort. Yet the Company of the Cat had won great victories for Braavos, and in those victories, most especially the victory at Nyrelos, he had played a fair part. And so he stood where he stood, calm, remote, unreachable, with his thoughts in the clouds gazing down distantly on the grandeur of the city below as the wind flowed under his feathers. By that means, he coolly ignored the irritable heating of his body in his armour that was bothering the other men, musing on what fancies the decadence of the east might bring.

Stannis smelt something pungent near his face.

He recoiled like a snake, shocked. At once he looked around with more than man’s eyes; two of his eagles were swooping lower, seeking glimpses. He put his gauntleted hand to his face. It came away brown.

There were Braavosi men all around them, poorly clad, struggling, held off by the fists of men of the Company of the Cat—strangely, only the fists, not sword-point. Their faces were bright with anger and their shouts and jeers filled the air.

“Go home! Go home!” This from an old woman in ragged clothing.

“No war!” cried another, a young man.

“Rich man's war, poor man's fight!”

“f*ck outlanders!”

“f*ck the fat-cats!”

“f*ck the Sealord!”

“Out of our city!”

“Out!—out!—out!—out!—”

When some of them saw the dung on the face of Stannis, one of the captains, their jeers grew louder.

“Get out, sh*tface!”

“Braavos don’t want you here!”

“f*ck Sealord Antaryon!”

“f*ck the war!”

Rage took hold of Stannis, flaming red and roaring. They dare? They dare?!? After all that I have done for them? He wiped his gauntlet clean on his armour and went for his goldenheart bow; the other dashed to his quiver. One of those rioters would serve excellently as a sacrifice if requisite, but for this he did not need one; at this range he had no need of secret sorceries to make his arrows fly farther and faster, swift as the wind, and strike true; with so many men so close, he could hardly miss…

A gauntleted hand clutched his arm. Captain Nikar hissed in his ear, “Stay your bow, Sunsetlander.”

“Their disrespect—” Stannis spat. He could not even finish the phrase, so choked was his voice with fury. Stannis had his father’s build, tall and broad and strong, surpassing most men; that sufficed to pull savagely free of his comrade’s grip. Nikar staggered, near flung off his feet by the force of the blow; but he came back, and he and two others gripped Stannis by the arm.

“You must not. This is the way in Braavos; there are always rioters. Massacre a bunch of Braavosi freeholders and our patrons will lose power for sure; the city will be enraged; we’ll lose everything—”

“They are insolent,” snarled Stannis, struggling. “They should not dare. Insolent smallfolk are—”

“You are not in the Sunset Lands! Ways are different here!”

Another voice spoke. “Stay. Your. Bow.”

Stannis had not survived for six years by disregarding those commands. Wrath warred with self-preservation. The latter triumphed.

He dropped his arm. “Your will, commander.”

“We will soon be with our patrons,” Handtaker said in his softest-spoken voice, the one that was most filled with the promise of cruelty to the disobedient. “The freeholding men of this city, smallfolk though you’d call them, think highly of themselves. The great men of Braavos have men experienced in quelling such disorder without slaughter such as you would commit. We await them. Until then, I have no use for men who lose their wits at the whiff of sh*t. Do I make myself clear?”

There was no choice if he wished to keep his head. “Yes, commander.”

Soon, indeed, a tide of armed men in uniform surged down the streets, better-dressed than the mob. Ignoring shouts of “Fat-cats’ slaves!” and “Traitors!”, they rushed among the rioters with weapons in hand. Stannis saw they bore no swords; their weapons were made of wood, and they seemed practised in giving the rioters a beating and throwing them off without doing them great harm.

The uniformed men badged with the Titan parted ways, and one emerged from among them: a pudgy middle-aged man with some unfortunate’s blood running down his fists. “Lord Handtaker,” he greeted, in Braavosi with a thick Volantene accent.

“Master Levoryn,” Handtaker said. “A pleasure, though I would that it were under better circ*mstances.”

“So would I,” Levoryn said. “Permit me to escort you to the Sealord’s Palace. His Excellency would be pleased to see you.”

“’Course he would,” muttered Bloodbeard. “We won his war for him.”

Stannis thought that would have merited a sharp look from Handtaker, but it gained none. The commander must be angrier than he seems.

At a nod from Handtaker, the men consented to be led away to a barracks on the other side of the city. Stannis and the other captains followed Handtaker towards the east end of the harbour, where golden domes and gleaming spires rose out of the mists.

Once they had passed through several columns of unsmiling purple-clad guards, they were led up flights of marble stairs and through great oaken doors to private rooms. Stannis had to wave off a servant who meant to help him remove his armour; it had been so many years since he had not done it for himself. Every sight was wondrous. The lovely woven rug beneath his feet depicted a stern-faced lord whose name Stannis did not know, lifting a sword, slender and silvery as a shard of starlight, towards a huge host of animalistic Pentoshi. It was muddied by his socks, even after the removal of his boots, and promptly rushed away without complaint to be cleaned and replaced with another. Once unarmoured, he strode over to the bed and rested a hand on the white pillow, wondering. It is so soft. He had not thought his hand to be dirty, but one of the servants took a single look at the pillow and swept it away.

Eventually he was persuaded to bathe. There was a tub of hot water already prepared for him. He sank in with a groan, and a freckled serving man scrubbed the dirt from his body. After that he was reluctant to let himself rise. When he did, he smelt of roses.

Once upon a time, Stannis realised, this would have seemed natural to him. It was startling to realise how much his exile had changed him.

By now the servants were getting anxious, for the dinner was soon to begin. He rose, and, once dry, they draped silken garments over him, all of them softer and cleaner than anything he remembered. They worked quickly; only the largest-sized clothes they possessed would fit him; and they offered the traditional colours of highborn Braavosi, purples and browns and blacks and dark greys. Stannis preferred black. It had been long since he had wealth enough to garb himself in gold, so it was the closest that he could reach to Baratheon colours.

He wandered from his room in a melancholy mood, his thoughts dwelling on a pale grey tower of stone that he knew he would never see again, rising high and proud on the Narrow Sea’s western shore. All this well-treatment made him remember his younger years. He could not help but think of home.

His thoughts a world away, struggling with the urge to send an eagle to gaze there from afar—a futile urge, he knew, for he could not return nevertheless and it only worsened his longing, and yet he was tempted—Stannis allowed himself to be led quickly by the servants. They took him through wide corridors to a hall full of portraits of Sealords past. This, he discovered, was no private dinner; dozens and dozens of Braavosi men were here, greatly outnumbering the sellsword captains from the Company of the Cat and a few other free companies.

Handtaker, his small lean hunter’s body seeming out-of-place in these magnificent surroundings, was last to enter, save for the Sealord Ferrego Antaryon himself, a tall fit man whose once-dark hair had more than a few streaks of grey. “Welcome, welcome,” Antaryon boomed, “to our valiant friends, who have aided in Braavos’s rise to glory!”

There was a polite toast, with restrained sips of the wine, which was superb. Most of his fellow sellswords, Stannis saw, clutched the stem of the glass instead of holding them the proper way, three-fingered.

“Let me introduce my friends,” Antaryon said, and swept around the hall, introducing the Braavosi guests. Every man of them was as plainly rich and well-dressed as himself. Stannis could not help but notice that the Sealord clapped some of them on the back, whereas others were merely named.

Handtaker addressed him with chill courtesy. “I thank you for your gracious hospitability, Your Excellency, though I must note that by others in the city we were received unkindly.”

“Oh yes, that rabble,” the Sealord said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I was sorry to hear they’ve given you trouble. The mob have been uproarious ever since Sealord Qorayis passed—they loved him, old fool that he was—but especially lately. Lots of them don’t like the war. Well, they’ll have less cause to complain now that we’ve won.”

“We have won the war,” a younger man, Magister Anno Nusaris, noted. “It remains to us to make a peace worthy of the blood that our men sacrificed.”

What we sacrificed, you mean, Stannis thought. The men of Braavos itself had contributed very little. The free companies had done the real work.

“More blood was shed by us,” said one of the captains of the Ragged Standard.

“Quite so,” said Magister Horo Lynalyon. “The free companies did as we bade them, and have been reimbursed properly. Let us not bring unenlightened notions to the table. His Excellency’s plans are more than satisfactory.”

“Dare I ask,” said Handtaker, “what these plans might be? I remind you, friends, that we are new-come here.”

“We’ve been busy winning the war,” said Bloodbeard. This time he did get a sharp look from the commander.

“Of course, Lord Handtaker,” said the Sealord brightly. He was the first man Stannis had ever met who spoke that moniker as if it were a normal name, without a flicker of uncertainty or fear. This one is too stupid to be afraid, Stannis thought; he was reminded unpleasantly of Robert. “There are many terms the bearded priests have agreed to, more by far than we could have attained if we had not won such a great victory, but the essence of them is this: A swathe of Norvos’s backcountry belongs hereafter to us, in the Hills of Norvos from Amaenelos to Menos. That was a lesser gain than we could have taken. In exchange we have something more valuable. The bearded priests may not impose any tax or tariff whatsoever on our commerce on the Rhoyne and all its tributaries. Hence our shipping will be able to proceed freely as far as the Golden Fields, where the Rhoyne starts to belong to the Qohoriks and Volantenes. That is worth more than any mere conquest. Our coffers will be filled with iron.”

They fought this war not for honour, not for lands, but for coin, Stannis thought. Upjump merchants and they will make men die to bring them more coin. His lip curled.

“The coffers of the mighty men in Braavos,” said Magister Qarro Domaryen, sitting three chairs from Nusaris. “The men who control the great trading fleets of the rivers. I fear the likes of the mob that assailed our brave defenders will not be so easily placated.”

Some of the magisters were nodding in agreement, but most of them did not. It seemed that the mighty men of Braavos largely supported their Sealord—either that, or they wanted him to think so, or perhaps the Sealord was predisposed to invite few save for his determined supporters.

“Nonsense,” declared a white-haired old magister named Lorio Hyndel. “Freer trade is for the best for all. Goods of all sorts will come to us more cheaply, now that they are without Norvoshi custom. Every shopkeeper in Braavos will be thanking His Excellency.”

“Indeed,” Antaryon said. “If not—well, permit me the indelicacy, magister, but if they did not approve, this would not be my palace.”

The moustached face of Banero Prestayn—a man older than Antaryon, very richly dressed, sitting near Domaryen and Nusaris—tightened.

“This does leave us with a fair deal of newly acquired land,” Antaryon went on. “I am of a mind to give it out to eminent men of the city, who will know how to give it proper usage. For all those who believe they have some proposal that will use it to the benefit of the city, my ears are open.”

Stannis soon began to see why this dinner was happening. Those magisters who had not supported the war were being invited to name great projects, such as vast plantations of some crop or the construction of new mines, that would serve the Sealord’s purpose, along with those who were already allies of the Sealord. If they pleased him, they were to be granted plots of the land that Stannis and his fellows had conquered, as their reward for speaking nicely to their master. Prestayn and his party, invited perhaps solely for politeness’s sake, flung barbs at Antaryon, but the numbers of his followers were dwindling.

Antaryon is not like Robert, Stannis decided, despite what he seems. He is just another corrupt courtier. Robert would have handed it all to the first man he took a liking to, then gone away to f*ck another whor* in Father’s bed.

The dinner went on, full of the sort of bribery of stolen goods that Antaryon would doubtless have clapped a man in irons for, if it had been done by a man less lofty than himself. It sickened Stannis to think of the brave men of Norvos treated thus. The axemen of Norvos had fought fiercely and bravely in the defence of their homeland, better by far than the mediocre performance of the Braavosi men; but Braavos was richer and had been able to hire better free companies, so Braavos had won, and now Braavos meant to subjugate them and carve up their country like a chicken.

Late in the evening, Nusaris spoke again. “This talk of lands and usages for the benefit of the city is all very well,” he said. “I fear, however, that it may not be to the benefit of the city to take as much as this, as well as Norvos’s concessions on commerce. The other Free Cities may be alarmed.”

It was not the first time that one of Prestayn’s followers had raised this matter tonight, and not the first time that it had been dismissed.

“Ah, don’t be so afraid,” the Sealord said. “Braavos has fought other Free Cities before. The Lorathi hate the Norvoshi more than either of them hate us. We can defeat Lorath, and we can defeat the alliance of Norvos and Qohor. We have done it before. And now we have our fine friends to help deter any unpleasantness.” He gestured at the sellsword captains with a fork. “We’re too far from Volantis and the Three Daughters, and as for Pentos, well do they remember when we humbled them. I doubt they wish to repeat the experience. What other threat is there? Neither the Lorathi nor the Norvoshi and Qohoriks have strength enough to overthrow us. Either of them would be foolish to try.”

“Quite so, Your Excellency. The matter of trade is a fitting concern for your noble selves,” Handtaker said. “As for the small matter of the security of the city, you may leave that to us.”

Stannis saw the amusem*nt in those small dark eyes over that hooklike nose, and suddenly he understood that Handtaker did not truly agree with the Sealord. He wants war. He thinks it will come and this is the best way to get it.

“Good man, Lord Handtaker,” Antaryon cried, reaching over to pat the commander on the back.

“Our threat may cause them to put aside old hatreds,” Nusaris continued, speaking quickly. He sounded genuinely afraid. “Magisters, we are placing ourselves at risk of the same fate that befell Volantis in the Century of Blood. We dare not seem too mighty. Are we prepared that the enemies of this city may retaliate?”

“Let them come,” said Stannis. “We will destroy them, each and every one.”

It was a scorching day of Essosi summer, scarce diminished by the cold ocean wind that hissed in his ears. Fathomless dark waters, foaming and writhing under the glare of the sun, lay to the north; on every other side, as far as the eye could see, were vast stretches of sand and pebbles and shingles, grey and grim and unending.

Two figures, small against the immensity of that landscape, were riding eastward on sand-bred mules, needed to withstand the jagged rock beneath their feet. One was a young woman, short and dark-haired and dark-eyed, with olive complexion, dressed in the thin, white, loose-fitting clothes common among these folk. She was small and slim, too slim, and had only a pouch at her belt. The other was paler, yet with even darker hair, short-cropped and as black as every one of his garments, in spite of the heat. He was broad-shouldered and heavily-built, his belt had a scabbard hanging from it and he bore a bow coloured like burnt gold.

“Here it is,” said the woman in white, pointing with a finger. Her companion’s gaze followed. Eastward went those eyes, as dark a shade of blue as the wind-whipped ocean, and he espied something equally grey, rising very slightly over the lip of the horizon.

“We shall see,” the man in black said. “I must go closer.”

The woman in white spurred her mule without complaint. Forward and eastward they rode, away from the afternoon sun, which cast long shadows ahead of them. She led him, picking skilfully away from the most treacherous patches of the rock. The man in black went after her.

In time they drew nearer, and found what they sought. Ten rough grey pillars rose out of the sand. Atop them was a roof wrought of blocks of the same uneven stone, scarcely a few feet over the sand. Most of what lay underneath had been swallowed up long ago. This little that remained was what the woman in white had seen.

The man in black crouched in front of it, and his eyes stayed there for a long while. Finally, without looking up, he asked her, “What do you know of this place?”

“Not much,” the woman in white told him. “There are a few old ruins like this in these lands, though I reckon this one is the biggest. These people, they lived here before what we did. Did you know that? The ruins were there when our forefathers landed here, as escaped slaves from Valyria. By then all the old grey buildings were already empty.” She shrugged. “Some folk say they were all slain by the Valyrians.” She spat at the name.

“Not the Valyrians,” the man in black said. “I’ve felt it. These were old when Valyria was young.”

There was another silence.

The man in black turned, and he pressed a few iron coins in her hand. “This should suffice for your mother,” he said. “You have done what I asked of you. Go.”

The woman in white stood her ground. “Beggin’ your pardon, but I want a look too. I came all this way, an’ I showed you here when you asked. You want to see what’s inside; well, why don’t I get to?”

The man’s deep voice rose, and he put a hand on the hilt of his sword. “I will not ask again.” He drew it forth. “Go.”

She fled.

Once he had satisfied himself that the woman in white was gone, the man in black sheathed his sword. He turned back to a particular point of the ruin between two pillars, not visibly different from any other pair of pillars, and began to dig. He had naught but his hands, and the pile of sand and small rocks was high about the building. Much of it had to be moved, far enough that it would not just slide back in.

It was many hours’ work. He set himself at it without complaint. Others came to help him, foxes and small sea-birds and his mule, working placidly together to shift more of the sand from this seemingly immoveable place. He ate some salted beef and slept upon the sand, and when the sun rose again it saw him back at work, beginning before dawn.

It was past sunset on that second day when the man caught a glimpse of something that was not grey stone. His thin lips twitched into a smile. It is there. It was there as he had known that it would be. It was there as he had seen it being set in place six-thousand years ago.

It was the top of a wooden door.

Satisfied with that, he ate some more salt-beef and went to sleep again, and on the third day he awoke and shifted more of the sand, digging deeper. When the door was roughly half-uncovered, and he stood in what was like a great pit amidst all the sand and pebbles and shingles, he laid a hand gently upon the top of the door. He felt the power that infused it, the power that guarded it from outsiders, the power that sustained it, the power that warded off the threat of decay and the encroaching sand; and he knew it was less than his.

He stood behind a pillar and spoke a word in High Valyrian.

There was a hideous screech. The door exploded into a thousand splinters that rotted away in moments; that was smothered by a wave of sand and shingle that flowed like water through the opening, collapsing into the building with the clatter of small shifting rocks.

The man in black emerged from behind the pillar; he had clung to it as hard as he could, to avoid losing his footing and being swept away and struck and killed by the impact as the sand beneath his feet rushed in. The level of surrounding sand had dramatically shrunken. And there was a hole where had once been a door.

He smiled.

Treading carefully, not trusting the treacherous sand beneath his feet, Ser Stannis Baratheon crawled up to the hole and slid through. He slid over a mound of sand and shingle, built up over the millennia, finally allowed in by his own deeds. Inside it was pitch-dark, so he struck flint, setting alight a little lantern he had brought with him. He was glad that he had thought of it this time. In his experience, such places usually were.

It was a temple.

The pillars helped to support the great weight of the roof, but they were outside him now; there was a wooden wall, preserved by old magics. Inside it, there were carvings. Stannis gazed at them, fascinated. There were men fighting and hunting, women weaving and gathering water, children playing, all working the soil, chieftains ruling, animals being eaten or sacrificed, and stranger things, men with the heads of beasts and beasts with the heads of men, gods no doubt, interacting in all sorts of ways with people and with each other…

It could have been the work of a lifetime to understand it. Stannis was not here for that. He traced his fingers over the drawings and found no mighty magic in them. He proceeded to the altar for the sacrifices, made of rough-hewn stone—no, he realised, not even hewn, merely dragged stone; these people had not known how to cut it—and he felt the echo of pain, a thousand bulls and children dragged upon it and their throats cut in the search for divine favour… but nothing more.

He went past it, uncaring, holding up his lantern and squinting to see, for he could not see far. This could not be what he had felt, what he had dreamt of. There was power here, and he had come to find it.

A while’s walk from the entrance, following the wall, he felt a corner. That is too early, he thought, remembering how big the ruined temple had been from above. A moment later: There must be another room.

On the opposite side of the room from the entrance, Stannis found another door. He pressed a hand to it. There was magic, no doubt of it, magic meant to protect it from trespassers like himself.

No matter.

He drew himself up, took several steps back and uttered a word of command.

The temple door shuddered under the blow, and held.

Surprised, Stannis spoke again. Nothing happened. He spoke again, more sharply. Nothing. Again, infusing his voice with strength. Nothing. He threw himself at it and struck it with all his weight, and then tried hacking at it instead. Nothing sufficed. It was unyielding. The enchantment on the door was too strong.

I will not permit a door to hold me, thought the greenseer. Not when I have come so close. A pause, and a resolve: The price must be paid.

He took four steps further back and drew his sword forth all the way. He laid a finger upon it, thought, then moved his hand away. He drew back his sleeve, touched the point of his sword, and slashed from elbow almost to the wrist.

Stannis howled with pain, crying out as the blood poured forth from him. His legs convulsed beneath him; he nearly fell. The agony attacked him like hungry wolves tearing at his flesh, marauding and merciless.

Nonetheless, he staggered and kept upright, and pressed his bleeding arm to the side of the blade; and it burst into pale fire, white as snow, burning against the dark. It was so bright it hurt to look at it, bright like the stars, bright like the sun. To spare his eyes he cast them away from the flaming sword.

It was a magic long known to the Valyrians. Anogroperzys, they called it. Bloodfire. Like all magics that could accomplish much, it was power born of sacrifice. For an ordinary man, the spilling of blood might merely light a flame… but he was spilling greenseer’s blood, and that made it something more.

The three-eyed crow had taught him years ago that there was power in king’s blood, but not for any man who called himself a king. Self-proclamation was not enough, else sorcerers would make great use of any fool who named himself a king and could be harvested. The true cause was that there was power in the old lines, for many of them were distantly descended from sorcerers in the Age of Heroes. That was an echo of an echo, a mere shade of what true sorcerer’s blood could unleash. There was power in king’s blood… but king’s blood was to greenseer’s blood as a leaf to a tree.

Gritting his teeth, eyes watering, fighting the rush of pain, Stannis advanced, bearing the sword like a torch, holding it far away from him. Bright burnt the bloodfire, bright and white and overpowering. Already, in that instant of that brief first touch, his left arm was now burnt as well as wounded. Drop by drop, the castle-forged steel of his sword had started melting, scarcely able to contain the bloodfire blaze. It would hence be useless as a sword. For now, though, it was good enough.

He smote the temple door a single time; and the old enchantment screamed and shrivelled up before the bloodfire into nothingness. For long ages it had stood pristine and utterly untouched by time. Without that enchantment, as if burdened by the weight of all those ages at once, the old wood crumbled into dust.

Stannis stepped through the hole where there had been a door.

His mouth dropped open.

All around him was an artifice of utterly different kind to what he had seen in the rest of the temple. The rest of the temple was wrought of rough grey rocks dragged into place. This was smooth, superbly smooth, and it was blacker than midnight, so black, so perfectly drinking the light that even the bloodfire looked very slightly dimmed. In its pale glow Stannis beheld the smooth passages too low for a man, built for something shorter. The stone was damp to the touch, but not with water. It was like slime, sticky and slippery.

The temple was not wholly built by that ancient long-dead civilisation. They had built it around something much, much older.

Holding aloft the sword, Stannis strode into this remnant of something that he had never seen. This was the power he had felt; it must be. To one who was not a sorcerer it could not truly be described. He felt it like fire in his bones. The very air around him sang with sorcery, bright as the light of the full moon, clear as the ring of a bell, strong as the scent of a banquet.

No wonder it had been worshipped. To anyone who could sense it, it must feel like the touch of the gods.

Awed, keeping his head down so that he could walk, Stannis meandered through the black-stone passages. While his left arm seethed with agony, his fingers trailed along the walls, tracing the patterns they found there. He drank in the sensation of power around him, and felt giddy. It was as if he were drunk on strongwine, so enraptured was he, so exhilarated.

Yet as he moved and his head cleared as he became more accustomed, he perceived that all of this magic was old, old, old, older than anything that he had ever felt before. The people who had made this must have been mighty indeed, but where were they? Why had they gone away?

Head bowed, he kept walking through the dark stone, moving towards the place where the power felt strongest. It was not a long walk. This little settlement could not have been anything more than a small village, an outpost even—which made him wonder what it would be like to be in a larger dwelling of theirs. Disappointingly, he saw no distinction from the rest. There was the same low ceiling, the same slimy sensation, the same close-in walls, the same patterns…

The same patterns.

For the first time Stannis looked closely at the walls, blacker than the wings of a crow but lit by the white fury of the bloodfire. There were inscriptions there, he realised; he had not perceived them as such, for the writing was in no script he recognised, but that was what they were. The script was of triangles and ellipses and rectangles and circles, loops and arcs and shapes for which he knew no name; it was nothing like any form of writing he had heard of, but it was writing.

He touched it with the tips of his fingers as the pain of his wound burnt in his left arm. He traced the shapes, as fascinated by the shapes as he was frustrated by his inability to comprehend them. He kept tracing along the wall, feeling as he went. He did not know their meaning, yet somehow it seemed to him that sometimes the words meant something comforting, sometimes they meant something grand, sometimes they were proud, or angry, or restful, or eager, or reluctant, or afraid…

Afraid?

Even as he had that thought, his fingers slipped onto the next shape along.

It struck his thoughts like the charge of a thousand thousand knights. He did not move; but he felt as if he had been lifted up and blown by the force of it. A voice swept through his mind, a great howl long and low and rumbling, like a tremble in the bones of the world.

STORM-BORN, it roared. STORM-REARED, STORM-FEEDER, STORM-CALLER… HERE YOU STAND WASTING YOUR LIFE AWAY, IN THRALL FOR COIN TO A MEANINGLESS MORTAL. HAS IT NOT OCCURRED TO YOU THAT YOU WERE MEANT FOR SOMETHING MORE?

He struggled for control. He struggled to stand still. He struggled even to understand the great voice that swept away his thoughts and left in its wake only ruin.

“You do not tell me my destiny,” Stannis growled. “No old greenseer does, and no ancient enchantment either. Only I decide what I am meant for.”

IT IS NOT YOUR DESTINY, the great voice thundered. IT CAN BE YOUR CHOICE.

“What do you want from me?”

ONLY THAT YOU COME TO ME, STORMCHILD.

“I am not a child.”

That amused the great voice. ALL MEN ARE CHILDREN TO ME.

Stannis struggled to understand. “Why would I come to you?” he demanded.

WHY DID YOU COME HERE? asked the howling abyssal voice. It was not a question. YOU WANTED POWER. YOU STILL WANT IT, IF ONLY BECAUSE A PART OF YOU STILL HOPES YOUR BROTHER WILL CALL UPON YOUR AID AND END YOUR EXILE. AND YOU WILL GAIN POWER WHEN YOU COME TO ME.

“Why should I believe that?”

YOU WILL SEE.

The world transformed before his eyes. He saw a pale child on a pale horse; an army charging towards a man, and a man charging towards an army; a young girl running with an eagle on her shoulder; a man cradling a boy’s bloodstained body, weeping in the rain…

YOU WILL SEE, roared the voice vaster than the world. YOU WILL SEE…

A lean hook-nosed man with a murderous smile at the top of a tall tower; black banners, pure unadorned black, waving in the wind; a black-sailed ship upon a river in a sea of grass; a great gate taller than ten men, wrought of smooth black stone…

YOU WILL SEE…

It ended. Abruptly Stannis could feel his left arm again, screaming with the pain of its wound. His right hand held a sword that shone with pale fire. His left hand’s fingers were touching some symbols on the wall of an abandoned outpost enclosed in a long-forgotten temple millennia ago.

He withdrew his fingers with a flinch, far too late. Shaken beyond words, he turned and walked away.

He emerged from the black stone tunnels, then from the ancient temple that some forgotten people of mankind had built around them long after they were made. He pushed his way through the heap of sand and shingle, which the wind had shifted slightly so that some of it once again covered the entrance, and emerged into the waking world. He blinked, and shielded his eyes. It was morning.

“There!” A voice he knew: Urynis, a boy who served as one of Handtaker’s messengers. The boy rode up to him. “The commander said—my gods.”

He was staring. Stannis did not notice this at first, for he too was staring at Urynis, as if the boy were strange to see, though they had seen each other countless times before. Blinking in the glare, for a moment Stannis wondered why; then he recalled that he had not extinguished the bloodfire. That was careless, certainly. He had had other things on his mind.

At a thought, the pale blaze vanished. His wounded arm still howled at him. He took a glance at the wrecked sword and cast it aside, then looked up at Urynis. “What did the commander say?”

“He said you told him you’d be here,” the messenger-boy babbled. “I couldn’t find you for days, captain, I feared… well. He commands you to come back to the city as quickly as you can; if need be, I’m to give you my horse.”

Stannis scarcely listened. He was gazing only at Urynis, who had the silver hair eyes of the Valyrians, common in much of Essos, and was expertly controlling a white mare too large for him. He had just realised why the sight had seemed strange.

A pale child on a pale horse…

Is it all going to come true so soon?

The boy was still talking. “Norvos and Qohor have allied with Lorath and they sent an envoy saying the Braavosi should give back what they took from Norvos in the war. Even Pentos joined in; the commander didn’t think they’d have the balls for it. The Sealord means to reject those terms. There’s going to be a war.”

“Very well,” Stannis murmured, his face indecipherable. “I suppose now it begins.”

Eyes lifted wearily before him, Justin trudged up the jutting jagged stones, following the man before him. The straps of the pack he bore felt like knives being pressed against his shoulders, heavy with provisions and mail. Around him, the wind cried like a dying child, ululating long and loud and low.

No trees grew on ground as high as here, but there were many bushes, stout short often-needled scrub. Every step had to be taken with care. Not for the first time, he missed his step, tripping over a protruding piece of rock he had failed to tell apart from the surrounding same-pinkish-grey stone. By instinct alone he put a hand out on a greenish boulder to his right, to steady himself, grasping the granite, for the ground was tilted to the left, not flat, and he dared not fall. Not for the first time, he pulled it straight back, recoiling like a snake. The stone was blisteringly hot, baked by the unceasing summer sun.

The pull sent his elbow almost into the man behind him. The sellsword swore at him in colourful Tyroshi; Justin picked out the words ‘bastard’, ‘whor*’ and ‘horse’. Inflamed by outraged pride, Justin was about to retort, until he saw the captain’s eye upon him. He cursed under his breath and stayed silent. The captain disliked fighting in the ranks, and that was one man Justin was not willing to offend.

He took another turn around the mountainside, saw what lay before him, and groaned. Men were pulling themselves up a sheer face of rock, four times the height of a man. It was too steep to walk. Men were grasping at clefts in the rock, reaching out uncertainly with hands and feet. Perched at the top, a full man’s height above any of the others, a great broad-shouldered figure glared down at them impatiently. An eagle was perched upon his shoulder and blood was dripping from his stone-cut hands. It seemed he did not notice. Justin could not make out much of his features, for the Essosi sun blazed at his back; it was like gazing at a faceless shadow that loomed over him.

He exhaled, wiping sweat from his forehead and long white-blond hair from where it tumbled in front of his eyes. There was nothing to it. He would not let himself look weak or hesitant in front of this man. He went on, carefully picking the places of his steps, and made it to the steeper part of rock, whereupon he started to look for handholds.

A clatter and a cry rang out behind him.

Justin whipped around, swift as a sword-thrust. Behind him, a line of men were winding about the mountain, hundreds of sellswords with their mail on their backs and their heads down beneath the beating golden sun. A man had stumbled over a sudden rise in the rock. As Justin watched, he tottered, waving his arms to keep his balance, and lost it. That was all it took. The luckless sellsword fell left of the column and rolled over on the tilted ground, over and over, over till he hit an outcropping and stopped with a hideous snap.

They all paused. Blood and brains of the fallen sellsword dribbled out over the bare rock. Then they turned back around and moved on.

“This is madness!” shouted Nomeo Lagan, commander of the Iron Shields. It was a struggle to hear his accented Braavosi over the wails of the wind. “There’s reason that nobody lives here! Nothing awaits us by this path but grinding our host as grist to the mill, for slow drawn-out death!”

Ser Stannis Baratheon stared down at him. “Have patience, commander. We are not far now.”

“Not far? Not far?” Lagan said incredulously. “We’ve been marching for a fortnight, and I’ve yet to see hide or hair of this valley of yours.”

“It is there, and our passage will hasten greatly once we reach it,” Ser Stannis replied in the same Braavosi tongue. “A few days only.”

“You said that a few days ago.”

Stannis bit out, “I did not expect you to be so slow.”

“You should have! That’s the fourth death today, and I wager it won’t be the last. The men are hungry, weary, angry, insolent.”

“They always are,” Stannis said. His lips twisted with distaste. “When we leave these mountains, they’ll have plenty of rapine and pillage to partake in. That will quieten them.”

“‘When’?” Lagan repeated. “Going east, there’s no end for many miles, and they’re in need of a good rest soon. This is a fool’s scheme. The ground is too perilous. We must go some other way—south, out of the Ralemne Heights, into the lower parts of the Hills of Norvos—else we won’t leave these mountains alive.”

“South?” Justin pointed, though the sheer mountains on all sides blocked the sight. His voice dripped scorn. “Then I invite you to enjoy the company of sixty-thousand angry Qohoriks and Norvoshi and Lorathi and all the sellswords they could muster, marching through those hills. Their scouts will find you, as sure as sunrise. I’m sure they’ll greet you with hospitality.”

“It’s your captain who means us to put ourselves at their hospitality—to come out behind them, far from our friends!”

“They set out from Norvos to take Braavos. We are too few to make them turn back for us,” Ser Stannis said. “But when we emerge from the Ralemne Heights, east of their army, and plunder the fine estates of the wealthy men of Norvos, we will set their hearts aquiver. They will force their commanders to send a lesser host running to stop us, while their main strength marches west, against Handtaker. That lesser host is what Handtaker commands I am to destroy.”

We do that as soon as we can, Justin thought, and then they have to send another host against us, lessening the numbers of their main host, so the great battles in the west are more winnable. As Ser Stannis doubtless knows. It was a good plan, in his opinion, or at least as good a plan as could be made when fighting a war against such a powerful foe. The Pact of Four’s greatest strength over Braavos was the vastness of their armies; their greatest weakness was that, despite their careful preparations, they were split in two. The hosts of Qohor, Norvos and Lorath from the east would have to be weakened and then destroyed before they could join with the host of sellswords gathering to the south, in Pentos.

“Whereas your plan,” Justin put in helpfully, “would be to face all the strength of three Free Cities at the same time.”

The laughter of sellswords rang out, harsh and mocking. Ser Stannis did not smile. His mouth did not twitch. But his scowl grew slightly less irritable than was customary, which Justin counted as akin to another man howling and thumping his chest with glee.

Lagan reddened. “You say we’ll emerge from the Ralemne Heights. What if we never do?” he demanded. “We’re not even half-way through. Our crossing is too far from any town or village. There is nobody to turn to for aid. We lack the food to keep going forever. We should turn south, or join our comrades in the Braavosian Coastland. By your plan we will die here.”

“The Braavosian Coastland? You mean, turn back, like whipped dogs with our tails between our legs?” Stannis’s voice was a soft hiss. “Do you not recall what happens to men who desert or disobey in the Company of the Cat? The Red Tigers were one of the great free companies of the world, till they were fighting beside the Company of the Cat and they turned their cloaks. The hunt was long; but twelve years later, my commander caught up with the man who commanded them at the time. He was starved so badly he began to eat himself, rending his own flesh; then, with those open wounds bleeding, he was thrown in a pit of tigers. Real tigers. It amuses him to play little games like that, you see. You may not fear me, commander; but if you do not fear Handtaker, after all these years, the gods have never made a greater fool.”

Nomeo Lagan’s fleshy face had turned pale. “I did not say that—”

“You did not need to say it,” Stannis said. “What you did not say, said enough. Let us have no more talk of desertion. You may be a commander and I a captain, but I have more men in my detachment of the Company of the Cat than the whole of the Iron Shields or any of the other free companies in this host. I am in command here. When I tell you to go on, you go on.”

And so on they went.

The great granite mountains were everywhere in all directions, with no end in sight. The Ralemne Heights allowed not the slightest view of any land outside them. The hike was tedious drudgery, wearying to the bone, but not mindless work; the loss of thought could easily mean slipping and tumbling down to a grisly death upon the hot sun-beaten rocks below. Some men did. Others fell and were injured, and had to be slain by their comrades rather than abandoned to starve.

There was not so much as a goat path to ease their way. Justin would have fallen to both knees and thanked the Seven for a dirt track, let alone a road. Yet Ser Stannis Baratheon walked always at the fore of the host, finding trails that wrapped up, down and around the mountains in places where they were less steep and jagged than elsewhere.

Less than a week after the captain’s threats to Nomeo Lagan, it was a toil to walk. Justin put one foot in front of the other, his head drooped down, following the footsteps of the Myrman in front of him. He ignored the whispered conversations and exclamations of the men around him, for he had always been an outsider among them, Westerosi as he was. The only man here whom he knew at all was Ser Stannis.

Then, turning around the mountainside, he bumped into the Myrman.

The Myrman had stopped, Justin noticed. They had all stopped.

Justin was bemused. They stopped once each day, after the end of the day’s march, to greedily devour a thin dinner of stale bread with a bit of salted meat; but now the sun was bright. It was still morning.

Above them, having climbed up the slope to give more men space to see, Ser Stannis swept an arm. “Behold. I did not lie to you.”

Before them, two or three miles away, lay a great smooth-sided valley in the mountains. The stone was dark and slightly green, a different colour to the pinkish-grey granite that dominated the Ralemne Heights, though, now he thought about it, Justin did recall seeing some boulders like that. The look of the rock was strangely smooth, as if part of the mountains had been scooped out by some tremendous force, like a man putting his fingers through butter. It was sometimes narrowing, sometimes widening, always at least a hundred yards wide; and it extended far in both directions, northwest to the desolate Bay of Lorath and southeast, outward.

Justin had never seen or heard of it. It had taken a long hike to get here, and there had been so many mountains between him and it that he had not caught even a glimpse of it before.

“Dear gods,” one sellsword captain swore. He turned to Ser Stannis. “How did this come to be?”

“This valley was carved by a great river of ice,” Stannis said, “that flowed here once, before the time of men.”

“Ice? Here?” said another sellsword.

Nomeo Lagan’s jaw had dropped. “How did you know of this? I’ve spoken to countless men from the Hills of Norvos. You were born in the Sunset Lands. Ere we came here, I studied every map of this place that there is, and none of them mentioned such a place as this.”

Justin saw Stannis frowning with irritation and he could not help himself. The opportunity was too perfect. Loud enough to be sure Stannis would hear, he suggested sweetly, “Mayhaps you should think to buy some better maps.”

Days later, smoke stung at Justin’s eyes and wailing filled his ears. Lobrenor was burning.

They had made much better pace after finding the valley. Men spoke of ‘the Hills of Norvos’ as if it were one place, but it was larger than some of the Seven Kingdoms. Parts of it were high peaks, like the Ralemne Heights. Others were hills so gentle they were scarcely hills at all. Here was in between. To the southeast, the great valley thinned and vanished, but it took them much of the way. The villagers of Lobrenor had had little warning when one and a half thousand hungry soldiers descended from the mountains.

They never stood a chance.

Dead men—fools who had thought they could defend their homes with pitchforks and hoes—littered the hillside fields where, in better times, the Lobrenoriks reared their sheep and goats. Their womenfolk were being taken as bedwarmers, often on the ground, rarely with a bed and rarely willingly; the sellswords had been without for longer than they were accustomed to. Their farmhouses were aflame. All the aforesaid sheep and goats of the villagers had been slaughtered, and the hungry sellswords were cooking their animals on pyres made from the wreckage of their homes.

It had been weeks since Justin had eaten as well as this, and so he ate. The mutton made for an excellent meal, though he was a little put off his food by the despairing screams of the Norvoshi villagers who were losing everything they had.

He would have to steel himself to it. Lobrenor was the first village they had come upon. He knew it would not be the last.

Justin did not partake in the rapine, nor did he venture into the little thatched-roof houses to take what few things the miserable smallfolk possessed, though he did allow himself to eat the stolen mutton. In this he followed the example of his captain. For he would not let himself be diminished in Ser Stannis’s eyes. While the other sellsword captains and commanders found fearful, weeping women to shove against the walls, Justin was quick to notice, Stannis Baratheon stood alone upon the hilltop amidst the devastation, as austere as he had been on the day Justin met him.

Ser Stannis had made quite the impression, on that day. Justin still recalled it. After his ship reached Braavos and he signed his contract with a lowly recruiter of the Company of the Cat, he had stridden up to the king’s brother and asked to speak with him.

“Who are you?” Stannis had demanded brusquely, in the Braavosi tongue, before Justin could give the elegant greeting he had intended.

“Ser Justin Massey, at your service,” Justin had said in the Common Speech of Westeros, with a deep sweeping bow. “Of Stonedance, in the crownlands. Presently contracted to the Company of the Cat, but now and forever sworn to House Baratheon.”

Those dark blue eyes had narrowed. “It has been years since I have heard words in that tongue.”

“It is your tongue, ser, as much as mine,” Justin had replied.

“Not any more,” Ser Stannis had dismissed, and Justin, sensing the awkwardness of the subject, had not raised it again. “Well, out with it, man. Why are you here?”

The sheer rudeness of the king’s brother took quite some time to get used to. Even now, it surprised Justin sometimes, albeit not on most occasions. Back then, it had shocked him speechless.

“Well?”

“I—I am not heir to a great estate,” Justin had stammered, “but I squired for your royal brother, for a time, and I saw much of his court. It is not well in your absence, ser.” He had taken a chance on that, assuming Stannis Baratheon would like to hear ill of King Robert. “His Grace pays little heed to matters of state, leaving them to his small council, while he… partakes in… matters of the flesh.” He phrased it delicately. “The rule of the Seven Kingdoms is the province of his Hand, the Lord of the Eyrie, and his wife, Queen Cersei. They have filled royal offices with their cronies, not only the small council but many offices below it, from the greatest to the meanest. His Grace does not stop them. And these cronies are not skilled. They have signally failed to deal with the revolt of the ironmen.”

“As I feared.” That news had pleased Ser Stannis, Justin could tell, despite the words. “That is Robert’s nature. He has never had patience for much that he does not understand, and there’s little he understands. It is no wonder he fled to the Eyrie and abandoned all such matters at Storm’s End to me. Lannisters, Arryns… doubtless the Tyrells will worm their way into his good graces next.” His lips twisted into a grimace when he said that name.

“Ser, I do not think they will,” Justin had said cautiously. He did not like contradicting the king’s brother, but he was not the sort of man who would give false advice to his liege. He was a Massey of Stonedance, and he had his pride. “The king’s court is enthralled to the Hand and the queen, and neither of them tolerate outsiders. All rewards are given only to their partisans. None of Lord Mace’s vassals have been raised high.”

“Oh? Then mayhaps Robert’s reign is not entirely folly.” The king’s brother had looked at Justin with new interest, after that. Ser Stannis, he would come to understand, did not enjoy the company of men who told him only what they thought he wanted to hear.

Justin had seized the opportunity. “I came to seek a worthier Baratheon to serve,” he had lied through his perfect white teeth. He could hardly say, I came because the queen has dismissed me from court, the king seems like as not to drink himself into an early grave, the prince and princess are young, young children sometimes die, and I hope to be well rewarded if perchance you come to the crown, after all. “May I accompany you, ser?”

Stannis had waved a hand. “Very well, Massey. If you must.”

And so it was that Ser Justin Massey found himself today upon a blighted hillside, somewhere in the Hills of Norvos, a thousand miles away from home.

He walked up to the hilltop, between celebrating sellswords, mutilated corpses, weeping villagers and burning crops and homes. There Stannis Baratheon stood. He was garbed in a black surcoat over his mail, featureless, without any sigil, reddened slightly with a bit of blood. His boots, too, were as black as his hair. The only thing upon him with much colour was the golden eagle resting on his left shoulder.

“Massey,” Ser Stannis said as Justin surmounted the hill. By his standards, that terse greeting was high courtesy.

“Ser.”

“I’ve told you not to call me that. I am a captain, not a knight.”

Justin did not contradict him, but did not intend to stop. Westeros was Stannis Baratheon’s place, as it was Justin Massey’s, and Justin meant to remind him of it. The last thing he wanted was for the king’s brother to give up on crossing the Narrow Sea. Elsewise, how would he get his reward?

Characteristically, the captain spoke what he wished, on whatever matter he wished, without anything to lead to it. “When I was younger, I hanged men like that.”

Justin followed his captain’s eyes to a sellsword who stood not twenty feet away from them, holding a screaming woman up against a tree.

“Shall I put a stop to it, ser?” Justin asked. He unsheathed his sword.

“No,” Stannis said. “We must be cruel. Every act of cruelty and banditry we inflict upon these lands serves our purpose; it serves to offend and outrage our foes, and force them to send a host eastward to root us out. I should not restrain them. Thus I was commanded. And there are some men who are not disobeyed.”

As if without noticing, Stannis’s hand drifted from where it had been stroking the eagle’s feathers to his back. When it touched, he trembled, ever-so-slightly, like a riverbank reed in the breeze.

“Men like you should not have to obey men like him,” said Justin.

“There are no other men like him.”

“I do not believe that’s so. Handtaker does not maim and kill for cold necessity. He maims and kills because he enjoys maiming and killing. There are other lowborn men—men like him—who do that. When they are born here in Essos, they call them ‘commander’ and do them honour and give them riches. When they are born in Westeros, we call them ‘murderer’. We hang them.”

“And when they are highborn, we call them ‘Your Grace’.”

“Aerys?”

“Robert.”

Justin raised an eyebrow. “Ser, I do not think—”

“You did not hear of Prince Rhaegar’s children. I heard it from the mouth of Lord Eddard Stark. He was there, and he is the closest friend of my brother, the last man who would contrive lies against him.” The king’s brother shook his head. “I served Robert well, and would have continued in that, if he had let me. I have not been sworn to a good man since my lord father died.”

His humours have turned to melancholy, Justin reflected. To him it seemed they often did, suddenly, without warning. When they did, he knew not what he ought to do. He sought to find some clever turn of phrase, some wit that would lift his captain from that bleak mood, and he came up short.

It was a while before Stannis spoke again. “I suppose I should partake in it myself,” he said at last. “Gods know the others do. But I cannot bring myself to that. I do not like it. I do not like it.”

“No good men do,” Justin said. He hesitated. “Captain—”

“You only call me that when you wish to please me,” Stannis interrupted. “There is something you would have of me. Go on. What is it?”

“I turned Lagan’s question away from you,” he said, “but there was something in that. It seems to me he was right. That ice-valley of yours is surrounded by mountains, so it is beyond the sight of man until you’re near. And if you’re near… well, why would you be? It was a long, hard, perilous journey to reach it. Men don’t live in the heart of the Ralemne Heights, or even near them. The ground is too harsh. Crossing the Heights is easier with that passage, but they’re nigh impassable without it; you’d need to carry with you more food than a man can bear. You can’t see the passage until you’re near. But without the passage, the crossing seems hopeless; so you wouldn’t come near unless you already knew.”

Four eyes studied Justin’s face. Stannis’s thin lips quirked into a smile, slight and cold.

“Unless you already knew,” Justin repeated, meaningfully.

“I wondered whether anyone would notice that,” Stannis murmured. “Yes, I knew. Beyond the sight of man, you say; but there are many things in this world that lie beyond the sight of man. That does not make them less real. That does not mean they cannot kill.”

Another eagle fluttered down to land on Stannis’s unoccupied shoulder. He put up a hand towards its beak, to give it food.

“Go to sleep, Massey,” Stannis said. “I would not have you be weary. We will fight again tomorrow.”

Their charge thundered across the plain, wondrous to behold. Noro leant forward on his horse, cold wind whistling in his ears, blowing back his hair, streaming straight into his face. Hundreds of his fellows rode beside him, bellowing their war-cries. Still on horseback, they drew back their bowstrings and let loose.

The killing rain descended on a faceless figure dark against the dawn, with its back to the rising sun. The cold wind hissed and blew suddenly harder, shifting serpent-swift, a cool gust that forced most of the arrows to fall short. Those few that did hit struck uselessly with the clang of steel on steel.

Silently, the enemy approached.

Do you think your blindness keeps you safe?

It does not.

The whisper did not come from far or near. Soft as silk, it was—quiet, faintly amused—yet the words thundered in his thoughts like lines of blue-white lightning burning through the sky; as soon as they came, he could think of nothing else.

You do not see your death even when it stands before your eyes…

but I… see… you…

The army drew closer. The foe lifted a spear of blazing flame and lashed out as the first of the riders came near. Men and horses fled alike, screaming, burning. Noro’s fellows died in droves, and his nose was filled with the sickeningly tasteful scent of roast meat. His own horse reared; he struggled with the reins for a moment, then it threw him with all of its strength and bolted away, consumed by its fear of fire.

Noro toppled to the ground. For a while he knew nothing but his own breaths, harsh and quick, and the pain of his broken leg that arced through him like red lightning. Then a steel-toed boot kicked him over. With a howl of pain, he rolled onto his back.

A long shadow fell upon him.

Tall and terrible, the enemy gazed down on Noro. He was covered entirely with silvery armour, bright in the light of the morning sun; over it he wore a featureless surcoat as black as clouded night. The only part of his skin that could be seen were his hands, scarlet and seemingly self-replenishing. For time passed and the blood never ceased to flow.

Noro spat in his face. The drops of spit and blood fizzled and vanished at a rod of pale flame.

“Kill me then,” said Noro boldly, conquering his fear. “I have fought greater men than you, maegi, and every warrior’s life must end in time. Slay me and I will go on to ride in the Night Lands.”

You will never ride in the Night Lands, came the same soft voice, from everywhere and nowhere. There are crueller fates than death in this world. I do not only kill. I take.

Despite himself, unease crawled down Noro’s spine. “I have little worth taking.”

Is that what you believe? That amused the man with the bloody hands. I do not speak of gold. All that I will take from you is what is mine.

“And what is yours?”

The visor fell, and Noro stared into eyes as dark as the depths of the sea. They held his eyes, transfixed him, fixed him where he lay, as tight as iron chains; and a red dripping hand pressed down on his heart.

Why, you are.

Curling crimson fingers pulled, pulled, pulled, and his vision lurched, the whole world shuddering…

“AAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

Noro awoke with a scream. He grabbed his arakh, leapt to his feet and became entangled for a moment, making him fall. Pure terror thrummed through his thoughts, picturing dark blue eyes and red hands come to steal his soul. Then he realised he was caught in his own ger, and sheepishly he had to dismantle the warm hides that clung to him.

“Ko Noro!” Three guards came running up to him, having heard the disturbance and seeing him up and awake. “Where are the intruders? Command me!”

“At ease, Zebho,” Noro said to the one who had spoken. “There was no intrusion.”

“How can there be no intruders? I heard the cry!”

“There has been no intrusion,” Noro insisted. “The khal is well. You may check on him if you wish, but do so quietly. He needs his sleep as much as any man.”

“Then how—”

“Zebho,” Noro said in a warning tone.

“Very well, ko,” Zebho said, surrendering. The warrior strode off.

Noro sighed. He could hardly have said it was a dream. He would be the subject of ridicule from all. Thanks be to the god, at least, that as a ko he had a tent all to himself. No-one else had witnessed his shame.

It was still dark; only a swollen half-circle moon lit the night sky. Noro went back to bed. It would be a while before dawn.

When he awoke for the second time, Ko Noro donned his armour—light, certainly lighter than the suit of full plate worn by the shining figure in his dreams, but present nonetheless. He took up his arakh, a long curved blade, and his bow for horse-archery, which no self-respecting Dothraki would ever go without. Thus armoured and armed, he went out to greet his lord.

Khal Jhatho’s ger was guarded as it always was. The warriors who had stood there in the night knew better than to disturb a bloodrider. They bowed as Noro entered.

He saw his khal, a thickset man of middling height, strong and sunbronzed and stouthearted. The sight of Jhatho was familiar to him. But to his displeasure and surprise he and the khal were not alone.

“What is the meaning of this, blood of my blood?” Noro demanded, lifting a callused hand to gesture at the paler men who shared the tent with them. “Are we to let dragon-men into our councils?”

“Peace, blood of my blood,” Jhatho said. “Commander Ponat, Commander Kandah, Captain Sebvonis and Captain M’nar are here by my leave as my guests. They share our hearth because they will share our burdens on the field of battle.”

“They are allies,” Noro said, “but they are not of our khalasar. I deem this unwise, blood of my blood. It so happens that at this time we are together, but such things are ofttimes short-lived. That does not mean their purpose is our purpose.”

“Enough!” said Jhatho. “They are here by my will, and that suffices. We shall draw our plans.” That was not the voice of Jhatho his friend. That was the voice of his khal; and Noro knew the khal more than well enough to know he would not brook dissent when he spoke thus.

He could have challenged him anyway. He and Jhatho had been boys together, in old Khal Mokhago’s khalasar, whose riders had been so mighty that once upon a time five Free Cities had paid tribute in a single year without the need to spill the slightest drop of blood. They had ridden against one another in a hundred childhood games and ridden beside one another in a hundred battles. But it was a new-made thing that Jhatho had seen fit to declare himself khal. Noro had supported him in that, as in all else, as Jhatho’s first and thus far only bloodrider; and he did not deem it wise to erode his friend and lord’s fragile authority by gainsaying him.

“Your will,” he said, inclining his head.

“Good,” Jhatho said. “Captain M’nar, you said that you had words for me?”

“I did.”

Of them all, Noro knew, Badohin M’nar was the man who mattered. The diminutive Lorathi might be a mere captain, whereas two of the other sellsword leaders commanded free companies in their own right; but he was a captain of the Bright Banners, and a mere detachment of that one free company outsized the whole of most others.

“My outriders have brought me word of our enemy,” M’nar said. “Handtaker’s raiders have abandoned their advance on Norvos.”

Of everything Noro had expected, it had not been that. He spluttered, “What?”

Ever since the pillagers who had been seen with Company of the Cat insignia—Handtaker’s men—had somehow emerged from the mountains, they had marched south towards the Free City of Norvos, sacked and despoiled every village and town that they passed near. Norvos itself and its tributary cities held firm, for they were garrisoned and well-walled, but not firm enough to throw the raiders out from the surrounding countryside. No-one had expected that an enemy force could reach here. After all, the Ralemne Heights were supposed to be impassable.

Powerless to prevent this damage to their fortunes and estates, the wealthy men of Norvos had sent envoys to come screaming at the great host of the Pact of Four that was marching to deal death to the arrogant Braavosi. The high commanders of that host had had no choice but to placate them. That was why Noro, Khal Jhatho and the others were here in the first place.

Thus far, the enemy sellswords had plundered only lands to the north of Norvos in the Hills of Norvos. Men called the whole region ‘the Hills of Norvos’, as if that huge area of land were all alike, but in truth it contained everything from the high craggy mountains of the Ralemne Heights to the low-lying and almost flat Noyne river-plain. Most of the warmer, wealthier, flatter lands in the Hills of Norvos lay to the south of the great city. Why would Braavos’s raiders change course away from the richest pickings, while they were winning?

“I doubted it too,” Captain M’nar said. “I did not tell you at first because I thought it an attempt at deception. But many of my scouts, by now, have told the same tale—too many to be disbelieved.”

“Where are they heading?” asked Kandah, commander of some small free company of a hundred men whose name Noro did not bother to recall. “North, back into the Ralemne Heights? West, to face us?”

“East,” said M’nar.

“To threaten Qohor?” mused Sebvonis.

“He can’t,” objected Ponat, who was himself a Qohorik. “It is too far. The river Darkwash flows wide and swift and treacherous; few bridges have been built there, all of them well-defended. Besides, it’s so far that the war would like as not be over by the time he arrived. No, he must know of our coming—good scouts, I suppose—and mean to flee.”

“Fleeing would do him no good,” Khal Jhatho said. It pleased Noro to hear Jhatho speak; this meeting already felt uncomfortably like being servants in the khalasar of Khal M’nar. “My people know well how to raid the dominions of the dragon-men.”

Exactly why they knew this so well was left politely unspoken by both the dragon-men and the Dothraki.

“Raiders can kill many times their number,” Jhatho went on, “but there are always deaths, when pillaging is done. Some lucky peasant slays a warrior in a fight, or a gang falls upon a warrior when he relieves himself, or a brother or husband surprises a warrior in a woman’s bed. Not many deaths, but some. Pillage one town, this is no great thing. But in time, it cripples armies.”

“So time is on our side,” said Commander Ponat.

“Yes,” said the khal. “We are hired by the Pact of Four, so we are given food by the Norvoshi. The enemy must seize it. As he seizes it from villagers, their thorns prick him, and he weakens with every passing day.”

“Then Handtaker’s man is a fool,” declared Captain Sebvonis. “It’s to be expected. He’s a Sunsetlander, their whole way of life is a relic of a world dead for thousands of years.”

“This Brathian may have been born a brute of the Sunset Lands,” M’nar said, “but I know Handtaker well—better than I would have wished to. In the Company of the Cat, captains he deems unworthy do not live long and do not die quickly. The gods have made few crueller men, but also few more cunning. I refuse to underestimate any man the old monster has entrusted with command.”

“The one you dragon-men call Handtaker is not unknown to us,” Noro said. “Any man hand-chosen by Aro the Cruel should not be taken lightly. I agree.”

Noro had not been there—he had not yet been born—but it was not a tale the Dothraki would soon forget. The great khal Megoro had sought to be the first khal to make Old Volantis pay tribute. He had come against a great sellsword host that included the Company of the Cat and its then-new commander, and he had fallen short. Whereas most of the sellswords had simply murdered and looted their Dothraki prisoners, Aro Isattis had taken two-thousand Dothraki captives alive, swearing not to kill or maim them, in exchange for all the gold and slaves and weapons they could give him. He had been as good as his word. He had marched deep into the Red Waste, leaving them alive and whole. There, in the scorching desert without food or water, he had set them free.

“Indeed,” said M’nar. “I do not think Handtaker would have appointed a coward. Whatever the Sunsetlander means to do by fleeing east, he has some purpose. Mayhaps it is simply that he knows we have the better of him in numbers, and his purpose is to keep us away from the rest of the war, not to engage us. That would ease my mind, if it is truly so simple. But I dare not presume it. We must maintain many outriders, to give us clear views of where the enemy is and what he is doing; we must keep a strong guard of our camp, lest he seek to come upon us by some treachery; and we must avoid contested river-crossings at all costs.”

“Surely that’s not needed,” Kandah said. “The Gallant Men tell tall tales because their detachment lost a battle to a host smaller than itself. No implications on present company—” he smiled wryly— “but sellswords aren’t known for honesty about their shortcomings.”

“I think it is needed,” said Ponat.

“So do I,” said Jhatho, to Noro’s surprise.

“And I,” said Captain M’nar. “I doubt there is truth to the Gallant Men’s tale. It sounds too absurd to be believed. But if there is… well, I would rather not find out the hard way.”

That word was final, for Badohin M’nar’s detachment and Jhatho’s khalasar outnumbered the other sellsword hosts together.

“Blood of my blood,” Jhatho said, “stay behind. I would speak with you.”

It was not a request. Noro remained as the sellswords gave curt nods and left Khal Jhatho’s ger, M’nar last of all.

“I am sorry for speaking harshly to you among the dragon-men,” Jhatho said, reaching up and clapping Noro on the shoulder. “You are worth more than most of those self-important fools they call commanders, petty khals of a hundred men. But the folk of the Free Cities do not respect our people, nor any people who are not themselves. We must be seen to speak with one voice.”

“I understand that, blood of my blood,” Noro said, bowing his head. “But I do not see why we should trust them. Many a time have dragon-men betrayed khalasars, the smaller ones especially. If we must hold council with them, let it be in their tents, after we have already decided our course privately among ourselves. They should not be let in a Dothraki ger.”

“If we thus recluse ourselves,” said Jhatho, “they will do the same, and we will hear less than the dragon-men commanders do. That would blind us to the world, for their scouts can move around in these lands and escape notice, whereas our people cannot.”

“Better fight blind than fight with a knife in your back,” said Noro.

“That is so,” laughed Jhatho. “But it is a hard truth that we must impress them, blood of my blood, so that the dragon-men will grant us greater contracts in later times. Our khalasar is small, and we need to fight dragon-men’s wars and take their coin if it is to grow.”

A truly vast khalasar, the sort that singers sang about, could cross the whole dominion of a Free City and be greeted with feasts and gifts of gold and girls along the way, for nowadays the dragon-men were practical folk who found it cheaper to pay off the horselords than to fight them. Only Volantis maintained the attitude of Old Valyria, forbidding the Dothraki from entering their lands and enforcing that decree by shining ranks of steel.

But most khalasars were not nearly large enough to threaten a Free City thus. Few khals were able to pass down a khalasar to an adult son; most khals started small, as Jhatho had. To gain followers, a khal must be renowned as a great leader and warrior; to win renown, he must wage war; and if he could not wage war against the dragon-men, he must wage war for them.

“I dislike fighting for dragon-men’s gold,” said Noro.

“I dislike it just as much as you do,” answered the khal, “but there is need of it, nonetheless. One day, I hope, this khalasar will be so great that Norvos, Qohor, Lorath and Pentos will throw open their gates and pay us tribute whenever we come near, fearing to face us. Now, though, we shall fight the Pact of Four’s war for them.”

“And they will attend our councils and tread in our gers.”

“For a few years, while our strength needs building. Yes.”

Noro sighed. “It isn’t what I would have done. But I will trust in your judgement. I swore a vow to you, blood of my blood, and I mean to keep it.”

“Thank you,” Jhatho said solemnly, recognising that the last word of the argument had been spoken.

They rode on all day, through rolling hills and pleasant green valleys. Noro was not fond of it; the grasses were too short, the land too twisted; but he had grown accustomed to it in his time out of the Dothraki Sea.

In the evening, with the sun low in the west, Noro and his fellows stopped for the night. They fed their horses first, then tied them. Noro sat with Jhatho as they had since they were young. Together they drank mare’s milk and dined on stews of grasses and leaves and whatever meats the khalasar could find.

Long they laughed with one another and spoke of old times, until the summer sun was near gone from the sky. Noro put up the bamboo lattices and hides of his ger and went to sleep.

That night, the nightmares came again.

The air was filled with screams and weeping. Tongues of flame licked at the houses and danced down the roads. Weeping townsfolk sometimes emerged, carrying everything they owned, only to find themselves impaled and looted by the hordes.

It was as a vision of fiery hell. It was horror. It was war.

“Where is he?”

“He is here. He will come.”

A scarlet-mantled silhouette came striding out of a burning town hall as the timbers of its roof crackled and collapsed behind him. Both the silvery steel of his armour and the black cloth of his surcoat were concealed, for he was bathed almost from head to toe in blood.

“My captains and counsellors,” boomed the deep voice of Ser Stannis Baratheon. “Speak to me.”

“The militia are broken, Captain Baratheon,” said Marro Namerin succinctly. “We crushed the heart of them when we came here, and those left have failed to rally and give much resistance. I reckon half of them have cast down their axes and fled. The town is as good as fallen; what’s left is only pillage and butchery.”

“Very good,” Ser Stannis said approvingly. He liked Namerin, that was plain enough. They were both men of the Company of the Cat; Ser Stannis did not get along as well with men from other free companies. “What of the men?”

“All’s well with the men, Captain,” Justin said with a sharp salute. “I’d even say that they’re delighted. From empty bellies and cold beds in the mountains, they’ve gone to abundant meals and bedwarmers here in the lower hills. No trouble with morale.”

“I thought they would approve.” The captain looked sour. “Losses?”

“Three,” said Justin. “Five wounded. Mayhaps more by the time it’s done.”

“Insignificant, then,” Stannis said. “Good. It will be enough, so long as the garrisons in Norvos and her tributary cities still prefer to cower behind their Valyrian-wrought walls than to come out and face us.”

Bozyno Vunel, another Company of the Cat man, cast a pointed glance at the fires and screams that emanated all around them. “If you were them, wouldn’t you?”

Several of the sellswords laughed. Namerin grinned. “I’d certainly have to consider it.”

“Those losses may be small,” said Nomeo Lagan, the Iron Shields’ commander, “but we had similar in the last town, and the one before. Time is against us; our host is bleeding, the enemy’s is not. When are we going to stop running?”

All the Company of the Cat men turned to face him with cold expressions. Meanwhile, the other commanders of small, separate free companies shuffled over to stand with Lagan. It was as if an invisible line had been drawn through the soil, separating the largest of the free companies in this host from the others—those who had faith in Stannis Baratheon’s leadership from those who did not.

“Running?” Alequo Nudoon said slowly, drawing out the word.

“Running,” Lagan repeated, glaring up at the green-haired Tyroshi who towered over him, taller than even Stannis. “This eastward flight is weakening us at no cost to the enemy. Yes, M’nar has a greater host than we do; yes, fighting him is perilous; but it isn’t getting better for us. Delay doesn’t avoid making a decision, it is a decision itself. And your decision is making things worse for us.”

“You so readily imagine running because that’s what you would do,” said Justin. “You’ve been thinking of it since as soon as we chose to brave the Ralemne Heights.” He looked around the other Company of the Cat men for support. “Or am I wrong?”

“You’re not wrong, Sunsetlander,” Nudoon rumbled in accented Braavosi.

Lagan purpled. “You—!”

“Your vision is so limited, so wrapped up in material things.” All other voices fell silent at Stannis’s soft hiss. “Battles are not fought by numbers, they are fought by men, and men can be encouraged or dismayed. The enemy are weakening more than we are, I tell you. Soon we shall turn and destroy them. But not yet.”

“Then when?”

The captain was unperturbed. “I will say when it is time.”

“Your time might be too late!” said Lagan. The other commanders of small free companies stood behind him, though they did not speak, fearful of the Company of the Cat’s anger, for they were smaller than the Iron Shields. “His Excellency the Sealord was quite clear. We are to go east, lay waste to the estates of the Norvoshi, lure away a Norvoshi army away from the great host of the Pact of Four, and then destroy it. That needs to be done so that Norvos sends even more of its army back home to root us out of the hills, and then the main host of Lorath, Norvos and Qohor is shrunken before it can face the Braavosi in the west. Those were our orders. Have you forgotten?”

“Why don’t you just listen to our Sunsetlander?” Vunel said. “You questioned him before, with that valley through the Ralemne Heights that no-one knew existed. You were wrong. Handtaker trusts the Sunsetlander’s insights, Handtaker of all men, for gods’ sake you know how he is. Why can’t you?”

“Because this is madness!” cried Lagan. “That valley is why I’ve been silent so long, but it’s been a whole turn of the moon since we came out of the Heights! Who knows what’s been happening in the rest of the war while we dawdle further and further east in the Hills of Norvos? Even if whatever bizarre plan you’ve cooked up somehow works, we don’t just need to win a battle, we need to win a battle soon, if the Sealord is to win the war. The host of the other three Free Cities in the Pact needs to be weak enough for the Braavosi to overcome it before it can join with the Pentoshi. Do you understand that, Sunsetlander? Do you have a plan for that?”

“Yes,” said the captain, grinding his teeth.

“What is it?” asked Nomeo Lagan. “Are we going to the Darkwash river, to overwhelm their greater numbers at a river-crossing?”

It was a good guess. Justin had thought of that himself. He had not been at the Battle of Nyrelos, unlike most of the other Company of the Cat men, but he had heard what his captain had done there. But the captain said, “No. Not that far.”

“Then what?”

“Preparations are being made.” Ser Stannis would not disclose any more than that. “Trust in me, and our foes will be like lambs to the slaughter. You will see.” There was not an ounce of doubt in that low, cold voice, only anticipation. “You will see.”

Do you think your blindness keeps you safe?

It does not.

You do not see your death even when it stands before your eyes…

but I… see… you…

“No,” Noro said as the letters traced themselves into his thoughts like brands blazing with fire, “I can see.”

An army charged towards a man, brothers in arms, hardened and battle-tested, bright with resolve, their horses’ hooves pounding, arakhs gleaming and arrows raining before them. They did not stand a chance. He knew what was coming.

Noro tried to call upon them to halt, to move aside, to change their minds. Somehow he found that he could not. He knew the words to say and his mouth would not say them. It was as if he were a prisoner in a world that was not his own.

The khalasar came closer, as he knew they would, and they failed, as he knew they would. Men and horses shrieked and sizzled before the spear of bright white light that swept around and dealt them fiery demise. Noro cast a glance at Jhatho’s face, hard with resolve, and from his friend’s courage he drew strength. Hopeless though he knew it was, he yelled a war-cry, daring to wonder whether this time it might be different…

It was not. His horse reared against the reins, threw him and fled for fear of the fire, as he knew it would, and he fell, as he knew he would. Then the world darkened as a tall terrible thing in the shape of a man stood over him.

He knew what would come next.

“No,” Noro sobbed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, whatever I did I’m sorry, please stop, please, please no, please no, no no no no NOOOOOO…”

The red hand reached, fingers curling like claws, straight for Noro’s heart…

Darkness.

Blessed darkness. It was more comfortable than light. If he could not see anything, he could not see the terror of the monster that was coming for him.

Noro took short sharp daggerlike breaths, inside his sleeping roll, inside his ger, wrapped up warm and tight. He was alive. He was safe. He was drenched with sweat. He placed a hand on his heart, noting the galloping march of his heartbeat and reassuring himself it was still there.

When the pounding of his heart had calmed a little, he poked his head outside. No wonder the ger was so dark. It was early in the morning. The sun’s first rays had not yet risen over the horizon in the east.

Ko Noro did not think he could get back to sleep, and did not think he wanted to. There was naught to do, then, but prepare himself.

Noro dressed, armoured and armed himself and was still up an hour before the sun was. In the cool of night he stood around and spoke with other warriors. There were more of them awake at this hour than he would have expected. He supposed that others were as nervous about the battle to come today as he was.

Khal Jhatho awoke two hours after Noro did, content and well-rested. When he emerged from his tent he was almost trembling with energy, yet with a certain stillness nonetheless, like a great hrakkar of the plains, tail twitching as it prepared itself to pounce.

He saw Noro. “I should have known you would awaken before me, blood of my blood,” the khal said with a rueful laugh. “You put me to shame.”

“Never,” Noro protested, but Jhatho dismissed it with laughter.

“Fear not,” Jhatho said. “I take it that you have broken your fast?”

“I have,” said Noro. He had needed it.

Jhatho looked closely at him. “Are you sure you are well?” he asked quietly. “Blood of my blood, forgive me, but you seem haggard.”

“I am well,” Noro said quickly.

“Are you sure?”

“I am very well. I only have… cares, for the battle,” Noro lied through his teeth. He would not tell Jhatho it was his dreams that had so perturbed him. That was a weakness in him. It was shameful for a man to burden other men with his weaknesses; a man should shoulder them himself. He was a man grown, a ko in a khalasar. He could not bear to make his old friend treat him like a child.

“I see,” Jhatho said softly. “I will not pester you. I ask you only to remember: the Great Stallion does not honour men who do not fear death. They are lackwit madmen. He honours men who feel fear in their bones and stand in spite of it.”

“I know,” Noro said, taking a shuddering deep breath. Then, on an impulse: “We will do you proud today, blood of my blood. Be not afraid.”

Jhatho smiled. “I know you will.”

Jhatho rose and gathered the men of the khalasar. He promised courage and honour and golden glory. It was easy to be swept up in his confidence, and by the end of that speech Noro felt like a proud man again.

He could not have picked a better khal. He could not have picked a better friend.

The sellsword captains and commanders came to speak to the khal. Badohin M’nar was at the head of them. They made final discussions, dispositions, battle plans. The hirelings of Braavos were near. They had caught up at last. There would be no escaping them.

“Ko Noro, I thought we were meant for glory,” young Kammo whispered in Noro’s ear. “Why are we meant to stay behind?”

“Because we are more to be trusted,” Noro said dryly, leaning down to speak to the beardless young man. “The reserve is to be committed at a time later than the start of battle; that is what it means to be a reserve. Sometimes battles are going badly. If that’s happening, a sellsword company left in reserve will like as not abandon the battle or switch sides as come in at the time and place they’re meant to.”

“But that would be treason!” said Kammo, horrified.

“Oh yes,” said Noro. “Always remember, Kammo, that dragon-men are not to be trusted. They’ll betray each other in an instant without a shred of remorse, and they’ll betray a ‘barbarian’ twice as fast as that.”

When the arrangements were done—a swift affair—they mounted, for all of them were ahorse, and went off eastward for the day’s pursuit.

It was only an hour’s pursuit to reach the enemy. The sellswords of the Company of the Cat and others had made their stand to the south of a particularly steep hill, for hills were the only obstructions to be found in this hot, dry part of the eastern Hills of Norvos. Noro guessed that they had been here all night, though he could not be sure; it was an irritating truth that no outriders had ever managed to get close to them and remain undetected to return. Oddly, there were no vultures above the field of battle, despite the large number of armed men gathering, a herald of corpses to come. He supposed they had been driven off, for in the sky he espied a trio of circling eagles.

Most of the enemy were afoot; some were with stolen horses. They had arranged a pike wall all around, clearly meant to deter the heavy armoured charges the Bright Banners were so famed for; but they did not rely solely on that, for no man could treat the Dothraki like heavy horse and survive. They also possessed walls of interlocking shields, to ward off the lethal rain of the Dothraki’s dreaded horse-archery.

It was not an altogether indecent tactic, Noro considered. But he did not think that it would be enough for them. It would not be easy to be vigilant against heavy horse attacking from near and light horse attacking from afar at the same time. It seemed to him that Captain M’nar meant to hammer them with his sellsword force, then use the Dothraki to attack from an unexpected direction, crushing the outnumbered Braavosi sellswords between two different muscles of the Pact of Four.

Noro did not come close, at first. He waited behind with Jhatho in the rear, watching the rest of the battle, ready to be sent forth when Badohin M’nar chose that his reserve should be committed.

That plan bled and collapsed when M’nar did. A long black arrow bristled from the eyehole of his helmet.

“Unlucky man,” Noro observed to Jhatho. “It was one shot in a thousand, to hit like that.”

“It is of small account,” Jhatho said, of the death of the man he had been allied with. “The Bright Banners are disciplined, company-minded; they are not the feeble retinue of some pompous lord of ancient blood. See—” he pointed— “they are already rallying around Aenio Phelaqys.”

Another arrow struck, flying so fast its path could scarce be seen. It was embedded in the eye of Commander Ponat.

Noro and Jhatho exchanged glances. Noro said, “That is no luck.”

“Agreed,” said the khal. “It seems this is becoming interesting.”

The inflection he gave the word “interesting” made Noro bark a laugh.

A third long arrow from the east pierced Commander Kandah’s eye in an instant. Of opposite accuracy, a stray arrow from the battle killed one of the eagles circling above. The others trilled with alarm and jerked briefly back and forth in the sky, but did not flee. Noro paid them little heed.

Phelaqys fell next. Noro felt a chill in his heart. Whoever this bowman was, he was good, very good. No-one was that good. Like any good Dothraki-raised boy, Noro prided himself on his skill at firing a recurve bow from horseback. He was familiar with what could and could not be done in archery. Aiming for the head from afar was tricky. Aiming for the eye…?

Fully armoured, helmed men were hard to kill, else they would not be so prized. They were no easy prey for archers at a distance. Except, apparently, for this one.

With more and more of their officers slain, the sellswords were losing their good order. It was plain as day to Noro’s experienced eyes. They did not flee, but there was no clear commander to react quickly when a hard knot of Company of the Cat men suddenly emerged from the enemy lines and burst through their centre. Led by a man in plate armour like that of the fabled Sunset Lands with strands of flaxen hair falling outside a damaged helm, the dense pack of Braavos’s sellswords came spilling through like water in the cracks. Expensively armed and armoured, doubtless the enemy’s best men, they cut deep into the host of the Pact of Four’s sellswords. A good commander, on the spot, could have swiftly given the order to move some squads of men, cut off the protruding line from the rest of the enemy host and kill the isolated men who had broken through; but it seemed each squad was on its own. There was no overall commander.

A warhorn blew. There was a hearty cheer, and the enemy’s reserve ran from behind the main battle lines, going to the south of the army and then turning north to pin down the Pact of Four’s host. It appeared that the Braavosi sellswords meant to slice the army of the Pact of Four’s sellswords in two and then surround both pieces, caught between the hill, the men of the breakthrough, and now the men of the reserve.

The khal saw it as soon as Noro did. He could not be faulted in clarity of thought; realisation of the enemy’s intent came to him immediately. He turned, and there was a light in his eyes. “Men of the plains!” he cried. “Men of my khalasar! Horselords, friends, followers! This is our hour!”

Jhatho put his lips to a gold-banded horn and called a great note, long and low and loud. A hundred other horns rang out behind him, and the host of the Dothraki charged.

Noro rode at Jhatho’s side, as he always had and always meant to. Their charge thundered across the plain, wondrous to behold. Noro leant forward on his horse, cold wind whistling in his ears, blowing back his hair, streaming straight into his face. Hundreds of his fellows rode beside him, bellowing their war-cries.

They circled around the great number of sellswords on their own side who were still to the east of them, in front of them, between them and the enemy host. They wheeled south of the rest of the battle, just as the enemy had done, and searched for an enemy that must be somewhere to the east of them. They sought out the Braavosi reserve that had so boldly ventured out like a long tentacle, stretching itself too thin, too far away from the main strength of the Braavosi army, eager to slice it off and crush it. When they passed south of their own army’s rear that had been blocking their sight, they found a man.

Even on horseback as he was, wind rushing in his ears, Noro blinked in sheer disbelief.

Not an army. A man. A single man, standing against them.

Behind him, the Braavosi reserve was battling against the Pact of Four’s host. But he was just a man.

A tall, broad-shouldered man. A man in steel plate armour. A man in a surcoat of featureless black. A man with his back to the rising sun, dark against the dawn.

Pure fear screamed through every inch of Noro’s body as if he had dived face-first into a lake of icy water. He knew this. He knew how this ended. He knew. He knew. He knew. He knew…

“You do not know the power that you are meddling with,” a low voice boomed in Braavosi. “I am Stannis of House Baratheon, and if you are no utter fool then you know what I did at Nyrelos. Flee from me and I will not pursue you. Flee from me and I will allow you to live.”

The fear threatened to overwhelm him… but then Jhatho laughed. It was loud and clear and pure and golden like the peal of a bell, and the sound broke the bonds that the sight of the lone figure had placed upon him.

It is not like the dreams, he told himself. Those were dreams. This is real.

“Confident, for one man against hundreds,” shouted Jhatho, not slowing in his charge. “I tell you—do not cast aside your life. You know we will win this battle, no matter how great a warrior you are; we are too many; you are too few. I offer you the chance to surrender.”

Quietly, Baratheon put down the two weapons he held: a great bow, coloured like burnt gold, and a thin black spear longer than a man was tall. It was like no spear Noro knew of; when it caught the light he realised that was no wood, even the haft; the whole thing was pure iron. Then—still out of range of arrows—Baratheon pulled off one gauntlet. With the other hand he picked up the long spear again and slashed deeply into his own hand.

Pale light blazed upon the spear where blood fell. Even as far away as he was, Noro had to resist the urge to throw a hand in front of his eyes. The white fire shone unfathomably bright, as bright as staring straight into the sun. As he wounded himself Baratheon had collapsed to both knees and howled in pain, and a great gash had opened on his palm. It poured forth blood—much of it onto the spear, which made the fire swell, and much of it onto the ground.

The hand was red and dripping.

Memories of what that hand had done to him dozens of times came rushing back, and Noro fought to stay focused and to ignore it. This is not a nightmare. This cannot be a nightmare. I am awake. I am awake. I am awake. I am awake.

Coldly, as if he had not just inflicted such a wound upon himself, Baratheon rose to his feet and put back on his gauntlet.

The lone figure pointed the spear, hissing and crackling with pale flame. “Once again I urge you: Flee. Flee and live. I am more merciful than my commander; I grant you this one more chance.”

“Pretty trick,” Jhatho roared back. “You are still a man, no matter how arrogant, not a god. You need us to flee because you can’t defeat us. We are not so easily deceived.”

The khal spoke again, then, less loudly, to address his people.

“Fear no maegi’s lies!” he called. “The Great Stallion protects mankind from foul spells and evil spirits. Trust in Him, be true to Him and to each other, and let not evil daunt your heart.”

The fear crawled over Noro like a physical thing, but he sheltered from it in the warm glow of Jhatho’s resolve. Jhatho needed him to fight this monster. He would not let him down.

White flames hissed in the distance as they continued their charge.

The earth trembled beneath the pounding hooves of the Dothraki khalasar. Stannis Baratheon felt the jolt of their charge in his bones. Behind him was the clamour of battle, as his outnumbered host busied itself fighting a different foe, with their backs to him, saved from sure doom only by their courage and their greater discipline. He stood alone, the sole shield between hundreds of Dothraki warriors and every man under his command; and he was desperately afraid.

He could not kill this many. He was not capable of that. If he could let loose arrows at them from a great distance, perhaps. If he had lured them into some cunningly laid trap, perhaps. But not like this. They were getting closer and closer, on an open field, with hundreds of arrows and arakhs destined for his throat.

He had hoped the bloodfire would suffice to dismay them. That was no easy working of the art; he had used it twice in a year, and that was more than he usually would; his left arm’s wound from the previous usage had still not yet recovered. Unfortunately, it had not.

Another flight of arrows rained down upon him. Stannis made an irritated gesture. The wind shifted, governed by an aspect of his thought and bound by blood sacrifice of a captive militiaman he had killed an hour ago. Most of the arrows had been well-aimed, and so most of them fell short. Some of them hit him anyway. Fortunately none of them had the luck to hit the joints between pieces of his plate armour. He wondered how long that luck would hold.

The Dothraki khal was not wrong, about one thing at least. There was one of him and hundreds of them. He was alone, with no horse to escape with, for no horse would tolerate the intense heat of the bloodfire that greenseer’s blood could make. The Dothraki were most famed as horse-archers, but they were no slouches with their curved swords, either. If they got close, that would be the end of him. Not even all his armour and all his sorcerous arts would save him when they rode him down.

Their arrows rained upon him again. Stannis in his birth form cursed vilely about Dothraki horse-archery, while Stannis in the form of the air felt them tickling his wind-currents and swayed to redirect them. He could not do this for much longer. He did not have the focus. Already he had had to dismiss his eagle companions; he could not fly with them and share in their thoughts, command the winds all around him, keep control of the bloodfire, and operate his birth form, all at the same time.

The Dothraki were still getting closer.

I must do it soon, or I am a dead man walking.

Swearing, Stannis relinquished his control on the winds. One instant he was a vast dispersed consciousness, feeling every man and beast and weapon that flickered in the wind, as well as a consciousness in a man’s body and a spurt of sorcerous flame; the next he was only the latter two. The shift in consciousness was disorientating. In his birth form he stumbled. The bloodfire roared out of control for a fraction of a second before he forced it back down. His thin, all-iron spear melted a little further. He feared it would not last too long. A wooden-hafted spear would have been burnt into uselessness long ago. Metal could not contain this heat for long. Nothing could.

Then, from a mind dwelling in two places, he leapt straight back to three.

While a deadly hail of Dothraki arrows showered upon his armour, Stannis Baratheon reached out beyond the confines of his thought, towards a mind much unlike his own. He grasped it and delved into the thoughts that danced and flickered within. They were simpler thoughts than his: fear, determination, obedience, threat, friend, foe, anticipation of reward.

That will not suffice. He bored in further.

There! Mate, food… he seized upon those thoughts and sent more of his own. Himself, running free in a great grass plain. Himself, eating whenever he pleased. Himself, mating with many females to call his own.

The mind that he had entered was confused, and wary. In some instinct it was aware that something was wrong. But it could not, exactly, understand what was wrong. It took in the new thoughts and…

Stannis in his birth form breathed deeply. It was done.

The intense struggle had taken seconds.

Taking control of a new beast for the first time was always arduous, and this had been more taxing than he had hoped; but it was finished now. The mind that he had pierced was too simple to understand what he was doing; it did not have a strong enough sense of self to be able to define itself to itself, and to separate itself from thoughts not of itself that were in its head. Therefore it followed the thoughts imposed by an invading mind as though they were its own. That was the key difference between skinchanging into animals and into men or women. A man, with a name, with a sense of self, with an identity, could know himself well enough to know the way he thought and thus to know what thoughts he would not have thought.

Skinchanging was a complicated matter. Efforts of mind and thought had no easy, lazy comparison to battles of fire or swords or flesh and blood. To repel the thoughts of a separate mind, one must know that they are the thoughts of a separate mind. A man or woman could do this. A beast could not.

That had been essential to the secondary plan that Stannis had had no choice but to fall back to, if he were to have any hope of leaving this battle alive. It was far from the most daunting part.

Stannis gazed back up at the khalasar.

Several hundred mounted warriors were charging at a man on foot, wielding recurve bows and wickedly sharp arakhs. They bellowed their war-cries, promising him death. He was silent. Against the immensity of the horde he could not help but feel very, very small.

He was a big man, tall and broad-shouldered. Some of the Dothraki were taller and broader than he was. He had plenty of sorcerous tricks. He had exhausted all that he could use. All that was left was man against men, will against wills.

The khal shouted encouragement. The hundreds of horsem*n bore down upon him. The thunder of hooves made the earth shake below his feet.

He held his spear. He yelled “Storm’s End!” at the top of his voice.

And then Stannis Baratheon charged them.

An army was charging against a man. A man was charging against an army. Neither side bothered with arrows any more. They were too close. Noro had his arakh in hand.

It was like a scene from his nightmares, exactly as he had known it would be. The wind on his hair; the wind on his face; the comrades by his side; the comrades behind him; Jhatho’s face bright with courage; Jhatho’s face hard with resolve; him and his fellows approaching the enemy; the enemy approaching them; the morning sun in Noro’s eyes; the rod of pale fire bright like the sun in the hands of the lone figure who stood against them.

How many times had he made this charge before? He knew not. But he knew the ending.

He clutched the hilt of his arakh with sweaty fingers, taking strength from the familiarity and hardness of the grip. It will not be the same. It cannot be the same. It must not be the same.

The figure of silvery steel armour and black cloth was closer every second. The far end of the iron spear in his hand was so hot that the metal was melting even as he bore it, white-hot droplets flash-freezing and hissing as they hit the ground.

The red dripping hands of Baratheon were everywhere, in his thoughts. He saw them in the earth, in the sky, in the horses of his companions. Crimson fingers, and they were reaching for him, each and every one.

No. They aren’t, they aren’t, they can’t be.

Noro’s horse was agitated. The stallion could feel the heat exuded by the snow-white fire, even from this distance, and was afraid. Noro held the reins tight and spurred it forward. It was hard when Noro himself had the same instinct as the horse. The terrible figure that he saw was exactly the figure he remembered from his nightmares.

For an instant, startlingly clearly, Noro thought he saw that Baratheon’s visor was down and he looked upon the face of his tormentor, as pale and cruel as he remembered. Blue eyes as dark as the deep sea stared at his face. A voice came from everywhere and nowhere, bright and burning like a slave-brand in the flesh of his thought. I… see… you…

Noro swerved, nearly hitting another rider in blind reflexive panic. No! Was it even real? He looked again and Baratheon’s visor was up. That made sense. Why would Baratheon have opened his visor in the middle of this, anyway? That would be madness. Madness… The thought of madness was like bugs crawling on his flesh. Had he gone mad? Was that it? Had he truly seen the face of the enemy, echoing the dreams, or was it a memory of the dreams? Could he tell the difference between truth and nightmare any more?

Might be he was truly mad, because in a way that thought was somehow comforting. I imagined it, he told himself. It never really happened. I’m only worried because of the dreams. Mayhaps I am mad, but I am still Jhatho’s ko, I am still his friend, and I will still be at his side, now and always.

Jhatho was still charging, near the front of them all. His arm was high, his arakh held aloft, beauty on his face and laughter on his lips. Noro clove close to that vision of glory, drawing strength, drawing comfort, drawing warmth, drawing resolve. Every instinct in Noro’s body told him he knew how this story ended; he knew they would fail, he would fall, the tall terrible figure would stand over him. He ignored them all. Jhatho needed Noro to be strong, for he was Jhatho’s bloodrider and it was a weak khal who chose weak bloodriders. He would be strong for Jhatho when he could not be strong for himself.

Baratheon shifted the spear in his hands as he ran, so that he was holding it right at the base. By now, all the rest of it was making a mess of white-hot metal droplets on the ground. The iron rod he bore was long, but very thin and very light.

The foremost two riders reached the enemy.

Baratheon slashed a great arc through the air, the spear shining with pale fire. By rights it was only a light scoring on the side, a glancing blow; but wherever that dazzling white blaze touched the horses, lesser fires followed in its wake. The horses fled, neighing desperately, with their riders screaming; hungry tongues of orange flame licked greedily up their sides.

Noro’s horse almost bucked him in the ferocity of its attempts to turn. It did not know what this whiteness was and it did not want to be anywhere near it. He noticed other riders having the same problem. Noro pulled the reins as hard as he had in a lifetime of horsemanship and dug his spurs in deep, eliciting an agonised neigh.

He had to do this, had to stay; only weaklings fled from battles, cowards, less than men, beneath contempt; and he was Jhatho’s bloodrider; everything he did reflected on Jhatho. He saw that bright white fire and the man who had conjured it from a red dripping hand and the fear was so intense that it almost consumed him whole, but he did not let it, because he could not let it, he could not, for the one who mattered more to him than anyone else in the world ever had.

“Circle him!” Jhatho was shouting, struggling to control his own horse. “Hit him from—” the great black warhorse reared yet again, trying to flee, maddened by fire— “several directions! Surround him, then we can cut him down! Courage! There’s still only one of him, we can kill him! To me, men, to me—”

Then the khal’s horse reared higher than ever before, and threw Jhatho off its back.

It happened in the course of a second. Snorting, straining to avoid contact with a burning horse that had come too close to the white fire and bolted, Jhatho’s black stallion rose suddenly on its rear legs as high as it could. One instant the khal was shouting orders; the next, he was on the ground, moaning with pain, while his horse galloped away.

Noro looked down upon him with utter dismay. Jhatho, strong Jhatho, swift Jhatho, always first to grasp a thing, best at war and best at horsemanship… how could Jhatho fall?

Then Baratheon lashed out again with that terrible white flame, twice: at someone to his right, at someone to his left. Horses were bucking, rearing, throwing their riders; riders were shouting, screaming, lying on the ground in pain; both were burning.

Jhatho should be there. Jhatho should be protecting them. Jhatho’s confidence had reassured him, it was just a dream, a nightmare, he was being a fool, he was being unmanly, it was not going to happen as it had happened in his dream. But it was. There was no-one to stop it. No-one could. Jhatho had been wrong; reality was wrong; the nightmares were real.

Fear filled him then, fear beyond fear, fear beyond anything, fear such that he had never known in all his years. The sounds and sights sent a wagonload of memories spilling over in Noro’s thoughts, all of those times he had seen this, all of those times he had seen this before, he knew this, he knew, he knew, he knew, he knew how this was going to end. Himself falling from his horse just as Jhatho had. The long black shadow passing over him. The red dripping hand that he had seen, he had actually seen it, today, the red hand that was coming to steal his soul…

He had a duty to his khal.

The old words, stark and unalterable, rushed back to memory: A khal who cannot ride is no khal.

And Noro yanked the reins hard to the right. His stallion moved with him at once, horse and rider of one mind in this, at last. Away they went, galloping as hard as a war-bred horse could gallop, fleeing from the dreams, fleeing from the great black shadow, fleeing from the fire and the blood. Other Dothraki fled too, following, in blind panic; the khal was unmanned and the ko was fleeing, and that was reason enough.

They had lost.

There is no shame in it, he thought. The khal couldn’t defeat that monster. No-one could. But he could not convince another, for he could not even convince himself. He knew he was disgraced, a coward, a dog, less than a man.

He had left his khal, blood of his blood, to die.

He had left his friend to die.

He had left Jhatho to die, and even if the world would forgive him that, he would never forgive himself.

When Ser Stannis Baratheon descended alone to greet his victorious army, they looked upon him in awed, almost worshipful silence.

It was difficult for Justin to resist that. Whatever else he was, the captain was one man. One man. For one man to overcome hundreds of fearsome Dothraki warriors and send them fleeing was a feat of arms beyond imagination.

“I told you,” Stannis said to the sellswords, the corners of his lips twitching upward ever-so-slightly. “Did I not? I told you, ‘You will see.’”

“Oh yes,” said Bozyno Vunel. “Captain—I—Captain. I have never seen a battle like this in all my years. I have never seen a man do what you have done—twice now, after Nyrelos. We were badly outnumbered, on an open plain, naught to protect us from the strength of a greater host; we should have been easy prey for their reserve; and we won. They ran away. From you.” He shook his head in wonder. “It is the perfect battle.”

“Did you know all along it would be this way?” Justin asked. “Is this what you meant when you said ‘preparations’?”

“Yes, and yes.”

“How…” Alequo Nudoon could scarcely speak. “How did you make ‘preparations’ for this?”

“Suffice to say that I did, with some difficulty,” the captain said. “This perfect battle was long in the making. That is why I required the delays I did.” He looked around. “Where is the Iron Shields’ commander, Lagan?”

“Dead,” Marro Namerin supplied. “He was cut down in the battle. Wonoat commands the Iron Shields now.”

“I see,” said Ser Stannis. He made no further comment on the matter. “Have you looted the corpses yet?”

Some of the other men looked taken aback. None of the Company of the Cat men were surprised by that brutal honesty. “Not completely, yet, Captain,” Nudoon said. “We… well… you…”

“Then get it over with, if you intend to,” Stannis said. “I will not tarry long. We’ll rest for the remainder of today, but afterwards we shall be heading back westward, with haste. Handtaker will be expecting me. There is a war to win.”

Justin forwent a chance to steal gold rings and suchlike from the bodies, though doubtless there would be plenty. Sellswords tended to carry their wealth with them, available at a moment’s notice, rather than relying on faraway vaults. The favour of King Robert’s brother mattered more.

He deemed that it was working. Namerin, Vunel, and the others had known Ser Stannis for years longer than Justin had, but Stannis nowadays rode with Justin more often than not. They were both men of Westeros, and that was a bond in this summery, lonely land.

So it was that he spoke often with his captain on the long ride to the west. He learnt little of the witchcraft the banished knight had unleashed upon the unsuspecting Dothraki, for Stannis did not like to reveal much, though he did like to believe Stannis had shared more with him than any other. Often their conversations were about Westeros, or about their past (albeit usually Justin’s).

The army took a different path to their previous way, so that they went through lands that still had something left to pillage. Yet there was not much pillaging. Ser Stannis drove a hard pace. They stopped to sleep or to forage food from unfortunate peasants. That was all. They did not divert their path to raze as many villages as possible. Indeed, they were scarcely razing villages.

Again they passed through the Ralemne Heights, for they did not wish to be followed. (The journey was less daunting this time, now that they knew it could be done.) They were far from the greatest host currently roaming the far northwest of Essos. The grand army of the Pact of Four had the greater part of a hundred-thousand men, and that was with the Pentoshi not yet arrived. One encounter with that leviathan and this little host would be crushed like a bug.

After they emerged from the Ralemne Heights, the peril of other hosts was even greater. Stannis grew cool and distant on that ride. He almost never spoke, except to command strange, winding courses for the army to follow—often through steep, rocky valleys, and on paths that were a disgrace to the honourable name of ‘dirt track’—or to warn them of enemy outriders in a particular place who needed to be intercepted and killed before they could proceed further on their way. He ate and slept and rode, fully in control of himself, yet somehow seemed simultaneously a hundred miles away. Most did not understand why; but Justin had seen how Stannis treated his golden eagles, and now there were dozens of them, nesting at the camp and flying far and wide.

Justin saw to it that the eagles were well fed and kept his captain’s condition secret as best he could. He suspected this was necessary. Stannis had forbidden outriders to leave the army, lest they be captured by the enemy and reveal his presence, but there must be tens of thousands of the Pact of Four’s sellswords and soldiers in these lands. It was a wonder that their small host did not intersect with any of them, and Justin was fairly confident that he knew how it was done.

Wonder though it was, it took Stannis’s full attention, night and day, to achieve. By the time they at last reached the rest of the Company of the Cat, the captain was weary to the bone. Justin had to watch him to check he was not in danger of falling off his horse, and his eyes were red and often blinking.

Justin and his comrades rejoined the main strength of the Company of the Cat at a camp outside Amnos, a tiny fishing village on the coast of the Shivering Sea about a hundred miles east of Braavos. The cat banners rose above a characteristically well-ordered grid of tents, surrounded by signal fires and a swarm of sentries.

“Prepare your tents,” Ser Stannis ordered once they arrived. “I do not and cannot know when the Company will be on the move. For all I know, it may be tomorrow. Speak with the guardsmen, they will tell you where to go. The commander does not approve of disorderly sprawl.” He turned to the men who were not from the Company of the Cat—the Iron Shields and the other small free companies. “I would advise you to set up your own camps. We are all, for the moment, in the hire of the same employer, and it would not be prudent to part ways; but we are not of the same free company, and it would be presumptuous over my commander if I were to forget that.”

Finally Stannis turned to Justin.

“Nudoon, Massey, Namerin, Vunel, come with me. We must report to the commander.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Once they had removed their armour and garbed themselves in easier clothes, they walked deeper into the camp. Soon twelve armed guardsmen fell in around them, walking quietly on all sides. Justin was surprised, but a whisper from Vunel told him not to be. “Handtaker’s a paranoid bastard, that’s why he’s lived so long.”

They passed into a tent larger than the others—with several layers, all filled with suspicious guardsmen ready to raise an alarm—and for the first time in his life, Justin laid eyes upon the commander of the free company he had sworn years of his life to.

Aro Isattis, called Handtaker, sixth commander of the Company of the Cat, was a lean, ageing man, perhaps forty or fifty, with a downturned mouth and a prominent protruding nose. His thinness did not look like starvation, or at least not current starvation, but seemed to hold a certain quiet strength. His face was impassive. Justin tried to see some sign, perhaps in the eyes, that he was looking at one of the most infamously cruel men in the Free Cities. He saw nothing. The commander of the Company of the Cat could have passed for a merchant.

“Sunsetlander,” Handtaker said.

“Commander,” Stannis said, bowing his head respectfully. “Would you like me to relay to you what we have done in the east?”

“That would be convenient.”

And so he did.

It was a long tale. Handtaker remained perfectly silent throughout; whatever else the commander was, he was plainly not the sort of man who was in love with the sound of his own voice. Justin listened to most of it. Many of the explanations he knew, but Ser Stannis spoke more of the truths behind his magic to the commander than he had disclosed to his men. It made for some intriguing stories. It was a pity Justin would never be able to tell anyone. He had heard enough of Handtaker’s reputation to know how that might end, and, when faced with the risk of a slow and miserable death, Justin considered that it was better safe than story.

“…and so they fled,” Stannis finished, in a triumphant tone. “It was the perfect battle. I could not defeat them, so I did not. I found a way for them to defeat themselves.”

Handtaker spoke for the first time in half an hour. “I see.”

Then he backhanded Stannis across the face.

Ser Stannis tumbled down, struck so hard that he lost his footing. “What—?” he gasped.

Justin started to step towards the captain. Namerin grasped him hard. “No!” he hissed. “You’ll only make it worse. You’re new, you don’t know anything here.”

Handtaker flicked a finger. Four burly guardsmen stepped forward immediately. Two grabbed Stannis’s arms and hoisted him up while one held steel at his throat. Stannis was not fool enough to make a move. He stood still, eyes wide with panic, taking very short breaths very quickly.

“You utter imbecile,” Handtaker said, very softly. “Do you have any idea what you have done, Sunsetlander?”

Stannis spoke between sharp breaths. “Commander, I… I do not understand.”

“That would be a no,” Handtaker said. “How disappointing. Very well. Do you remember the orders I gave you?”

This time, Stannis remained silent.

“I commanded you to use this passage you were so happy to boast to me your little spies had found. To ravage the lands of Norvos. To lure out part of the host Norvos was contributing to the Pact of Four. This you did. And then, to use that to pull out another part. Which you did not.”

“But—commander—I destroyed—”

“Destroying them was not your objective. It was merely a possible means to an end. If you ravaged the lands of Norvos, seized a great deal of food and then retreated into the Ralemne Heights, that would reveal to the Norvoshi that an army could pass out from the Ralemne Heights, when they had thought it impossible. That would allow you to hide in the mountains which, by your art, you know better than they, and would force them to send reinforcements to fortify all the passes from the mountains—not just the one most closely connected to that passage of yours—so that the Braavosi force, which they would know is somewhere in the mountains, could not attack out at will. That would have tied down many times your number. That strategy—or any other of a dozen I could name—would have been greatly preferable to your glorious victory.”

Justin had never heard the words ‘glorious victory’ spoken with such withering scorn.

“The purpose that I desired was for you to pull as large a Norvoshi force as possible away from the main host of the three Free Cities allied against Braavos to her east, before that host could join with the sellswords hired by Pentos. Therefore, a late victory—like the one you obtained—was as useless as a defeat. I did not care whether the men you lured away from Norvos’s army were gloriously slain or tied up with some other duty; I merely needed them gone from the west. And because of how long you delayed the encounter with the very first force sent to bring you to heel, trying to utterly destroy them instead of to do whatever you had to do to make Norvos give them reinforcements, no reinforcements were given; so those men stayed in the west.”

Handtaker leant forward, looking into Stannis’s paling face.

“I see the beginnings of realisation on your face. Good. The Sealord’s men met the Lorathi, Norvoshi and Qohoriks on the west coast of Lorath Bay. The Braavosi tried to stamp them out. The Pact lost more men than Braavos did, but the Pact’s army is intact. The soldiers and hired sellswords of Lorath, Norvos and Qohor joined with those of Pentos, overcoming the separation of forces that previously hindered them. The Pentoshi, who have no formal army but plenty of money to hire sellswords, and the Free Cities fight more with sellswords than with their armies in any case. The Pentoshi, who are famously very rich, and have not lost anything in the recent war as Braavos and Norvos have. Those Pentoshi. Which now leaves the Braavosi facing precisely the strategic nightmare they tried their best to avoid from the very beginning of this war: not three but four Free Cities, all their forces together, against Braavos alone.”

Stannis’s eyes widened.

“You think like a warlock, not like a captain,” Handtaker went on remorselessly. “You have become so accustomed to using your witchcraft to destroy your enemies that you forgot to consider when and why and whether they need to be destroyed. You faced an enemy that would be difficult to destroy in battle, because you were badly outnumbered. Instead of thinking back to the circ*mstances of the war and wondering whether you needed to utterly destroy him—indeed, whether an attempt to destroy him would even be the wisest course—you cast aside every other strategic consideration in order to be able to destroy him. You succeeded. At the cost of making your success useless.”

For the whole conversation, Handtaker did not raise his voice. His tone was polite, pleasant, conversational. It was as if he were remarking on the pleasant weather.

A gesture. The guardsmen stepped back.

Stannis fell to both knees, voice shaking with distress and dismay. He massaged his throat. “Commander, I will redeem myself for my failure. I will lead your men to great victories—”

“No.”

The bald, lone word left Stannis actually shocked. “Commander?”

“You will not lead my men. You are demoted from the rank of captain. You are not suited to it. You have served me ably as my warlock, aiding the outriders and giving good winds to the ships and working terror at Nyrelos, and for that you will continue to be paid very handsomely. But it was a mistake to raise you to command.”

“Commander,” Stannis protested, “I made a mistake, I see that now, but—”

“‘A mistake’. You did not follow your orders. I’ve killed men for less. I do not tolerate disobedience, I believe I’m mildly well known for it. Know this: If you were not so useful as a warlock, or if I were not entirely convinced that your deeds arose from stupidity rather than betrayal, you would already be dead.”

Stannis absorbed that solemnly.

“I… I’ll do… I’ll… I’ll fix it, commander.” Stannis lifted his eyes imploringly to stare into Handtaker’s own. “I’ll set right what I set wrong. You need do naught but give the word, and I will go out to battle for you, under your command or whoever would you like, I will destroy your enemies—”

The commander regarded him coldly. “It is far too late for that.”

“What do you mean?” Stannis seemed bewildered. “Surely you can undo my demotion—”

“Of course I can,” Handtaker said, impatient. “With one utterance I could make you the new commander or I could make you a corpse in a shallow grave. It is too late because Lord General Ls’tar has brought about a cataclysmic collapse in the Braavosi front lines. It is too late because the Pact of Four have stormed the cities of Karavos, Moninth, Lyndos; only the fleet in the lagoon holds them back from Braavos itself; what remains of the Braavosi army cannot last long. It is too late because Antaryon has been deposed, and Magister Anno Nusaris is the new Sealord, and Nusaris has sent envoys to Ls’tar seeking terms.” And finally, finally he raised his voice. “It is too late because we’ve lost the f*cking war.”

The man in the dark robe stood in the shadow of the Titan, watching the ships come home with the sunset.

The hulls came first into his sight, as splashes of purple paint on the horizon, for their sails blended with the cloudy sky. They travelled in their hundreds, a fleet unrivalled by any other in the world. Many-masted they were, long and sleek and broad-sailed, and tall as well. Yet their height seemed as nothing when they passed under the pillars of black granite that were the legs of the Titan, melding with the mountains of two different isles. The top of a mainmast rose less than a quarter as high as the point where the Titan’s legs met

The Titan blew an earth-shaking roar, the customary blast to herald their coming. Looking up, a surge of pride filled Anno as the ground trembled beneath his feet. This great artifice was Braavosi work, all of it, made not by the blood magics of the dragonlords but by the hands and minds of men. By then the ships were close enough that he could see the sailors’ faces, pale in the cool wet air and framed by dark strands, and he knew they felt it too. They stood proud and straight-backed, as if they were returning as a conquering army and not as the miserable dregs of defeat.

If only that were so.

Oh, they had not been defeated on the waves, to be sure. The Braavosi fleet had performed splendidly. The Lorathi fleet and all the sellsails that the Pact of Four could hire had descended upon Braavos, and the brave sailors of the Queen of Cities had fought off them all, then executed an exemplary blockade against Lorath and the coasts controlled by Pentos in the latter half of the war.

It had not been enough. None of it had been enough.

All of Braavos’s naval might had not been able to stop the Pact of Four’s armies. The attempted landing on Lorath had failed miserably, driven back into the sea. The blockade had been too late; by the time Ferrego Antaryon as Sealord had learnt that four Free Cities had gone to war upon him, Lorath’s gold had already hired and paid an immense host of sellswords, instructing them to gather at Norvos. The Pact of Four must have been planning their Great Northern War for a long time. Probably as soon as Antaryon’s war with Norvos ended, Anno thought, damnable folly that it was.

The throng of people gathering at the docks raised a haggard cheer for their returning heroes. Anxious children and women shouted names, seeking fathers, brothers, husbands and sons amidst those sailors who had lived to come home.

Anno stood among them, in the midst of a crowd and yet utterly alone.

He watched the ships moor at the Ragman’s Harbour in the west of the city. Doubtless they would soon be seeking their wives and children, parted from them for nigh a year. Before that, though, there were formalities to be got out of the way.

“Your Excellency.” The high captains of the expeditionary fleet bowed.

Anno Nusaris, newly elected Sealord of Braavos, surrounded by dark-robed attendants and ringed in steel by unsmiling armed men, raised his voice. “My high captains,” the Sealord said. “You have served the city well.”

“As you have led us well, Your Excellency,” the high captains said in unison.

Anno wondered darkly whether men’s memories would agree. The treaty with Norvos after the previous war had been utterly undone; worse, the Unequal Treaties with Pentos, born of five wars and a century of effort, had been stripped away. Pentos had regained its full independence, devoid of Braavosi vassalage. Among the free Pentoshi government’s earliest acts had been the restoration of slavery. Worst of all, a Norvoshi army dwelt in Karavos, one of Braavos’s five tributary cities, and it looked like they were not about to leave.

All of this was the fault of Ferrego Antaryon’s faction and their senseless over-ambition. But Anno feared he would be remembered as the Sealord who had presided over one of the worst defeats Braavos had ever suffered.

Nonetheless he spoke the traditional words. “Do you therefore, comprehending your return, relinquish your commands and all the authority conferred upon you back into the hands of the Braavosi people whence it came?”

“I relinquish my command and all the authority conferred upon me back into the hands of the Braavosi people whence it came,” each high captain said.

“Then be welcomed to hearth and home as a free citizen of Braavos,” Anno said, and it was done.

With the wartime formations officially disbanded, the common men of the expeditionary fleet were permitted to disembark. They came down in good order, without haste to find their loved ones. These were disciplined men, and they knew they would not be separated from their families for long. In peacetime the Braavosi fleet was still on duty, remaining in the lagoon or on the high seas to keep merchantmen safe, but city leave was common, unlike in wartime.

The ceremony was done—an old custom, designed to prevent the grand commanders of land and sea from using their men to seize political power within the city, after an unstable era of more than a hundred years in which they had done precisely that—and now there was no further need of Anno here. He lingered nonetheless, among the people he was charged to lead.

Men met women and children and other men, and embraced one another with hugs and kisses and tears. When they had moved off, and the number of sailors was receding, women and children and the elderly turned away too and headed for their homes, backs slumped and weeping. These were sights and sounds to scour the soul, but Anno forced himself to watch despite it. They were his fellow citizens, and this was the cost of war. As his grandfather Sealord Ranio Nusaris had told him, the course of the cold demands of statecraft should never cause a Sealord to forget what fighting meant, behind it all.

Hours later, when most of the throng had departed, leaving only a scattering of families searching the docks with fading hopes, Anno’s keen eyes caught sight of a young man nearby in the black of night. He must have been less than a hundred feet from Anno for hours. Aproaching, Anno heard sickly, snuffling snores coming from him.

The man was asleep on the docks in the cold wind, missing an arm.

Anno saw the tatty remnants of a uniform over those slender youthful features and his heart seized up with disgust. He must have been a soldier who had given everything for Braavos, only to lose his job and be cast out onto the ground like the foul-smelling contents of a chamberpot.

Quietly, bidding his guardsmen to stand aside, he walked up to the sleeper, knelt and lightly tucked a purse of iron coins beneath the sleeper’s only arm. “I am going to make things better,” he whispered, knowing that nobody could hear him. “What I do, I do for the sake of men like you. You will have a home soon. I promise.”

A gesture, and they moved on.

Anno was in a melancholy mood as they headed to the Sealord’s Palace, tall spires gleaming in the silver moonlight, on prettily cobbled streets that looked a world away from this. Everywhere he went, guardsmen and servants bowed and called him “Your Excellency”. A set of several immense rooms, the Sealord’s personal bathing, dressing and bed chambers, were particularly well guarded. Dozens of men guarded every door, and not even Anno’s guardsmen passed, only Anno.

He put a key into the lock, turned it, and was greeted by the gleam of gold.

A kingly hoard was heaped all over Anno’s floor. Gold, silver and gemstones were the greater part of it, but by no means all. There were also plenty of furs, barrels of fine wine, spices, sculptures, portraits and more—a breathtakingly massive gathering of the wealth of Braavos. It could have given food, shelter and comfort to thousands of Braavosi. That was how Anno would have spent it. Instead it was destined for the magisters of Pentos, Norvos, Qohor and Lorath when their fleets arrived to take it, as tribute in recompense for the Great Northern War.

Anno stepped into the chamber, locked the door and turned away from the hoard of tribute. He had little desire to look upon the sign of his beloved home’s subjection tonight.

Anno Nusaris awoke early in the morning on a soft white featherbed quite like the one that he had enjoyed in his old family manse. That, at least, was familiar to before, when so much of his life was not. Some servants were allowed into the meticulously guarded privacy of his night chambers to dress him, and in a robe of charcoal grey, he emerged to the rest of the gigantic Sealord’s Palace.

The next day, Anno was issuing judgements in a public square when a tall, pale-skinned hairless man with a hideously scarred face was escorted by dozens of glaring armed guards into his presence.

“I offer you sincere greetings, Your Excellency,” said the pale man, wearing lots of gold on his person in contrast to the subdued dark colours that were preferred in Braavos, “for myself, Captain Gemilio Nikar, of the Company of the Cat, and on behalf of my commander, known hereabouts as Lord Handtaker.”

A sellsword envoy. Anno stiffened.

“I greet you, Captain Nikar,” he said, “on the behalf of the people of Braavos.”

“And a most generous people they are,” Nikar oozed. “These seem to be rather open surroundings, Your Excellency,” Captain Nikar suggested, glancing dismissively at the surrounding Braavosi citizens, ordinary men and women here to watch their Sealord’s judgements as was their right. “For delicate matters, would it not be better to your service were we to meet more privately?”

“I am a leader of my people,” Anno Nusaris said coolly, “and I act on their behalf. I do not need to hide from them. I am not about to hire you; there is no need for secrecy. This is the way things are done in Braavos, you see.”

Cheers resounded off the walls and rang to the skies. “Nusaris, Nusaris, Nusaris!”

If at all deterred, the pale scarred man did not let that stop him. “As Your Excellency desires,” he said with a bow. “Lord Handtaker has long enjoyed a relationship of trust and mutual respect with the office of the Sealord, keyholders and magisters of Braavos, and it would grieve him deeply were that not to continue.”

“I do not wish to cause unnecessary grief,” Anno said.

“I am glad of it, Your Excellency,” said Captain Nikar. “You see, my commander wished to raise a somewhat delicate matter. We fought bravely for the cause of Braavos throughout the recent war, never tiring, never deserting even to the very end, just as we promised we would; and it therefore occurs to him to raise the issue of the payment—”

The crowd erupted in jeers. Mocking yells and snarls of hate drowned out what Nikar was trying to say, raining down on the sellsword who was trying to take more of the wealth of which Braavos had so little remaining.

“The payment that the Sealord of Braavos promised to us,” Nikar shouted over them.

Anno Nusaris made a cutting gesture. Over the course of several minutes, the noise died down.

“I see,” Anno said politely. “You do understand, I hope, that we are in quite some difficulty. We must pay a very great tribute to all four of the Free Cities that stood against us in the war, and many of our citizens are in great need.”

“That is grievous to hear, Your Excellency,” Nikar said with unconvincing grief. “Please accept my sincerest condolences for the fate that has befallen Braavos.”

“They are accepted,” said Anno.

“Yet I must nonetheless raise the matter of payment.”

“Ah yes. Payment for your services in the Great Northern War.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“That is a very large payment, isn’t it?”

Captain Nikar looked wary. “The… ah… previous Sealord was a generous man, Your Excellency.”

“Generous,” Anno Nusaris repeated. “That is one way of putting it. He is not remembered as a generous man in Braavos, you may be interested to hear. Yet he was exceptionally generous to you. Has it occurred to you to wonder why?”

“The minds of Sealords are not known to me, Your Excellency,” Nikar said.

“Oh, I think they are,” Anno said mildly. “You did something for him, so he did something for you. Are you a foolish man, captain?”

Nikar looked taken aback. “I’d like to think not, Your Excellency.”

“I still remember that grand reception nearly a year past, when you and your commander sat as guests in the Sealord’s Palace,” said Anno. “Your Lord Handtaker and his captains acted as the tough fighting men, carefully serving one man’s interests. You spoke words of absurd, foolish confidence about Braavos’s prospects in a grand war. I remember all your extravagant promises of victory. ‘Let them come. We will destroy them, each and every one.’ That’s what one of you said to me, wasn’t it? Those words, coming from sellswords as successful as you, persuaded many of our magisters that if they were to take as much land from Norvos as possible then the retaliation wouldn’t be too dangerous. You persuaded them that the chance was worth taking.”

Nikar’s pale scarred face was turning ever more pale.

“I don’t think you are a foolish man, unlike my unlamented predecessor,” Anno continued. “Nor do I think that of your commander. So what do I think, then? That leaves me little choice. That means I think you deliberately tried to persuade the leaders of Braavos into taking foolish steps that would cause a war that would kill thousands of my people and leave my city destitute, so that you could earn some gold. And then Antaryon and his corrupt friends granted you a grossly inflated wage, many times what sellswords would ordinarily be paid in a contract.”

The Company of the Cat’s envoy struggled to be heard over the jeers. “We fought for your city! That wage was for the danger we undertook, by picking your side!”

Anno’s voice was harsh with disbelief. “‘For the danger’. Antaryon said so, but we all know why he really did it. You helped to sway the magisters of this city to do as he wished, so he thought kindly of you; so when war broke out to his surprise, he heaped Braavosi taxpayers’ hard-earned wealth on you.”

“Please, Your Excellency, it was promised! We need the coin!”

“You need the coin? You need the coin?” Anno remembered the wounded soldier sleeping on the docks, a better and more deserving man than this by far, and his temper blazed red-hot. “I’ll tell you who needs the coin. The poor people and the wounded and the widowed and the orphaned of Braavos are in desperate need of gold we can’t give them, because of what the Pact cities are taking from us. Because of the war you sellswords wrought, with your lies, for your greed. The blame lies with you, almost as much as Antaryon’s men. So long as I am Sealord, what remains of Braavosi wealth will be spent for the Braavosi, not to pay off the merchants of death whose sweet lies ruined this city in the first place.”

The cheers were deafening now, the ocean of applause so tremendous it drowned out all other sound.

“Tell Handtaker this,” Anno thundered. “We don’t want his kind here in our city!”

The celebration of his people uplifted him like nothing he had ever known. For all he knew, he could have been walking on the clouds. Anno exulted in it, delighting in the warm glow of their approval. He would always keep them in his thought, he swore to himself, and be a better Sealord than any other who had come before. Distantly, as if in a dream, he saw the sellsword emissary ride away empty-handed, doubtless to inform his foul master. He scarcely noticed. He was too caught in the moment…

A high-pitched cry tore through the morning air.

Anno Nusaris looked up, his reverie shattered by the scream. He looked around for a while. But all that he saw was a lonely eagle circling in the sky.

Hammered unrelentingly by raindrops, angry desperate voices filled the stuffy air of the tent like swarming flies.

“Useless! They won’t help us! You’re a fool if you think the proud high-and-mighty likes of Hyndel and Domaryen will stick out their necks for the likes of us!”

“Not for us; for themselves,” argued Bloodbeard. “Nusaris seized power from them; surely they’ll want it back.”

“Not enough to unleash violence in the city,” Tyleo Anastis retorted.

“Nusaris unleashed violence in the city! All his rioters, shouting for peace… he threw down Antaryon, for gods’ sake, he fought the lawful Sealord! Why shouldn’t they do the same to him?”

“Because he didn’t fight the lawful Sealord. The rioting commoners did, but Nusaris didn’t. Antaryon was deposed lawfully. The Braavosi have a way to throw away a Sealord who has led the city to disaster; ‘impeachment’ it’s called. That’s what they did to Antaryon, then the magisters and keyholders voted for Nusaris to replace him. That is how things can be done in Braavos.”

“What a load of bullsh*t! ‘Impeachment’, so Nusaris’s faction, Prestayn’s men, get to overthrow Antaryon and Antaryon’s faction don’t get to do the same back… how absurd. It’s just words, a paper shield, meaningless. There’s no such thing in Norvos or Tyrosh. Why don’t they just kill Nusaris and have done with it?”

Captain Anastis lost his patience. “Well we are not speaking of Tyrosh!”

“Shout at me all you like,” snapped Philenio Zometemis, whom men called Bloodbeard. “Call me a fool if it please you. How do you propose we get the gold that was promised to us?”

“That’s just it,” Anastis said, more quietly, wiping the sweat from his monstrous scar-covered face with one hand. “I don’t think we can.”

“Why did they vote for Nusaris at all?” lamented the Pentoshi captain Ranio Lorumis, one of Handtaker’s old friends, holding his head in his hands. “The voters don’t like Nusaris; they’re all rich, and the rich are Antaryon’s men for the most part.”

“The sentiment of the city is on Nusaris’s side,” one-eyed Ommo Pomistis explained. Young, this one, but with the dark hair and slight figure common among Braavosi. “He knows it. Antaryon’s men know it too. The Peace Men on the streets are bolder every day, and Antaryon’s faction won’t dare push the commoners too far.”

“Mayhaps we can appeal to the Iron Bank to make good the lack,” suggested Captain Feran, a Myrman, Handtaker’s chief of scouts. “The keyholders there are sensible men, not swept up with Nusaris’s dangerous commoner-loving nonsense. Surely they understand Braavos will have to pay free companies in times to come. If our payment is withheld, other free companies will be wary of the Titan.”

“If it were a small lack, perhaps they would,” Handtaker said wearily. “What the Braavosi owe us is not small. In advance they paid us half of what would have been the Company’s full wage for an ordinary contract, but my Braavosi associates prevailed upon Antaryon to promise us a much higher wage. The Iron Bank would not make good a sum as great as that. Not unless they thought the Sealord would eventually pay them back for it. Ferrego Antaryon might have, but Nusaris was one of Banero Prestayn’s men, before… before all of this. Prestayn wouldn’t have, if he’d succeeded in becoming Sealord, and the keyholders of the Iron Bank are not utter fools. They know Nusaris won’t.”

“Then what can we do?” moaned Feran. “We lost too many men in the Great Northern War, staying to the very end so that we wouldn’t forfeit our payment by that generous contract you got for us, and soon it’ll be time to pay the men’s wages. We need that gold! What is left to us, if neither the Iron Bank nor the new Sealord will give it? Commander, are you sure we can’t find a way to throw Nusaris down? Perhaps with the aid of your… associates?”

“We can’t.” Handtaker said it shortly, baldly. “Horo Lynalyon was my closest associate there, and he’s been charged for war profiteering. Levoryn has been sacked from his rank in the Guard; Prestayn’s nephew commands in his place. The others have been cowed by Nusaris’s purge. They scarcely dare step out to the canals to show their faces.”

Disdain dripped from Handtaker’s voice, as it often did, but there was something else as well, something unfamiliar. Shocked, Stannis took a moment to identify it as despair.

In seven years, he had never, ever heard the commander sound so defeated.

A deep, incredulous voice rose over them. “Do you mean to forget what those liars have stolen from us? Do you mean to forgive?”

It was the first time Stannis spoke since he had told them what his eagle-eyes had seen.

“I think we must,” Tyleo Anastis said, resting his head in his hands. “We have no other choice, unless you can think of a way to see Nusaris deposed that has eluded all the rest of us.” He looked up challengingly.

“We have a choice,” Stannis said. “We’d be fools to rely on the wheedling of magisters. They’re cowards to a man. Merchants have their place in the world, but no man of the sword should ever have to go on bended knee or to rely upon a petty copper-counter. They are no true men. They know nothing of lance and bow and sword, only how to fiddle with silks and spices and simper in their fine manses.”

His words oozed contempt so thick that one could almost taste it.

“They don’t have the stomach to fight Nusaris.” Stannis swept a hand around the tent. “But we do.”

“Fight him?” Captain Pomistis asked, jaw dropping. “Have you lost your wits?”

“No. It sounds like I alone have kept them. Every place needs a man and every man has his place. We are not Braavosi electors. What do we know of their arcane procedures? We won’t defeat Nusaris on his terrain; we will defeat him on ours. We are warriors, and war is what we know well. So I say—Let us seize the bastard daughter of Valyria by the throat, and we’ll take what is ours by rights at the point of a sword.”

No-one spoke. For a few seconds, the sheer audacity stunned them all to silence.

Old Anastis was first to recover himself. “You are entirely mad. How would you break through the Braavosi defences?”

“With ease,” said Stannis. “The Braavosi defences are pitiful; it alone of the Free Cities has no walls to hold us off. Thanks be to the Great Northern War there’s still a great multitude of sellswords near here, one of the greatest gatherings of our kind of the past fifty years: those that fought beside us, those that fought under the Pact of Four, the difference does not matter. Men in our profession are ofttimes willing to risk our lives for gold and glory. We should be easily able to ally with enough of those free companies to form a host that can break the Braavosi remnants in the field. Braavos’s army has been mauled in this war, and even at the best of times, all the Free Cities’ hosts of sworn soldiers are smaller than the hosts of sellswords they hire to fight for pay and loot. And where in the world has more to loot than the Queen of Cities?”

“Braavos has no walls. Braavos needs no walls,” Ommo Pomistis said. Stannis thought of him as a young man, though he was older than Stannis himself. “Have you even seen it, Sunsetlander?”

“Yes,” Stannis said, grinding his teeth.

“Braavos has its wooden walls,” Pomistis said slowly, in such a tone as if he were speaking to a dull child. “Braavos has its fleet. And Braavos is in a lagoon; they don’t call it Braavos of the Hundred Isles for nothing. Yes of course an alliance of free companies could defeat what is left of their army. But other free companies will not join with us if they can make no profit from it, as long as Braavos itself remains untouchable. All that we could do is lay a siege—a worthless siege, for Braavos could easily resupply by sea, so we would fail.”

“We would not fail.”

“Then tell me,” the young Braavosi captain said, slow, mocking, “how, exactly, do you expect to get us past the greatest fleet in the world?”

Stannis looked past Ommo Pomistis and locked eyes with Handtaker. “It is possible,” he said, straight to the commander. “You may not trust me as a captain any more, but you were at Nyrelos, you know enough not to doubt me as a sorcerer.”

A soft, soft voice, silk in a whisper. “I know.”

“So trust me then, commander, when I tell you that it can be done.”

Handtaker’s dark eyes held that gaze for a long while. None dared to speak. Then, sharply, once, he nodded.

Yes! Stannis clenched his fists with elation. He had the chance he had desired, to win back the esteem he had lost.

“I will hold you to that,” Handtaker murmured.

“Your trust will not be misplaced, commander,” Stannis declared. He expected that his life depended on it.

Handtaker did not further reply, but others were less restrained. “Commander, surely you don’t mean to follow this mad plan!” cried Tyleo Anastis. “No-one can get past the Braavosi fleet, despite the Sunsetlander’s bluster. Only the Volantene fleet would stand a chance, and they’re a thousand miles from here. It cannot be done, has never been done! Even the Valyrians trod lightly around the Queen of Cities!”

“I’m not sure of that,” said Bloodbeard, to Stannis’s shock. He had not thought that Philenio Zometemis had any fondness for him. Something of it must have shown on his face, for Captain Zometemis snorted and said, “Don’t think too much of it, Sunsetlander. But I was there at Nyrelos, Tyleo, when you were leading a detachment. I saw what the Sunsetlander did there. If he says he can get us past the Braavosi fleet… well, I won’t assume he can’t.”

Anastis looked straight at Handtaker. “Commander. Listen to me, please. This is insane. Do not throw this free company into a hopeless war upon a madman’s say-so.”

The silent struggle in the air grew backbreaking. Philenio Zometemis against Tyleo Anastis, Handtaker’s foremost captain against one of his oldest friends.

At last the commander spoke. “We may die,” Handtaker acknowledged. “But we may live. If we do, we will become rich beyond imagination.” His voice hardened. “And I did not acquire my reputation by ever, ever, ever forgiving any man who has betrayed me.”

With that, Stannis knew, I have him.

“So this is how I propose we get the gold that was promised to us,” Stannis said, his heart soaring. “We gather other free companies with a promise to share the loot. We sweep aside the remnants of the Sealord’s army. I smash the greatest navy in the world to broken beams and bloated bodies. And then—” a sudden smile, thin lips twisting like a knife— “we sack the Queen of Cities.”

Moonlight danced on the crystal waters of the Braavosi lagoon, the tallest spires of the Queen of Cities glittering in the distance. On the other side of the lagoon from here, he could see the head and shoulders of the Titan, nothing more. Specifically, the back of its head. For the Titan faced the sea whence a fleet of another Free City may have come, as it had been designed to; it was hence helpless to prevent assault from this direction.

Beside the shore a swarm of men had gathered, thick on the ground. Tents had sprouted up among them, and in the centre of their camp they had piled a vast number of rafts, cut from the green woods that grew in these fenlands—wet, hard to burn—and bound with hempen ropes. Cookfires burnt everywhere except around the rafts, a pattern of orange spots against the night. In this summer warmth, the fires’ heat made the camp stuffy. Around those fires pranced thousands upon thousands of sellswords. They were not armoured, except for those on guard duty, who kept watchful eyes around the camp. The heat was sweltering, and as they had crushed the Braavosi hosts themselves, they knew the lack of strength that remained at the disposal of the Sealord.

Among those oft-scarred swaggering men with weapons ever at the ready, there crept small stooped figures with their heads down. These men, women, girls and boys ran errands for the sellswords, handing out food and water, passing messages, cleaning armour, fletching arrows and so on—all those things that the sellswords deemed beneath their notice. Sometimes they were paid what was promised to them. ‘Camp followers’, these people were called, and they were unarmed and defenceless.

One of those was Perio Kavayn, who sat looking down, near a cookfire and next to a big, crude iron pot. The pot was filthy with grease, fat and pieces of charred meat that had stuck to the bottom. Perio had naught but a dirty cloth and some hot water to clean it. It was tough, tedious scrubbing that made his arms ache. He did not complain, though. Why would he? This was his life. It had always been his life. He had been born to this, son of a whor* and some unknown sellsword, and he had lived and grown to adulthood following armies around, knowing nothing else. He had always been under the tyranny of fear, knowing not to talk back to armed men, lest they take it as insolence.

A pair of sellswords wandered past him, deep in their cups. Perio outwardly paid them no heed, his face down, intent on his scrubbing. His ears worked fine, however, so he heard them anyway.

“I reckon it’s soon,” said one of them, a burly man with a bristly brown beard. “We got plenty o’ rafts now. What are they waiting for?”

“The fleet,” said the other, shorter and black-bearded. “The Sealord’s fleet’s still there. We gotta get past it.”

“They oughta told us how they goin’ do that,” said the first. “That irks me, y’know. ’T ain’t fair, only the high-ups know. I don’t like takin’ things on trust.”

The second sellsword shrugged. “The pay’s good,” he said, “or I’d be gone already. I don’t trust ’em, I’m no man’s fool. The way I sees it, if the Braavosi fleet’s gone, we’ll know. It’ll be hard to miss some’at like that. And if it isn’t… well, then, I ain’t gettin’ on a raft, an’ I don’t think no-one else will, neither.”

“Fair.”

Meanwhile, Perio’s hands found an ugly lump of blackened meat, stuck to the iron. Another one, he thought, with a sigh of despair. He dipped the cloth back in his bucket of hot water and shoved it over the lump, back and forth.

“D’you think they can really do it?” the brown-bearded sellsword asked.

“Dunno. I’d say no-one can, but…” He shuddered. “But you ’eard of the one they say is goin’ do it. They say he’s the prince of the Sunset Lands, banished by his brother, the king. A country where kings laugh as they take some of the most important men in the land and burn them alive, just ’cause they can. Some sick bastard murdered two babes from the highest family in the land an’ raped their mum with her babes’ blood on his hands, and no-one bothered to punish him for it. Not a slave woman, a princess—the sort of person who’d be safe from that, in any civilised land—and they did that anyway. No-one’s safe in the Sunset Lands, even the high an’ mighty; so if you ain’t born high, you’re even more f*cked than them. Sunsetlanders’ leaders have no restraint, they don’t leave anyone safe from their schemes, worse than the most cutthroat of magisters. Even the Dothraki aren’t as bad. They’ll stab you in the front, sure, but they won’t swear endless friendship, shake your one hand and stab you with the other like Sunsetlanders do to each other. The nastiest, cruellest, most sick, most corrupt bunch of barbarians in the whole wide world… and he did something so, so, so terrible, even they decided it was too much.”

“So ’e’s a sick f*cker,” said the other sellsword, looking vaguely green. “Why does that mean—”

“He’s more than that,” the tall black-haired sellsword insisted. “They say he killed an army once; they were just standin’ there, on dry land, and he made the river change its course and drown them all. A man annoyed him, once, and he turned him into a toad. He talks to ghosts, and they tell him where to find secret passes no-one else can see. In the Great Northern War he fought a whole army of Dothraki, just by hisself, and called white fire that killed damn near all of ’em. Only a few scattered and made it out alive to tell the tale.”

The brown-haired sellsword said, dubiously, “An’ you believe all that?”

“Some of it. I dunno what o’ that is true; but if it’s half; gods, if it’s half of half… If anyone can sink the Sealord’s fleet, it’s the Prince of Sunset.”

“If he’s that powerful,” said the shorter sellsword, “why don’t he done it already?”

“We need rafts, I suppose,” the taller sellsword said. “It ain’t do no-one any good to sink the Braavosi fleet if we can’t cross anyway.”

“And now we have the rafts.”

“Aye.”

“So it’s soon.”

“Aye,” the black-haired sellsword said solemnly. “I reckon it’s soon.”

The two sellswords passed out of earshot. Perio Kavayn did not pay heed to them. He had been at this camp of sellswords since long before it reached the lagoon of Braavos; he already knew all that they had to say. Perio did not wish to listen to those simple-minded swaggering fools. Why would he? No-one did.

No-one did.

Underneath the face of Perio Kavayn, a man who did not have a name watched and waited. Perio had worked like this for years, passing beneath notice as one of many servants following the camp; but the man who did not have a name had only recently arrived here. Perio lived, breathed, walked and talked as a man who had no interest in what he had just heard; but the man who did not have a name was exceedingly interested. He was alarmed, too. The two sellswords’ supposition, if correct, was not encouraging. He did not have a long time to act.

Perio kept his head down and diligently scrubbed his pot, just another faceless camp follower. Sellswords talked to one another, and an intruder would be noticed among them; but nobody, including those who gave him orders, paid much notice to Perio. He melded in seamlessly with the men and women in the service of the sellswords because he was not pretending to be himself; he really believed that was who he was. He was not pretending to be Perio. He was Perio.

The face taken from long-dead Perio Kavayn was earnest and honest, intent on finishing the task that had been assigned to him, while secret thoughts that left no impression on the surface circled in the underlying mind. The Faceless Man would have to act quickly, if the enemy were soon to strike. These sellswords could not be permitted to launch their attack. Fortunately, they were not a single free company. There were dozens of free companies here, dozens of feuding commanders who would doubtless wish to take leadership for themselves, held together by the commander of the largest of those free companies: the Company of the Cat.

That was it. That was the duty he had been hired for. That was the keystone. Kill Handtaker and the arch of this alliance would fall apart, every sellsword commander squabbling for the position. Then the sellsword host would splinter and the Braavosi people would be safe.

It was no easy task, but his order had been well-compensated. It had been expensive indeed, in gold and blood alike, for a desperate Sealord who truly loved his country. Anno Nusaris would not have the legacy he had prized; the Nusaris family line would not continue, any more. That had been the price—well, that, and the fact that the House of Black and White was now overflowing with coin.

That was the way of things. The Faceless Men did not kill men because those men were deserving of death, as decreed by some judge of good and evil. They killed men when the House of Black and White was paid.

Perio kept washing the dishes, while the man who did not have a name considered his course. Within the undistinguished folds of what looked like an ordinary servant’s garb were several secret compartments, containing some of the deadliest poisons known to man. He would have to select a fast-acting one, if the attack on Braavos were soon to proceed. Handtaker had to die quickly. But Aro Isattis had not got as far as he had by lack of vigilance; the commander of the Company of the Cat was a paranoid man. Doubtless the man who did not have a name could do his deed sooner if he were to corner and kill one of the men who prepared the commander’s food for him, then steal the face of that man, but that was not his way. The Faceless Men took a certain pride in that. They were hired killers, but unlike clumsy other orders, they were skilful hired killers. They did not kill people whom they were not paid to kill.

In times like this, that could be troublesome, for he could not kill Aro Isattis’s many guardsmen and servants. But he was the greatest of his order. He would find a way.

While the man who did not have a name plotted, Perio Kavayn worked innocently on his cleaning. When a dozen of the camp’s guardsmen walked near him—helmed, armed and armoured men who would spell doom for the man who did not have a name if they caught him—Perio placidly went on doing his dishes. It was one of the first lessons taught to an aspiring Faceless Man. Slink away from guardsmen, try to hide, act as though you are guilty, and you make your guilt far more obvious than you would if you stay calm. And why would Perio not be calm? He was just a servant. He had nothing to fear because he had nothing to hide.

The guardsmen passed him by, as several previous parties of guardsmen had. They walked straight past him without even slowing down. Perio did not look up to gawp, for he had spent most of his life as a servant to sellswords and he knew not to do anything that could be considered insolent when in the presence of armed men, else they might hit him, casually as another man might shoe a horse. He kept his head down, for fear of being hit, and went on cleaning the pot.

A low, cold voice: “Take him.”

The guardsmen spun around. Perio Kavayn was shocked, and in an instant he became the man who did not have a name; in another instant, the man who did not have a name understood that he had been found out; in another instant, his hands flew to cunningly concealed knives; in another instant, he drew them. The guardsmen were running towards him. In another instant he considered, then dismissed, the hope to flee; then his experienced hands were up and killing. One slid a knife between the joints of a guardsman’s armour, almost severing his arm; another shoved down a man’s visor and drove a knife into his face. At the same time, his legs spun and struck with a hard kick to one of the smaller, lighter guardsmen; the man cried out, lost his footing and knocked over a comrade…

No! A hard hand on his arm. He reached out with the other, swift as a striking snake, to cut it; but his aim for the joint between the gauntlet and the armour of the arm went off, and his knife clanged harmlessly against hard metal. That perplexed him for a fraction of a second. His aim was never off. Then he realised someone had grabbed his other arm.

The grip tightened, then his legs too, and he was immobile. Not dead, though. That surprised him. He breathed quickly, short sharp breaths like stabbing wounds, his heart thundering. The same was true of his opponents.

“Gods be good!” cursed one of the guardsmen, panting. They had been twelve to one, and four of the attackers lay on the ground, dead or elsewise out of the fight. “That was unnatural.”

The tallest of the guardsmen took off his helm, revealing a pale face with a curtain of night-black hair, thin lips and dark blue eyes. “You have done well, Marro,” said the Prince of Sunset—for surely it could be no other—in the same voice he had heard, as deep and frigid as the bottom of the sea. “Bind him.”

With thick unyielding rope they bound the arms and legs of the man who did not have a name.

“Now take him to my tent.”

They did. The armoured men—he guessed they were not truly on guard duty, despite their look—carried him through the camp, ever-watchful of the lethal skilled hands of the Faceless Man. They need not have bothered. From his training, he could tell almost immediately that his bindings were solid and that his hands could not reach far enough to shift the knots. Arm-movements could shift them, mayhaps, given time; but he suspected he did not have nearly that much time to live.

“See to it that we are not disturbed,” his captor said. “Then leave us.”

Unquestioning, the armoured men obeyed.

“You were a fool to believe you could pass unnoticed, facechanger,” the Sunsetlander said softly. “Your master should have sent a common thug. A warrior infused with sorcery is easy prey. Do you not know what I am?”

“A sorcerer,” said the Faceless Man.

“More than that. I am a greenseer. Skinchangers may only possess the mind of an animal that they know well; but my kind are not so limited. Long ago I lost the habit of keeping my mind wholly confined to this mortal shell. It is ever-roving, trailing all around my birth-self. My thoughts can delve into any beast I please, often many at the same time… and into men, too.”

The man who did not have a name knew he had been found out; but he reminded himself that he had no way of knowing how much of this was true. It helped to control his fear. “You reach into the minds of men?”

“Oh yes. Your face is unremarkable, but your mind… the sheer strangeness compared to other minds… the lack of sense-of-self, the lack of memory, the lack of rootedness, the deliberate destruction of all that you are, everything that defines you to yourself… to me it is like a fly buzzing around before I swat it. It is difficult not to sense you.” Those thin lips thinned further in disgust. “You’ve given up so much, facechanger. Do you even know your name?”

“We of the House of Black and White surrender our names along with the rest of our pasts,” said no-one. “One cannot be an impartial servant to Him of Many Faces while retaining a sense of self. It is a sacrifice that must be made, to serve a greater purpose.”

“Bah! I spit upon your sacrifice. To give up all that you are is not sacrifice, it is surrender, it is worse than death.” The ruthless Prince of Sunset seemed honestly appalled. “Every man, including the most wretched beggar the world has ever had, has his self. It is the only thing that not even a spiteful king can take from us. He knows who he is. He has memories. He has a past. He has a name.”

“It makes us worthy servants of the many-faced god,” the Faceless Man said, unable to tolerate his entire order being insulted by this monster. “It makes us more than merely men.”

“No, it makes you less than a man. You have deliberately eroded your own sense of self, to help you to pretend to be someone else. You are worse than mutilated; you are making yourself into nothing. I would sooner die.”

“Did you bring me here solely to hear your insults?”

“No. I brought you here because you were an unforeseen impediment. You want my commander dead.”

The Faceless Man spoke softly. “And you do not?”

There was a long pause.

“I am tempted,” the Sunsetlander admitted. “But no. For all that he has done to me, he is my commander and I owe him loyalty so long as my contract is not done. And if you kill him now, I will never take my revenge upon the Braavosi scum who have cheated me.”

Suddenly, the man who did not have a name understood. It is surrender, it is worse than death… you are making yourself into nothing. I would sooner die… “You mean to kill me.”

“No,” the Sunsetlander said. “I thought of it. I intended it, even, when I set out to catch you. But it has occurred to me that there is a way for you to find a part in my plans, lessening the risk to myself.”

“Your purpose is to take revenge on Braavos, is it not?” said the man who did not have a name.

“It is.”

“Then I will never serve your purpose.”

“You seem to believe you can stop me,” said the sorcerer, lips twisting. “You will do as I desire because I desire it. I am the storm that shakes the world of men, and you are a leaf in my thrall.”

“I would not—” said the Faceless Man, and then he understood. “No. No. No, no, no—”

“Oh yes,” the Prince of Sunset murmured. “You have worn many identities, have you not? Consider wearing just—one—more—”

And the thoughts came streaming into his mind as if they were his own:

I am Stannis Baratheon, of Storm’s End. I was born to the line of the storm, and now I come to Braavos to claim my vengeance.

I am not Stannis Baratheon, he thought. I am Perio Kavayn—

But no. I know I am not Perio Kavayn. That was a mask I wore. Perio Kavayn is a servant, and I am not a servant.

That is true, gods help me, it is true…

I was not born to the line of the storm. I am not Baratheon. I do not know Storm’s End.

How do I know that? I do not know where I was born. Where was I born?

It had been years since he had even wondered; but he could not help but think of it. I do not know where I was born. I do not remember.

So perhaps I was born in Storm’s End, to the line of the storm, that is House Baratheon. I was not born ‘no-one’. No-one is. The face of ‘no-one’, the Faceless Man, is a lie, just another false face I have worn.

Could it be?

No! You are trying to trick me! Outrage and fear rose in his thoughts. I am not you. I am not an extension of your will. I am my own person.

You? What you? There is no you here. There is only myself.

That you— he thought, thinking of the face of Stannis Baratheon. He looked up. He could see no other face. In the tent there was only himself. Terrified that his other-thoughts might be right, terrified of what that might mean, he closed his eyes.

That is my face, not a false one. I know that Perio Kavayn’s face is not the one I was born with; I remember donning it for the first time. It is just another false face I have worn.

He did, but—

You! You! You are not me! I am a Faceless Man! I am no-one!

Yes, said the whisper, but no-one is born as no-one. What was I, before I was no-one? Am I starting to remember?

And with horror he realised that he was. Memories filled his mind of a past that was not his own. His childhood in Storm’s End; Lord Steffon’s bearing, proud and distant; Robert, to be envied and resented, yet served; Lady Cassana Baratheon, close and kind and warm, whom he had loved with all his heart. His lord father, and his lady mother, and little Renly whom he had promised to protect. He had killed them all, and the grief and shame that he felt now were overpowering emotions, far stronger than anything he recalled from his other memories, filling his thoughts—

No. A feeling of panic joined the grief, warred with it. They are not my memories! That is not me! That is not me!

I am Stannis Baratheon. I was born and reared by the line of the storm; I am feeder of storms, caller of storms, child of the stormlands. Storm’s End is my home, though I have not been there for a long time. I may have wished to be no-one, to have forgotten, but I was not born no-one. No-one was. Who else could I be?

I— He tried to find an answer. I am a man of Braavos.

I have been to Braavos. I have dwelt there, for a time. But I hate it now, and I have come to take my vengeance.

I do not hate Braavos!

But the hatred filled his thoughts, like a river flooding its banks with bitterness and resentment. How dare they, how dare they, those upjumped merchant scum who cheated me, I will give them punishment— The surge of hatred overwhelmed the milder emotions that he had allowed to himself as a servant of the many-faced god. He tried not to feel it, but he could not not feel it; it was everywhere; it was so, so strong.

I do not hate Braavos! But he felt the hatred in his mind. Fear. Is that a lie?

It is a lie. The thought came with absolute confidence. I know what I am. I am Stannis Baratheon. I am myself, and I remember my name.

He scrabbled for a retort. I am a Faceless Man, of the House of Black and White. I serve Him of Many Faces.

Hmm? That is not a self. That is an occupation. Contempt. I am no servant. I have been forced to act as a servant, in order to obtain the coin to feed myself, but I know what I truly am. I am Stannis Baratheon, and I am the storm, and all who look upon me should know the touch of terror.

The memories flashed across his mind once more. The warmth of his mother’s hugs, Lady Cassana’s smile, little Renly looking up at him with an expression of hope. And then he was the storm. His fingers were the currents of the air, stirring the sea into a frenzy, and he watched and laughed with glee as the Reachmen whom he hated, hated, hated, drowned and screamed, their ships torn to splinters by the storm that had descended upon them.

That is not me. These are not my thoughts, they are someone else’s. I am not the storm. I am not the storm.

I am the storm. Calm. Confident. Thinking with perfect conviction. I am Stannis Baratheon. Whatever may have befallen me, I know who I am. I know my name.

I cannot be. I am—

What?

What was he?

It was as if a great chasm had opened before him. He clutched at the edges of the pit, black and deep and yawning. I do not know my past. I do not know who I was. I do not know who I will be.

I was the storm. I will be the storm. I am the storm.

I am not the storm. Desperation. He was drowning in the dark. I am someone else. I am not Stannis Baratheon. I cannot be, I cannot be.

Is it so hard to believe? Amusem*nt. Triumph. I was made to forget my past. But I know what it is, now. That is my past. I remember.

Not my past. Not my memories. It is not I who remember. I am not—

I am. I am Stannis Baratheon. I am the one who was born to the storm, reared by the storm, called the storm, fed the storm, was the storm. I am the storm that shakes the world of men, and I do not need to wear false faces.

It is not a false face. It is a true face—

But it was not. He had forgotten. And his own memory of when he had put on that false face came rising up like a sea monster from the depths of the pit, flung straight at him.

I think I do not know my true face. For a time, I did not. But now I do. This is my true face. Pale, high cheekbones, thin lips, black hair, dark blue eyes. I have only forgotten.

It cannot be. It cannot be.

It is.

I am not Stannis Baratheon.

I am Stannis Baratheon. Absolute confidence. There was no room for doubt. I am the storm. I am the storm. I am the storm. I am the storm. I am the storm.

I am not the storm. Panic. Terror. A thought, unbidden, against the patterns of thought that the many-faced god’s servants had drilled into him: But then what am I? Where was I born?

In Storm’s End. Triumph. I know. I know. Do not be afraid.

I cannot be the storm. I am not the storm.

I am the storm.

Fear—fear such that he had not known in a lifetime. He was losing everything.

Or gaining it?

Losing it!

He searched that black pit. It was if there was something he once knew, but he had lost it, somewhere, sometime. On purpose. He could not find it. He did not even know what it was, and that terrified him more than he could describe.

I am not the storm.

I am not the storm.

I am not the storm.

I am not the storm.

Desperation. Must work. Must.

I am not the storm.

I am not the storm.

I am not the storm.

I am not the storm.

I am not…

I am not…

I am not…

I am not…

I am not…

I am the storm.

Certainty settled about him like a burial-shroud. In the same single instant, the corners of two mouths twitched upward into small, self-satisfied smiles.

Stannis Baratheon opened his eyes.

“You have fought,” the Braavosi envoy said, “successfully. You have swept hosts of the defeated and the diminished from the field. But you must surely understand that you can go no further. The wooden walls of Braavos are impenetrable. Your ravaging of the outlying villages is a nuisance, not a threat to us. Yet you are fortunate men. For, from the kindness of his heart towards the subjects you have butchered, His Excellency the Sealord is prepared to offer you fair terms, if you will hear them.”

“I am so glad that we can resolve this like civilised men, Magister Domaryen,” said Handtaker, wearing a wide, sharklike smile. The sellsword commanders and captains gathered around him exchanged glances with each other and muttered.

“Indeed,” said Qarro Domaryen of Braavos, relaxing. The disapproval of the others was concerning, but Anno and Calido had told him that the other free companies here were smaller and of less repute. They would not dare to act alone. The Company of the Cat was the one that really mattered, and the Company of the Cat was ruled by Handtaker with an iron fist. “It should, of course, be understood that His Excellency would have you leave his lands and cease to rape, kill and plunder on the soil of Braavos.”

“Oh, of course,” said Handtaker politely. “We would not wish any unnecessary unpleasantness.”

“In return, His Excellency offers you these terms—”

“I’m sorry. When did you get the idea that you would be deciding terms?”

Qarro blinked. “Lord Handtaker—”

“These are my terms,” Handtaker said. “I demand that Braavos will give us all of the sum of gold that we were promised, and then ten times that, in compensation for the Sealord’s treachery. We had to make war upon your city to take what we should have been freely given. Actions have consequences, magister, treason most especially.”

“Ten times?” Qarro erupted, horrified.

“Eleven, actually,” said Handtaker, “and I am not done.”

One could have heard a pin drop. Distantly the cries of seagulls touched Qarro’s ears. Speaking in the silence, Handtaker’s voice, quieter than before, seemed to fill the world in its soft solemnity.

“I want Anno Nusaris,” Handtaker said, menace pouring off his tongue and murder written on his face. “I want his brothers. I want his sisters. I want his father and his mother. I want his children and his wife. I want his uncles, his aunts and his cousins. I want his father’s and mother’s cousins, his grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ cousins. I want the descendants of them all. And I want every man, woman and child bearing the Nusaris name in the whole Free City. I demand all of them delivered alive into my custody, so that no Sealord of Braavos will ever again think to deny sellswords our wages after we have fought and bled for him.”

The sellsword captains roared their approval, shattering that silence pikes on the ground. “Handtaker! Handtaker! Handtaker!”

Qarro was quivering. When the throng of voices had faded enough, he cried, “His Excellency will never consent to such harsh terms!”

“I do not expect him to. I expect the magisters of Braavos to consent to my terms, if they know what is good for them. If they refuse, I’ll murder every single one when this city has fallen.”

“You madman, you surely know they never will. They know as well as you do: Braavos cannot be taken by storm.”

The smile that answered him was as clear and bright as the golden-lit noon sky. “How sure are you of that?”

That night was a misty one in much of the lagoon of Braavos. The mist was not too thick, for the most part; one could see through it, albeit hazily, like gazing through a dirty glass. For the most part. Some small places where the mist had gathered were too clouded for the orange glare of the watchfires to pierce.

It could not hide an army. It could hide a man.

Stannis Baratheon stood silent at a sail, black against the midnight sky. His arms were folded, for he did not row the rough-hewn wooden raft beneath his feet; a cold wind, shifting with his will, bore him onward. Sometimes he came within a few hundred feet of a great warship, painted purple with Braavosi dye. Yet he was surrounded by a cloud of thick white mist, which itself was concealed by a much larger cloud of thinner mist. They were blind to him. His man’s eyes were just as blind, but that was not much hindrance to a greenseer. One of his golden eagle companions flew above him, a magnificent adult female, espying warships and fishing boats to be avoided with his superb sharp eyes.

The crude raft glided through the lagoon with eerie, unnatural serenity. The waters scarcely rippled as it went. It approached Braavos of the Hundred Isles from the east, sailing disdainfully straight past a watchtower, until it came up to a bridge over the Green Canal, on one of the largest, most built up islands near the centre of the city. It was an outlying bridge, far from the greatest even of those over this canal. That suited Stannis well enough. The wind that was himself turned in seconds from a galelike gust that pushed the sail to its limits—despite being unnoticeable to the rest of the lagoon—to perfect stillness. The sail drooped. There was not the slightest flutter.

In that stillness, Stannis stepped off the raft onto Braavosi soil with easy grace. He felt the wet earth beneath his feet and triumph welled up within him; his customary scowl grew slightly less woeful on unfamiliar features. He had had his doubts. He now knew that he should not have done. These fools, ignorant and devoid of true power, were not and never had been strong enough to thwart him.

Quickly he dismantled the sail from the raft. He folded the sail, then heaved them both up to the underside of the great bridge, careless of his boots in the water. He wedged the raft and its bundle of sailcloth beneath the bridge, such that it could only be seen by someone below it looking upward. No longer needing the mist and the wind, he withdrew his will from the power that sustained them, and they fell out of his conscious thought. They still existed, but without the driving force of a warlock’s will behind them they became no more than natural.

Irritatingly, he felt a twinge of disturbance as he became no longer so intent on driving the mist and the wind. A small scared voice—or a bundle of concepts, rather, for even to call it a voice was an exaggeration—chanted unceasing in the back of his thoughts, a gibbering nonsense that he could not entirely dismiss.

I am not, it pleaded, over and over again, I am not, I am not, I am not, I am not…

It did not even know what it was not. It did not know that that meant Stannis Baratheon. It only had the vague, desperate conception that there was something it was not meant to be.

Stannis ignored it. He had no time to waste dealing with the last scattered bloody chunks of a hideously wounded mind that he had put out of its misery.

Wearing the face that the facechanger must have stolen some number of years ago, Stannis strode out into the empty night. The darkness was near total. There were no watchtowers here, well past the outer boundary of the Queen of Cities. In those sombre silent streets, a stranger stalked freely; none came to stop him. The arrogance of it! Truly the Braavosi behave like a folk who have never feared to be conquered.

They were fools indeed, if they did not fear what walked in the night.

Stannis stayed away from the barge-lights on the canals, few as they were, and the lamps that hung from the large straight roads. Instead he walked through twisting alleys that meandered on their way. His own stride was anything but meandering; albeit on shorter legs than he remembered, he came with swift certain purpose. His eagles looked down on him from above, but he did not need them now to know these streets like the back of his hand. Amidst the lazy languor of the Queen of Cities, the killer passed like a fleeting shadow cast by the flicker of a candleflame.

Then, in passing, he saw an iron-barred fence with prettily forged dolphin decorations, and grey stone walls with red wood balconies. The sight of it stabbed his face with shards of broken memory. He knew this place, and at first he did not know why he knew it, but then he knew that he had lived here once, half a dozen years and half a lifetime ago.

He stopped.

Hesitant, almost afraid, Stannis turned from his path and went up to the gate.

The house was doubtless home to some other man or family now. His servants were gone, long dismissed. They had served well enough; he h.oped they had found other employment by now. This place is not mine any more. It does not matter to me any more.

For some reason, he found himself laying a hand gently on a fencepost.

The low wrought iron fence would not have stopped a thief who was good at climbing, let alone a true threat, and yet somehow it was strangely charming in its powerlessness. It had been a long time since he had slept as he had slept there, feeling safe at night.

He knew not whether that was an aspect of the house or an aspect of the man who he had been.

Stannis wondered what his younger self who had settled here would have thought to see him now. In ways they were similar. That young man had already forsaken the foolish oath that he had taken as a boy, swearing not to use his magic just because of failures that were the crow’s, not his. He had understood that he had to take a path alone, defying the Faith’s prohibition of witchcraft and yet also defying the three-eyed crow, with its absurd pronouncements and its strict limits on the practice of his power. But he had not gone as far along that path as the older Stannis had.

The Stannis who had first set foot in his house had been a pitiable, self-pitying exile who spent most of most days in the form of eagles gazing mournfully down at lands he knew he would never be able to return to. That weak gaunt figure had been so busy brooding over what he had lost due to the caprice of his useless, ungrateful brother Robert that he had not even fed himself. He had been a shame to House Baratheon; Stannis saw that clearly now. And yet, in some sense, Stannis the half-starved exile had been more a Baratheon of Storm’s End than Stannis himself was. The exile had not yet delved into lost scrolls, ruins and ancient temples to enhance his power with their sorcerous secrets. He had not waded in the blood of hundreds of enemy prisoners, sacrificed in cold blood to wash away a horde of foes. He had not razed villages to the ground and overseen rapes and murders. He had not encountered all the unacceptable unbreakable orders and petty cruelties that came with service to Handtaker.

Gods, he had been so young.

The older Stannis knew better. The world was cruel, and only the cruel could survive it. Mayhaps he would have liked not to do what he had had to do, not to become what he had had to become… but he had had no choice in the matter. No choice at all. None! Only men blessed with good fortune, like his even younger self before Robert had banished him, had the luxury of avoiding hard choices. Unfortunate men had to take different paths. Stannis had had to sign up with one or another of the free companies, so that he could be paid, to eat, and for all Handtaker’s viciousness he did not believe that other sellsword commanders were much kinder. He had needed the coin.

There was nothing else he could have done, he knew. And even in spite of all this, a part of him wondered whether his younger self would have been ashamed of him.

Angrily Stannis withdrew his hand as if it had been stung and turned his back on the old house that a bitter young fool had once dwelt in. It is nothing to me. There was work yet to be done; he should not have tarried to return here. What was dead was dead. What was past was past. It should be left dead and unremembered.

Stannis walked on past the west end of the Green Canal. He ignored the Palace of Truth to his left, where the Braavosi would gather on the days of their silly choosings. He instead proceeded to the more northerly side of the city, a long brisk walk, and asked for passage on a ship to the Isle of the Gods.

There were hundreds of people coming to pray even at this ungodly hour, especially with an enemy army camping on the shore of the lagoon. Refugees from the surrounding towns and villages had filled the great Free City, and the folk of the city itself often had friends and loved ones outside. Indeed, the Isle of the Gods was one of the least suspicious places for a man awake at this midnight hour to be.

Therefore Stannis had no trouble obtaining passage on a boat to the Isle of the Gods. He came with a dozen other folk, women mostly, and, he suspected, likely widows. Some approached him with meaningless chatter. He did not reply, and they soon learnt to leave the little silent man alone. Stannis would never have drawn so little notice in his birth-self, he knew; the body of long-dead Perio Kavayn that the facechangers had stolen drew far fewer eyes than the broad, towering body of a Baratheon.

He stepped off the boat at the greatest dock, for the Temple of the Moonsingers. It was a great domed thing of white marble and silvery metal, dwarfing the Great Sept of Baelor as a giant to a grumpkin. Most of the passengers left there, so Stannis made himself no exception. Then, when the others entered by the immense statues of moon-maidens, he slipped away.

This small-limbed body was well-suited to sneaking. Doubtless the facechangers had chosen it for that purpose. Beneath notice, like a ghost in the night, Stannis flitted from temple to temple, seeing all but paying homage towards none. He passed a stout red sandstone fortress with a dozen fires burning, which he knew to be the Braavosi temple of R’hllor the Lord of Light. He had no interest in it. Cheap tricksters, pretenders grasping at the outer threads of the mantle of power and imagining it means they are blessed by the one true god. He passed the Sept-Beyond-the-Sea, too, and permitted himself to spit in its direction. Curse you, Seven Who Are Not. You should not have let me do what I did. You should have been real. He passed even the Warren, home to altars and statues for the gods whose congregations were too poor to afford a temple of proper magnificence, and he did not turn in.

He turned in when he saw a very familiar pair of doors, on a much smaller temple. One was wrought of weirwood, one ebony—one white, one black.

The facechanger’s memories were open to him, not merely like a book to be read but as if they were what he himself remembered. He walked up to the doors. He sensed the magic that dwelt in them, which he had never done in all his memories of entering and leaving through this door a thousand times before.

A pass-phrase enchantment, he thought. How quaint. It occurred to him to destroy it and walk in on his own terms. Certainly he was capable of that. But there was no need, and this way would make it easier to play along.

Stannis spoke in High Valyrian. “Valar morghulis.”

The doors swung open.

Inside the House of Black and White it was very dark, with only faint candles to show the way. Stannis’s eyes fitted easily to the low light and his ears and nose helped where his eyes could not. To this host body, those skills were so well known that they had become almost instinct.

A small girl in a black-and-white robe appeared, soon, to offer him refreshment. He brushed her away. She was no true girl, he knew; she was a woman grown, an initiate here. He had seen her many times before.

Shortly later, a man in a matching robe approached from a passage that opened in the wall behind him. Stannis turned to see him come. His memories told him it amused the facechangers to play the game of sneaking up on each other. It did not amuse Stannis. His thoughts were ever reaching out beyond his mortal shell; with their minds blazing like beacons, it was no game to him.

Yet he saw the face beneath the man’s cowl, elderly, friendly and with a pleasant smile. He knew that face. His memories told him instantly, and something within him felt the tiniest, most insubstantial flicker of hope.

help me help me help me help me help me

“Brother,” he said, bowing respectfully to the eldest facechanger of the House of Black and White, skilful and dangerous. The facechangers had no lord or commander, yet this one was held in great respect.

“You have arrived early, brother,” the old facechanger observed.

“I have,” said the one who was not no-one, simply.

“Were you successful?”

“I was.”

“That is quicker than I expected,” said the smiling old man. “You have done well, brother. I must confess I thought a man like Aro Isattis would be more trouble to bring the gift to.”

“Nothing more than a man. All men must die.” He put a dagger through the old man’s neck.

Horror. Misery. Guilt that could have crushed a mountain. no no no no no no no no no

Stannis whispered in the ear of the dying man, “Including you.”

He yanked the knife free.

The eldest of the facechangers fell boneless to the floor as Stannis stared down at the woman in the shape of a little girl. She was frozen in shock and horror, feet rooted to the ground. A quick perusal of her thoughts—open to him, easy prey—led him to understand that a servant of their ‘many-faced god’ had never turned against them before.

When she saw him take two steps towards her, though, she turned to run. She must have known she was outmatched; he, or rather his host, was a full facechanger and she was only an initiate. Instants later she lay dead on the floor… but an instant before that, she started to scream.

Cursing, Stannis ran on, extending his thoughts to perceive the bizarre self-mutilated minds of those who called themselves the Faceless Men. With ease born of long memory, he loped through the House of Black and White, knowing exactly where to find his prey.

It was scarce past midnight. The facechangers were barely getting up, bleary-eyed, in a place that they had believed to be their one sole place of safety. The first he found after the two victims in the entrance hall was almost in his sleep. He ran into the bedchamber of the second, dagger glistening with blood, legs pounding.

“Brother?” the second facechanger said with confusion, recognising Perio Kavayn’s stolen face on the man bounding towards him. “What—”

Dagger. Throat.

The little voice was sobbing. not real not real not real not real not real want to wake up want to wake up want to wake up

Be silent!

It did nothing, of course. The few small remaining shards of the possessed facechanger’s consciousness were too gone to understand the thought-command even if they could perceive it. Only a few reflexes, word-associations and instincts were left, devoid of complex thought.

His possessed facechanger near-leapt out of the chamber to rush at the next victim. To Stannis all of this felt new, but to his host body it was natural, honed by practising for years and years. The killings were swift and without mercy, bounding from one bedchamber to the next. The journeys were quick. He knew exactly where to go, and the House of Black and White was no large temple.

The fourth victim was the first to be armed and dressed, but still not out of his bedchamber. Stannis rushed in. “Brother, there’s an army, you have to help, I’ve killed some of them, come with me—”

“I’m with you, brother—”

Dagger. Throat.

The small soft weeping voice in his head rose into a soundless scream.

Stannis paid it no attention. Truth be told, this was less distracting than when it was capable enough to form coherent thoughts.

The next few facechangers were out of their rooms. Stannis emerged into a grand room in the centre of the temple, with a big black pool lit by dim candles at its sides, with alcoves for the dying and the dead.

It was no time for stealth. Cold-eyed, dripping blood of which none was his own, he turned to four facechangers in their black-and-white robes. “Stand and fight me if you dare, arrogant fools. You call yourselves servants of Death. Now it is time to die.”

“You are not our brother.” This from a woman. Hers was an old woman’s face, wrinkled, though that meant nothing. “Who are you?”

“I am the storm that is coming for you.”

I am not I am not I am not I am not I am not

All four of the facechangers charged at Stannis, rushing to circle around him and closing in, near to him and to each other. He did not fight back. He could not. There were too many. Instead, he threw himself at the mind of the leading facechanger.

If what he had done to the facechanger he now possessed was a slicing knife, this was a warhammer. There was not the slightest trace of subtlety to it; he simply flung his thoughts, self and memories into the mind of the facechanger foremost in the charge against him. She threw back her head and screamed, screamed like he had never heard anyone scream, screamed long and loud and high as glass that was as broken as her self was. Her mind took the brunt of the onslaught and struggled to reconcile the new wave of memories with what she already knew, found a gap where her own past should have been due to the facechangers’ wilful wounding of their own sense of self, shoved it in… but there was too much, too much, too much self-that-was-not-herself, clashing with herself, too much coming much too fast…

For a few crucial moments, the leading facechanger had no idea who or what she was, wrestling with the deluge of thoughts he had shoved violently into her head. In that time she tripped, losing her concentration, and tumbled to the floor. In doing so, she hit over one of her fellows, on the side she fell. It left him shaky and trying to recover his balance.

Stannis reached out with his thoughts and lashed again. He had not moved a muscle.

Another facechanger, a tall squinting man, howled his agony to the heavens as he was struck by a mental assault as careful as being trampled by an elephant. The blow tore the integrity of his mind to ribbons, turning it to a morass of contradicting beliefs and thoughts that refused to accept one another as consistent. It had none of the precision of the well-tailored mask that he had forced onto the face of his current facechanger host in order to enable this possession, but it did not need to. All it needed was to make the attacking facechanger briefly lose his concentration, and it was more than enough for that. The squinting man lost all control of hands and feet and he collapsed. The facechangers were very close to each other now, and it was too much for the one who had come close to losing his footing before; the hard impact of his brother’s body made him lose his balance and fall to the ground.

Three out of four facechangers had stumbled. Stannis leapt at the last with all the skill that his stolen host-body had, knives in both hands, and after a short fight it was over. He wasted no time in cutting the throats of the remaining facechangers while they were still on the floor.

There were some facechangers who tried to escape, afterwards. Many were initiates, easily cut down. Some were not; he only found two of those. He went after them first.

Stannis tracked down the last of the facechangers in a tunnel that led out of the House of Black and White. It should have been a secret, but there was not a single secret passage in the temple that Stannis did not know. The facechangers trusted each other too much. They had no lord, like sensible folk; they deemed each other equals; and so there was no one of them who was permitted to know secrets that the others did not. So the loss of a single one of their number sufficed to lose them everything.

There was a fight. It was short. The last of the self-proclaimed Faceless Men lay bleeding in a cramped dank tunnel in the dark, his dagger lost and half of his hand with it.

“Why are you doing this?” the facechanger sobbed. “You were one of us! Why, brother, why, what did we ever do to you?”

“Your order tried to thwart my vengeance. You made yourselves my enemies,” said Stannis. He paused, considering. “My brother Robert forgave his enemies.”

Stannis saw the hope blaze suddenly in the facechanger’s eyes. So they do wish not to die. They are not as inhuman as they want to be. “Then forgive us, please—”

“I do not make Robert’s mistakes.”

The blood went everywhere. He scarcely noticed. It did not make much of a difference now.

Stannis Baratheon strode out of the House of Black and White with dozens of dead bodies behind him. Most were men. Some were women. They were old, young, healthy, diseased, fat, thin, Braavosi, foreign, and any of a dozen other things. None were spared. The corpses littered the floor like autumn leaves.

He stepped over them, as carelessly as if leaves were all that they were, and went onward. By the time anyone visited the House of Black and White in the morning, he would be long gone.

There was duty to be done.

With cleaned hands and freshly changed clothes, Stannis hired another boat to take him back from his evening’s prayers. He soon landed, then made his way by foot along the waterside, westward, heading for the Canal of Heroes.

The Canal of Heroes was a wealthy area, replete with statues of past Sealords and the manses of magisters and Iron Bank keyholders. Stannis was not dressed such as to blend in with such surroundings. But it was dark tonight, and at this hour of the morning, even fewer people were awake than there were at midnight. There were not many men or women walking the streets to disturb him.

A sleek shadow crept along the canal-side, avoiding the bright lights of barges wandering the lagoon on the rare occasions that they ever came. It hid itself in alleys and behind the corners of buildings, and with eagle eyes it watched from above, and it waited.

Four armed guardsmen in purple uniforms, badged with the Titan of Braavos, came walking through the street on patrol, as they had done a thousand times before. They chattered with each other as they turned a corner.

The killer sprang into motion. The guardsmen had no time to react; they scarcely knew he was here before he was upon them. He was small and unarmoured, but he moved blindingly fast, and by the time two of them had drawn their weapons, the other two were already dead. Seconds later, so were the remaining two. He felt no guilt for that. The facechangers held it a dishonour to kill any man other than the one whom they had been paid to kill, Stannis’s host’s memories taught him. For them to break that custom was unheard of. But in Stannis’s regard the City Guard were men-at-arms in service of the enemy, so there was nothing wrong with killing them in war.

Stannis dragged one corpse into the shadow of a tall building whose palatial windows were not on that side. With the efficiency of a man who had done this many times before, he stripped the most intact uniform from its late wearer, and he took out a knife and started slicing.

Soon he held the skinned face of the guardsman in his hands.

The remainder of the faceless corpse was shoved into the water. Shuddering—for though his possessed host’s memories held this to be common, the greater part of his self was repulsed—he treated the skin with a variety of concoctions that his possessed facechanger’s memories had told him to take from the House of Black and White, each more vile than the last. By the end of it, the man’s skin had turned into something that felt oddly like leather. Then he downed a cup of a drink which tasted queerly like lemon juice, cut his face, and let his blood mix with cold dead flesh to make it his own.

Stannis looked up at the sky and looked down at himself through an eagle’s eyes. His face certainly looked like that of the Braavosi guardsman he had killed. He ran his fingers along the outline of the face. The match between sight and feel was perfect. He felt every bone and muscle. The facechangers’ way worked more thoroughly than the weaving of light and shadows that he was more accustomed to, he had to admit, though he still considered it dreadfully inelegant.

After that, a bleeding watchman of the City Guard of Braavos came running to his captain to warn him of a matter that must be discussed in person—a matter implied to be related to treachery.

Thump. Thump.

The feet of the City Guard struck the ground in perfect unison.

Thump. Thump.

They marched over neat stone roads towards the glittering spires that rose up ahead.

Thump. Thump.

A man with an extravagant moustache stood among them. All of them knew him well. They saw the face of Calido Prestayn, nephew of Banero Prestayn whom Ferrego Antaryon had defeated in the previous contest to be Sealord, and Anno Nusaris’s appointed High Captain of the City Guard.

“It’s the High Captain! Present arms!”

The guardsmen at the front of the Sealord’s Palace stood to attention. He gave them a gruff few words of assent, and of course they let him past.

Stannis Baratheon had to stop himself from smiling.

‘Prestayn’ and his escort were led up marble staircases and through great halls of tapestries and elaborate chandeliers. Stannis espied them with a jolt of resentment. He wondered how the Braavosi had ever been able to justify to themselves not paying the sellswords who had fought for them. From the look of it, he thought, selling the unnecessary luxuries in the Sealord’s Palace alone would have been enough for much of it.

At length they drew near to a great white door, wrought of a single shining piece of white marble. This was guarded by more than any of the others—dozens of men with the hard stare of the battle-tested, well-armoured and ready for a fight. They were too many to confront, even for him.

The man who loathed their master walked straight up to them anyway, bold as brass, and said, “High Captain Calido Prestayn to see His Excellency the Sealord.”

A tired voice called from inside. “Let him in.”

The men of the City Guard parted. He heard the click of a key in the lock from the inside. And for the first time since the reception in the Sealord’s Palace more than a year ago, Stannis Baratheon laid eyes upon Anno Nusaris, the Sealord of Braavos.

He was struck at once by the difference. The dark-haired, fashionably clad, youthful magister with an excitable bearing and a face alight with passion had become an older man with a lined face and hair streaked with grey, dressed in even more splendid robes, who walked stooped as if there were a great weight on his back.

“Calido,” Nusaris said. “What word do you have for me?”

“Your Excellency, I believe it would be better kept between us.”

Nusaris understood. Not doubting his old political ally for a moment, he gave a wave of his hand to the more than a dozen men keeping a wary eye on them. “You may go.”

The guardsmen stepped out, bearing Stannis’s fears with them.

Once the door was locked, Stannis and the Sealord proceeded into the latter’s personal chambers. The rooms were cavernous, dwarfing the chambers of the Lord of Storm’s End, and every surface shone with opulence: the walls teeming with exquisite tapestries, the ceilings bright with candelabras, the floor colourful with carpets that dazzled the eye. Strangely, in one patch of the marble floor the carpets had been removed, as if to clear the way for something. Wary of a trap, Stannis did not step on there. Elsewise he paid it little heed in his elation.

“Very well, then,” Nusaris said. “What is it, to come at this hour?”

“Recently, I was approached by a Faceless Man of the House of Black and White.”

The Sealord inhaled sharply. “I see. Am I to take it, then, that it is done?”

“You are not,” said Stannis. “It hasn’t been done. Handtaker is still alive.”

Anno Nusaris looked stunned. “The Faceless Men do not fail.”

“Apparently, they do.”

“Oh Moon above I need a drink.” Nusaris tottered over to his bed, almost a hundred feet away. He almost flung himself down on it, next to the bedside window. He poured two glasses, one for ‘Calido’, one for himself. “They should have told us. They demanded so much—so much. Coin that could have helped so many people. And—from me—” He choked. “I’m so sorry. Gods, I shouldn’t have believed the stories about them, I shouldn’t have given them so much of the wealth of the city when the people need it so desperately.”

“No, you shouldn’t have,” Stannis agreed, unsympathetic. Nusaris’s eyes flashed with anger, though the Sealord said naught of it.

“Well, then, Calido, how did it happen?”

“Their killer met a sorcerer called Stannis Baratheon. They have magic, perhaps, to help them kill so easily, but only a little, only one trick, one droplet in the ocean that is power. They met someone better than them at their own game.”

Nusaris was looking up at him with widening eyes. Belatedly, Stannis realised that the real Calido Prestayn would not have spoken like that.

It did not matter. Deception and charm had never been his greatest talents in any case.

He surged forward, knife in hand. Nusaris tried to cry out, but Stannis shoved a hand over his mouth. The Sealord drew a common eating-knife; Stannis knocked it from his hand with disdainful ease and shoved Nusaris himself to his own floor.

“You shouldn’t have tried to cheat us,” Stannis hissed, while the Sealord of Braavos struggled beneath him. “You shouldn’t have broken your vow to us. I cannot abide oathbreakers. A greedy, grasping, upjumped merchant is all that you magisters are, no matter how oft you pretend to be gentlemen. Braavos might know nothing of the sort, but in my land, when greedy merchants steal from their lords, we—do—them—justice.”

He brought the knife down.

Anno Nusaris, Sealord of Braavos, head of what used to be one of the most powerful countries in the world, screamed a high-pitched shaking scream that echoed through his cavernous chambers. There were bangs on the door from the men of the City Guard. Stannis had taken one hand from the Sealord’s mouth and was now holding down the Sealord’s hand with that one hand, while the other—the other—

—the other chopped.

A finger fell from the Sealord’s hand. Stannis wore a deep scowl as Anno Nusaris screamed. “Know what you are,” he snarled. “This is your rightful place. This is your punishment.”

The Sealord was wailing at his mutilation. Stannis chopped off another finger with a heavy-handed slash of the knife. The doors gave way before the guardsmen, and they ran in… but it was an immense set of rooms, due to the absurdly luxurious Sealord’s chambers. That still left them hundreds of yards away.

Stannis chopped thrice more, causing Nusaris to redouble his screams. He looked up. The guards were getting closer. “That was for the theft, but you are worse than a thief. This is for the betrayal of the men who died for you.”

He drove the knife into Anno Nusaris’s heart. The Sealord went still.

Stannis stood, still at the Sealord’s bedside, as the enraged guardsmen raced towards him. “Good riddance,” he said, spitting on the corpse. “And farewell.”

He swung out of the bedside window.

Agony! Shards of shattered glass dug into his skin. His arms were bleeding, his legs, his back, his neck, they were bleeding. Was anything not bleeding? If so, he did not know it.

Stannis forced himself on, despite the pain. He would not die here, to the guardsmen of the man he had just killed. He was too powerful. He was too important. He gripped the rough stone surface on the wall, finding slight handholds and footholds, and lowered himself down.

Thwung.

A sharp pain burst into being in his lower stomach.

Stannis tried to move. Every movement felt like fire. A crossbow bolt had gone all the way through. Bad luck, yes, but he would escape, he must escape…

Thwung.

Another. The Sealord’s guardsmen on the walls did not wait a moment. They saw a man scaling the walls—no matter up or down—and they let loose at him.

Thwung.

More pain, bright and hot and cruel…

Stannis fled.

The man wearing Calido Prestayn’s face lost his grip on the balcony.

He fell long, long through the air. He had once been a man who did not have a name. Now he was not even that. His mouth drooled and foamed, he lost control of his bowels, he screeched and writhed and clawed at himself, even in the air as he fell. There was no thought, no connection of concepts, no memory, no being—only fear and grief and a pervasive, incomprehensible sense of I am not I am not I am not I am not I am not I am not

When he smashed against the ground, the embrace of the starless dark was merciful.

That was the end of the last Faceless Man in the world, spellbound by a power beyond his comprehension. It was not the end of his possessor.

The consciousness of Stannis Baratheon cast aside the dying Faceless Man, careless with contempt. He fled back to the other forms in which he dwelt. Presently those forms were nine golden eagles, flying in and above Braavos, and one other.

Miles away, a great broad-shouldered figure stalked through the shadows cast by high rickety buildings on either side of him. He was pale of face, yet black of hair and black of cloak and black of heart. He paused in his long stride for just a moment, gasping from the remembered pain of the guardsmen’s crossbow bolts that had struck another man’s body. Then he went on walking.

For, in truth, not a single body of Stannis Baratheon had stepped off that raft and set foot on Braavosi soil.

There had been two.

Boom.

Willem woke to the groan of wood under a thunderous blow. At first he did not realise it. He moaned, sitting up in bed and rubbing red and weary eyes. What is it? It felt like he had hardly slept at all. A brief glance at the window showed the sky pitch-black.

Boom.

The floor shook. Willem jolted fully awake and reached for his sword, by old soldier’s instinct. It was there. It was on his bedside table where it should have been. The cold steel in his hand reassured him.

He knew at once what was happening. They’ve come.

Willem flung aside the covers of his bed, rose to his feet and ran from his bedchamber. He saw none of the servants. They must be asleep or cowering. Pain shot through his knees, but on he went, until he burst through the door of his charges.

Little Daenerys was up first. “Hello, Ser Willem,” she said, studying him with innocent curiosity. “Why are you still in your nightclothes?”

“There was no time, my princess,” Willem answered. “Dress yourself as fast as you can. It’s cold aside. You’ll need to move—”

Boom.

“—quickly.”

The whole house trembled this time, creaking timbers unused to this onslaught. Willem crossed over to the window. It was too dark for his old eyes to see much, and his sight was faint and blurry; but he dimly glimpsed a huge black shape outside the door.

“The Usurper’s men,” said Viserys. He was older, quicker to understand.

“Yes,” said Willem. “The Baratheons will be here soon. Go, Your Grace. Go by the back door. Go to the Temple of the Moonsingers, they take care of lost children and the killers won’t dare come in there.” He spoke quickly. “Remember: keep quiet; keep crouched low; and always look around you.”

“Why?” said Daenerys, a girl of six namedays, shivering in her dress. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t worry, Dany,” said Viserys, plucking her up in his arms, “Ser Willem will be there to take care of us.” He turned to Willem, doubt all of a sudden blooming in his eyes. “Won’t you?”

“Not this time,” Willem said sadly. He kissed the little princess on the brow, then turned to his king. “I’ll find you if I can. If I don’t come, take the first ship to Pentos you can catch. Before you leave, go into my chambers, take the gold with you, so you can afford it.”

“But why can’t you come too?” The princess was crying noisily while her brother wrapped a coat around her. “Don’t send us away, ser, please, please, I don’t want to go without you.”

“Be quiet, Dany,” Viserys told her, “Ser Willem is doing as he thinks best.” He was not far from tears himself.

“There’s my strong dragon king,” said Willem. “Be brave. And take care of your sister.”

Crash!

The shriek of failing metal stabbed at all their ears, the squeal of hinges, then the thump of something big, heavy and wooden landing on the floor. “Run!” Willem shouted. Not looking back, he sprinted for the stairs.

Fear stroked icy fingers in his heart, then, and despair rode upon it, but with it came resolve. Had this been what the guardians of the royal bedchambers heard and saw, when Lord Tywin’s mad dogs came to murder little Aegon and Rhaenys? The huge dark figure, the heavy footsteps? It could well be Gregor Clegane the Usurper had sent to do his dirty work. Willem did not know how he could face such a foe.

Or had there even been any guardians, due to the Kingslayer’s treachery? That was one thing, at least, in his favour. There were no traitors here.

He hit the last stair and turned out into the ground floor’s corridor. On its far side, black against the darkness, standing on a red door he had torn off his hinges, there stood a man.

Willem was a tall man. The intruder was a full head taller. High as a tower, he was, yet broad like a fortress wall—no slender lanky figure but a big-built body bulging with the promise of violence. Willem’s eyes moved swiftly past the matte black boots, the matte black cloak, the matte black robes, the longbow at the man’s side that looked like burnt gold. They went straight to the face: pale-skinned, with short-cropped black hair, a firm nose and blue eyes.

This is no Clegane.

Terror tore at Willem like hungry wolves, yet his voice was steady and sure as he said, “So you’ve come at last, Baratheon.”

The giant figure spoke at last, in a deep rumbling bass. “I am not Robert.”

“What?”

“I am not Robert,” the Baratheon repeated. “Flee, Willem Darry. You’ve done me no wrong; you need not choose to be my enemy. I do not kill men who do not give me cause.”

Memory came, slow, as it often did. Ser Stannis Baratheon. Willem had heard of him—living here in Braavos, they said, then joining in one of the free companies. The Prince of Sunset, men called him now, and of him there were many tall tales.

“Why are you here?” Willem demanded. “Your brother hates you; half the world knows it.”

“I am not here for him.” A snake could have drowned in the venom which soaked that last hateful word. “And I have not come for you, old man. You know that you have not the strength to stop me; every Faceless Man in the House of Black and White could not. Flee and live, or stay and die. The choice it is yours.”

Willem stared at the burnt-golden longbow at the other end of the corridor, considering how far he could run with sword in hand before the first shot. The Prince of Sunset was young, strong, and well-known for archery; Willem’s bones ached when he walked.

“If you were here for the war, you’d be at the Sealord’s Palace.”

Stannis’s lips quirked. “You imagine I am not.”

Willem ignored that absurdity. “You’re not. You’re here. So you and your men doubtless mean harm against the children.”

He waited. Stannis did not deny it.

“I am the king’s master-at-arms—the true king, not Robert. So long as I stand here, none shall pass.”

“So be it,” said Ser Stannis, as Ser Willem was already running, reaching, sword held aloft, mouth open with a battle-cry.

“For the king!”

Pale hands flashed, left to a long arrow, right to a golden bow.

Willem knew he would be hit. He would have to withstand it. The first arrow to the belly or chest would be painful, and no doubt it would kill him soon. He accepted that. If he could reach the Prince of Sunset soon enough to deal one blow, the children would be safe.

He saw the moment Stannis Baratheon realised his intention, the moment when fear first entered those ocean-blue eyes. The arrow was loosed early, hasty. The bowstring thrummed; he saw the arrow leave; he saw it was aimed high, too high to hit his belly or chest; his heart soared. It flew straight as an arrow.

—until the arrow-flight twisted sharply down.

As Willem gaped at it, in his sight the narrow arrowhead grew very wide—

Hoh. Heh. Stannis breathed deeply in and out. That had been unexpected. He had guessed that Ser Willem Darry would try to kill him. He had known that Ser Willem would die in the attempt. He had not dreamt that the old man would know this and embrace his own death anyway, by a headlong rush to take Stannis with him.

A warning, that. He had not perceived how determined his enemies were to kill him. He must not again make that mistake.

Stannis Baratheon stepped over the corpse of the man who had come two steps from ending his life and towards the back door of the house. The old knight had thought that he could deter pursuit; that, by his sacrifice, he could buy time to keep the Targaryen children too far from sight for Stannis to seek out and find them. He had near been right.

Poor fool. Near won naught.

A shift… a thought… and Stannis surged into the sky and scoured the city through the eyes of eagles.

He was hopelessly lost. He had stopped knowing these winding streets half an hour ago. He ran on anyway, blindly intent that he must be away, away, away.

“There!” cried a small high voice, and he nearly leapt out of his skin, ere he realised that the shift in shadows was just a bird on a roof somewhere, not a hired knife come to murder him. He clutched her tighter and went going.

“Are we safe yet?” asked his sister.

“No,” snarled Viserys Targaryen, turning into a tiny twisting alleyway.

“Where’s Ser Willem?”

“He isn’t with us.” He’s dead, Viserys did not say.

“Viserys, I’m scared.”

He choked back tears. “I know.”

His shoulders were shaking; his arms felt burning, carrying the smaller child who clung tight to his neck. No doubt he could have made a better pace without her. He did not even consider it.

On he ran, holding Dany with both hands. He turned into narrower and narrower streets, the smallest and most obscure that came in front of him. The Free City of Braavos was enormous; it made King’s Landing look like a town. Surely he must be able to lose them, surely—

Something black and hard wrapped around his waist.

Viserys screamed as he rose unwilling into the air, high and keening like an animal. He flailed against his captor; he writhed, kicked and bit.

Nothing availed him. The grip that held him was robust, and he had only seen three-and-ten namedays.

Dany let go her grip on him and ran as fast as her legs could carry her. The man behind Viserys took one long stride that covered as much ground as three of her childish steps, then plucked her off the ground.

“You sumap!” Viserys cried, using a foul word he had heard from the sailors. “You hurt Willem! You’re a traitor, a murderer, a Usurper’s dog, a… a very bad man!”

“Be silent,” came an angered voice as deep as the bottom of the sea. The man shifted Viserys and Dany both into the clutch of his left arm, freeing his right, then gagged them.

With that turning, Viserys caught his first glimpse of his captor. It was the tallest man he had ever seen up close: a massive figure in a robe and cloak that matched the colour of the night around them. It was hard to see much beneath the hood of the cloak, but despite it Viserys espied a pale face with dark blue eyes glaring down at him.

The man in black started walking.

In silence, Stannis Baratheon strode through dark alleys shadowed by high unsteady buildings on either side. Only the poorest folk of Braavos dwelt here, in this realm of the despised and forgotten. Doubtless no magister cared for them, or at least, no lord of Westeros would. The bright purple uniforms of the City Guard were rarely seen in these parts. Some inhabitants surely saw him, but they were a folk well accustomed to convenient silences, in the face of the cruel outlaws who dwelt often among them. Those few of the poor people of inner Braavos who were awake at this hour watched quietly from their homes, doing naught. They did not come out and challenge him, so he did not do any harm to them.

In his arm the Targaryen children squirmed and struggled, seeking to be free. They could not. He held them too tightly. Indeed, his grip was so firm that they could not breathe deeply, or so he presumed, for their breaths were short-sharp-shallow. Once, he stumbled, briefly, as he felt crossbow bolts—one, two, three—strike himself in another form. He fled from that form, taking refuge in his birth-self, and the pain vanished. The boy Viserys noticed his weakening and tried to wriggle free. He slipped from Stannis’s grip, ran as fast as he could, and made it nine paces before Stannis’s longer legs caught up with him.

Stannis crossed into the outer edges of the city, reaching the far end where the waters of the lagoon fed the Green Canal, and he sent forth his thought into the little winds and mists he had almost wholly forsaken. He had already made the requisite sacrifice—only a goat—and thus he was able to bind them to his will. Mist gathered about him once again while he took out the raft he had hidden underneath the bridge here and rigged its sail—black, of course, to hide him in the night. He stepped on, checking that his captives were still with him, and then he was off in the wind and away.

His thought was in the wind that drove him. His thought was in the mist that concealed him. His thought was in his eagle companions that kept watch from above for his enemies, so that himself-in-the-wind could steer him true. Most of all, however, his thought was of himself.

Traitor, the boy had called him. Murderer. Usurper’s dog. That bothered him a great deal.

Stannis could not help but wonder, Is that all I am? Am I still no more than Robert’s hound, even now?

There were few things in this world that Stannis hated more than King Robert Baratheon. Robert had dismissed and belittled him even as a child. Robert had cast out his family in his heart, preferring the company of the damnable Lord Arryn and Ned Stark. He had abandoned Stannis and Renly after the murder of their lord father and lady mother, fleeing to the Vale and to Ned Stark, even though he was the eldest of them and should have stayed in Storm’s End. Robert should have ruled in Storm’s End and taken care of his brothers. He had had a duty. Instead he had run away, to play at boyhood in the Eyrie with Ned Stark, with old Lord Arryn to watch over him, leaving Stannis, thankless, to take all the responsibilities that should have been Robert’s own.

After that, Robert had risen in rebellion against the rightful king over the maidenhead of some northwoman who was his precious Ned Stark’s sister. That had been a hard choice for Stannis to make: to stay true to the true king, Aerys, or to betray the king and serve his brother. In the end he had chosen to cast aside his loyalty to his king in order to support his brother, and so he and Storm’s End had been dragged into Robert’s war.

Robert had never done anything for him, for Renly or for the stormlands. He had forsaken them in their hour of need, then called them to his service anyway. When they had loyally come, he had spent their lives on his war with the same carelessness that he spent his gold on everything. Stannis had suffered and starved to protect his elder brother, despite Renly’s urgings to do elsewise. He had done the impossible; he had held Storm’s End past the brink of starvation, against all the power of the Tyrells, and then he had defeated them. When his little brother had betrayed Robert, Stannis had given up the one he loved most in the world and saved Robert’s cause from the evil of the Tyrells—for surely Lord Mace would have marched north and Robert’s vassals would have deserted him if he looked too weak to protect his own home. He had asked no reward—not a single land or title. And in return, Robert, useless oaf that he was, had taken Stannis’s home from him.

Forgive me, Renly. Did I kill the wrong brother? He was not as sure of that as he once had been.

The black sail bulged, borne onward by the wind, and the raft under his feet glided silently through the water; and Stannis stood upon it with his captives in his arm, and pondered.

The thought that he was Robert’s faithful hound—a dog kicked and beaten, forever either ignored or treated with contempt, never cared for, never mattering, valued less than Robert valued outsiders like Ned Stark, yet always coming back to pant and lick at the hand of his master… Stannis could not bear the shame of it. There was no worse thing a man could be.

Was he still Robert’s? He wanted to think not. He was his own man, surely. He was fighting in a foreign land, serving his own purpose and Handtaker’s, and neither of those had anything to do with Robert. Justin Massey may have come to serve him because of his birth, but Massey was more his man than Robert’s now; Stannis felt sure of it. Moreover, he had other trusted servants—Alequo Nudoon, Bozyno Vunel, Marro Numerin, to name those closest to him—who bore no link to the king on the other side of the Narrow Sea.

He had gone into Handtaker’s employment for the sake of coin to keep himself fed, not for the sake of Robert. Old allegiances mattered naught to him, no matter how oft Ser Justin might seek to remind him of them. In mind and body alike, he was far from Westeros. Handtaker had tasked him to find a way to take Braavos, so he had found one. If the way that he had found included removing Robert’s exiled enemies, well, that was only chance, no more. No more!

I am not Robert’s hound any more, he told himself. He was not sure that he believed it.

When the raft bumped quietly against the beach, Stannis took a leap back onto solid ground. He dragged the raft onto the shore, fully relinquishing his mists, and spied the firelight of the sellswords’ camp, miles in the distance.

He took out the gags from the silver-haired children’s mouths, and put them down.

This time they did not run. Experience had taught them the futility of that. But the boy Prince Viserys—twelve namedays, Stannis guessed, or at least not much more—immediately moved to stand in front of his little sister, shielding her behind his meagre height. The thought came unbidden: Like I would have stood in front of Renly, once. The memory was like grasping a dagger blade-first.

“Who are you? What do you want from us?” demanded Prince Viserys, his high voice sharp with command.

“My name is Ser Stannis Baratheon.”

He saw the fear in the boy’s eyes, at his first name as well as the last. Then my reputation is not unknown to him. The girl reacted only to ‘Baratheon’; she was too young to know the fear she should. She must have been about Renly’s age, when… when.

“You’re here to kill us, then,” said Prince Viserys.

Stannis said, “No.”

Shocked silence. That small word seemed to contain the world within it.

Prince Viserys looked baffled. “Then what? Are we to be taken prisoner?”

“I am not Robert’s dog,” Stannis said, as if that were answer enough. “I am not here to kill his enemies for him.” He turned to Princess Daenerys, not only in his birth form. Nine big golden eagles were flying now: four above the lagoon, two above the camp of the sellsword host, and three above the three of them. One of those last three birds fluttered down and landed on the girl’s shoulder. “Go to the camp of the army you can see over there. Seek out Marro Namerin of the Company of the Cat. Tell him to find you a ship for another Free City. No man in that host will be fool enough to harm you when they see you with my eagle, by my will. Do not be afraid.”

When the eagle’s long curved talons took hold of her flesh, little Daenerys cried out. “It hurts, Viserys!”

Purple eyes met blue. Viserys gazed up at him, wondering. “Why are you doing this?”

The words came with chill finality. “Because it is not for her that I have come.”

The boy understood. He turned around and knelt to speak with his sister. “Dany, you have to leave.”

“No!” said the girl, stamping her foot.

“Leave, Dany,” said the boy. Stannis noticed yet again how short he was. Only a boy. A child. “It’s the only way you can be safe.”

“Ser Willem said that, and we don’t have him any more,” she said. “I don’t want to not have you. You’re my brother, you should stay with me.”

“I want to,” Prince Viserys said, quivering. “Mother spare us, you don’t know how much I want to. But I can’t, Dany. It is not for me.”

“Why not?”

Viserys glanced at Stannis. “Because I am not your sister. I am your brother.”

“Yes. You’re my brother,” Princess Daenerys said, lifting her head stubbornly. “So I’ll only go if you’re coming with me.”

The edge of begging crept into Viserys’s voice. “Dany. Please.”

She took one more look at Viserys, then at the looming man in black. She fled.

There was a very long silence. Viserys said nothing at all, perhaps fearing that if he spoke then Stannis may change his mind. Stannis indulged him. Why not? he told himself. I do not lack for time.

When Daenerys Targaryen had disappeared over the horizon, Viserys Targaryen looked up at him. “Thank you for letting my sister live,” he said in a tone mixed between relief and weariness. He sounded old, Stannis thought. Those things should not have been heard in the voice of a boy so young that it had not yet broken.

Stannis said nothing. He only looked down at the boy. How strange that he had spent moons of effort, all seeking this moment, and yet, now that it had come, he knew not what he ought to do.

“So now you’re going to kill me, then?” Prince Viserys said, sighing, running a hand through his silver hair. “Secure your brother’s hold on the throne, and end the male line of House Targaryen for the Usurper.”

“It is not for Robert,” Stannis said. “If it were, I would not have spared your sister. Robert wants both of you dead. He shamed our uncle Eldon for not ending House Targaryen.”

“Whereas it is enough for you to kill only the men of my House,” Viserys said bitterly, with more of the petulance Stannis would have expected from a child facing death.

“I—that is not—” Stannis said, uncertain, and uncertain of how to deal with uncertainty. “That is not why,” he settled on saying. “This is about my revenge on the Braavosi for their treachery. This is not about our Houses.”

Why do I not just kill him? he wondered. And yet he stayed his hand.

“I nearly fought for your father, you know,” Stannis rushed on. He knew not why he was saying this. “I would certainly have served the rightful king if the rebel had been anyone but Robert. It was not quick for me to choose between him and Robert. My brother or my king…”

“Wouldn’t you always choose your brother?” asked Viserys. There was a curious turn to the prince’s mouth. Stannis did not understand it.

“No,” Stannis scoffed. “Robert is a worthless bloated bag of flesh. He cares nothing for his family, he only cares about Arryns and Starks. And food, of course, and war, and wine, and whor*s, and spending gold without thinking about it. He cares about a lot of things, I suppose. Everything except his family and his home.”

Viserys said, “Then why did you fight for him, ser?”

“I thought I should,” Stannis said, musing. He felt oddly at ease. The Targaryen boy was an enemy, of course, but an unarmed enemy too weak to do him harm. “I had my oath to Aerys, who was king by law, but there are older laws. A younger brother must bow before the elder.” His voice darkened. “Though mayhaps I am alone in keeping those older laws. I bowed before Robert, but Renly certainly didn’t bow before me. And Robert was meant to care for our family and for Storm’s End, as the head of our House, but he never did. It was me. It was always me.”

“Would you make the same choice, if you could make it again?”

“What does it matter? I cannot—”

Oh.

Stannis went silent. His thin lips pressed into a hard, flat line. His voice, a snarl: “You dare—”

“Yes, I dare. Think about it,” Prince Viserys pressed. “You hate the Usurper. He’d be overjoyed to hear that I am dead, you know it. He’d think the same of you. Why serve his purpose, after all that he did to you? You don’t need to. There is another way.”

“There is no other way!” said Stannis, thinking of Braavos and of his revenge.

“There is,” the boy insisted, defying Stannis’s anger to his face. “House Baratheon and House Targaryen haven’t always been foes. That was your brother’s work. Why not undo it? Don’t serve the Usurper. Don’t serve some sellsword commander, either. Swear your fealty to the rightful king, as your father did, and his father, and his father before him, and together we’ll take back our homes in Westeros. We’ll crush the Usurper. We’ll end both our exiles. And you will rise again as Stannis Baratheon, my Lord of Storm’s End.”

Stannis said faintly, “You would give me Storm’s End.”

The boy king smiled, triumphant. He must have sensed at once that those words mattered more than all else he had said. “Yes.”

It could be mine again.

Sheer cliffs of memory loomed over Stannis whichever way he turned. He saw his old bedchamber and his featherbed, as clearly as if he had just stood up from them. He saw the waves of Shipbreaker Bay on a gentle noon from out his window. He saw smiling Maester Cressen sitting with him, ever-patient, never-judging, to discuss their lessons—liar, the maester lied to me—and Septon Danwell with his bald head and his sideburns in the sept with his reassuringly familiar monotonous drone. Gods, to think I would ever reminisce for Danwell… He did, though. He did. It had been a simpler time, a kinder time, the happiest time he had ever known.

He remembered the immense tower of pale grey stone that rose lordlike over land and sea, firm, unshaken and unshakeable, a rock to be depended on, unlike its lord. He remembered Robert being away, or, worse, being here and still a stranger, talking incessantly of Ned Stark and his friends in the Eyrie. That made him frown. He stopped frowning when he remembered the curtain walls a hundred feet tall that had kept out the hordes of locust-like Reachmen, and all the times he had ridden up to those walls from the woods in better days.

Stannis Baratheon had witnessed wars and wonders, lived and wandered through a hundred realms and cities, and studied secrets from far across the world. For all that, Storm’s End was the only place that he could truly say was a home to him.

He remembered the hunts with Robert and his lord father in the Rainwood, his father sternly instructing them on so-and-so and such-and-such. He remembered little Renly running through the corridors in gales of laughter, shouting that he was a prince or a dragon or a knight.

He remembered the warmth of his mother’s embrace, and suddenly there were tears in his eyes.

“Yes,” said Stannis, quietly at first, then louder, “yes, yes, yessssssss.” Joy, so much joy that a man could drown in it. He felt giddy with glee. He picked up the boy in his arms and whirled him in the air. Home. Braavos mattered nothing next to that—no, less than nothing. The greater part of his revenge was done; he had punished Anno Nusaris himself; the rest of it was less important. “Home, yes, we will go home, we’ll gather an army and we’ll both go home; I’ll tear down Robert from the throne he fought his precious war for, the war that he dragged us into and cared more about than us; I’ll make you king, yes, I will; and I will kill Robert myself for all the slights he’s heaped upon me!”

He spun around, laughing. Above him, gloriously winged golden eagles danced patterns in the air. The boy king he held in his arms was frozen with fear, then let out a startled laugh. The child must be elated. He had talked his way out of certain death with nothing but his tongue.

My lady mother. It was hard not to think of her; he had not allowed himself, too long, for fear of the pain. Lady Cassana would have liked this child, he thought: young but not dim, and protective of his sister.

His sense of duty to Robert, that had dominated so much of his life, had never really been about Robert, had it? Stannis hated Robert. Even before he hated him, he did not love him nearly enough to want to dedicate his life to him. It had always been about Stannis Baratheon. It had always been about his love of the rest of his family, of which Robert merely happened to stand at the head, and his sense that selflessly carrying out a duty was a noble thing, and his guilt.

He remembered the warmth of his mother’s embrace, and knew that he had killed her. He remembered it perfectly. He had been the storm that shattered her ship and sent her drowning in a watery grave.

On that night, he had made a foolish oath against all sorcery; but also he had pledged that his life was no longer his own. It belonged to his family. Stannis had murdered those he loved, deprived himself and Robert of them, and deprived Renly of the chance to ever know them. Could there be any more unpardonable deed? He owed his family too much to turn against them, more than anyone knew, even themselves. He had to spend his life for House Baratheon, not for himself, if he were ever to make up for this the blackest of his sins.

Mother, I am sorry.

His grip grew very tight.

…and the cool night breeze swelled, swelled, swelled to a roar that challenged the foundations of the earth. The wisps of cloud above him grew and darkened, black-bottomed beasts that blotted out the stars. Thunder snarled its warnings of the spears of blue-white lightning that were thrown down from the sky, but it was itself drowned out by a colossal keening howl.

They noticed. In the sellswords’ camp, they noticed. In Braavos, they noticed. Nobody could not notice. Millions of men and women awoke, and their voices rose to a terrified babble that melded together like a wall of sound, but Stannis could not hear them. All of their voices as one were dwarfed by the surge of screaming air that soared over their heads.

The wind whirled around and around and around, building up to a fearsome thunderstorm. It stirred water, shifted soil, screeched on stone. Panicked captains barked their orders as the calm waters of the lagoon rose into frenzied rage…

…then calmed down again. Ripples died down; waves grew smaller; the rocking of ships ceased. Men sank to their knees and thanked their gods for their salvation, for making the shockingly fast rise in the winds be gone.

They are so blind, thought the storm. They did not know that himself-the-wind was not gone. In more ways than one, he was rising.

Two tall figures stood, one on each side of the Braavosi lagoon. The shining spires of the Queen of Cities lay straight in between them. One was a nightmare of the otherworld, a great dark walking thing that prowled shaded streets in the night and wrought wonder and terror beyond the dread of thought, and yet at the same time a lost boy banished from his land and hoping hopelessly of home. The other was a dream of the world of men, his feet rooted on the hills, his hand holding a sword high and valiant, a helmed warrior who championed the defence of men, and yet was himself not one of them but rather a great artifice of bronze and stone.

One was six and a half feet high; the other, four-hundred. Both of them faced to the west, whence a wall of wind blew to meet them.

For hundreds of years the Titan had guarded his city. Now a foe came to conquer it. Stannis Baratheon stood facing a statue nearly a million times his size. It was alone of its kind in the world; no-one else had built anything like it. Its legs and hips were made of dark stone, carved by the Braavosi from a great stone archway that had formed without man’s hand in some aeon long past. Joined to it by giant beams and sheets of metal, its upper body was more of the make of man, wrought of smelted bronze. It bristled with stonethrowers, scorpions and murder holes beyond counting, all prepared to rain death down below, and its hollow shape was home to countless Braavosi volunteer-soldiers in their barracks, armouries and watchtowers.

It was mayhaps the mightiest fortification built by the hand of man. A whole battle-fleet would be hard-pressed to attack it.

Yet all that they could do was scream against the storm.

Far above the heads of the city, a huge hot wind blew from the west. Gentle it was, at first, and cool; but minutes passed and it grew cruel indeed, for more and more of the turbulence from below rose high upward and spent its rage here.

All the power of the thunderstorm had been brought here and condensed into a single front of wind that hurled itself against the Titan. The air had grown so hot it was like fire, scalding, scorching as it came, and scouring the bronze with its unfathomable fury.

Storms were not meant to be so focused. They were not meant to be contorted and constrained. But Stannis Baratheon did not care what he was meant for. By shackles of blood and suffering, he had become the very power he had unleashed on this earth. Every breath of wind on water, every tickle of a person or a building in the air, he felt as if on his own body; when the air crashed hard against the Titan, he felt the impact hit. He was the storm that he had made, and by his implacable will the storm-winds surged ever-onward.

The man in black stood on one side of the lagoon. The Titan of Braavos stood on the other. And at last, battered by power unrelenting beyond all reason, it was the wonder of the world that failed first.

Groaning under the onslaught of the storm, the great beams and metal sheets that bound the huge hollow body to its stone foundation gave way, one by one. The bronze torso snapped off. It teetered. And finally, with terrible inevitability, shoved on by a surge of the storm that screamed its triumph to the skies, the two-hundred-foot-tall torso of the Titan fell back-first into the Braavosi lagoon.

When the Titan’s torso hit the water, west of the city, there was a splash like none that had been seen in living memory. The calm crystal waters convulsed. Much of the lagoon was hurled up in gigantic waves that left swathes of the seafloor briefly visible. The raging waters swept away stonework like wind blowing through autumn leaves as they thrashed back and forth like a tortured child. Some ships were physically flung up off the surface of the water, hung in the air for an infinite moment, and then—if not smashed by other waves in the meantime—they had to face the descent; their crews wailed in terror as they crashed down to their deaths on the unforgiving water. Elsewhere, further from the impact, ships met the kinder fate of being knocked over by the enormous ripples that rushed through the lagoon after the Titan fell.

Slowly, the high howl of the storm faded to a long, low, drawn-out exhalation.

In the besieged Free City of Braavos, a vision out of nightmare was left behind. Across Braavos, houses had had walls or ceilings knocked in by flying rubble, leaving them as wrecks. The air rang with the wails of the wounded and the dying. In neighbourhoods in the west of the city, nearer to the Titan’s fall, it was worse. There, blocks of brick and stone littered the earth, devoid of any shape that might indicate where roads used to be and where buildings used to be. To be at water was death. Nigh every boat in the lagoon, from mighty warships to little dinghies, was no longer afloat.

In the camp of the besieging sellsword host, whose tents tonight had been set safely far from the water, the captains and commanders of the free companies barked their orders. Men donned their armour and rafts were prepared for when the waters were calm enough. Braavos had had a Sealord, a High Captain, a temple of Faceless Men, a Titan and a fleet. Now none of those stood in the way of the invaders.

And all alone in the cold night stood the man behind the madness, clutching the corpse of a murdered child, tears and raindrops pouring down his face and king’s blood pouring down his fingers, weeping for the boy whose neck he had broken and for the home he now knew in his heart that he would never see again. Too strong a force prevented him from defying Robert’s decree and making war upon his brother. He felt sure he could vanquish any other; but he could not destroy himself, and he could not escape his knowledge of what he had done, however far he flew.

Stannis sat alone on an edge of twisted bronze and jagged stone, his legs dangling in the void, gazing down at a hundred isles of rubble and ruin.

The fires had gone out in Braavos, that had raged for two days and three nights. So had the screams of the plundered, the raped and the dying. In their wake they left an air of dreadful quiet and eerie emptiness. Rare was the house that did not have at least a toppled wall, wrecked by rocks that had been thrown about by the water in its wrath; in many, the ceilings had collapsed, and some had been torn apart altogether. Most of the city had been ravaged by the sellsword host, pillaged for everything that was not pinned down, and it showed in the way the men and women walked and spoke to one another. Under the gaze of the sellswords prowling the streets, the cityfolk went about their days like mice before a cat, timid, fearful, ready to leap and run at the slightest sense of risk. It was as if there had been something alive about the city, a spirit that had been banished, a candle-flame that had been snuffed out in the night.

In the outer islands of the western half of the city, the destruction was worst of all. There, fragments of buildings, of roads, of ships flung onto the land by surging water, and of people had melded into a jumbled mass of stuff. There was no telling what had belonged to what, or to whom. There were only shapeless heaps of wood and brick and rock and bone.

Surrounding Braavos of the Hundred Isles, the warm waters of the lagoon shimmered in the morning sunlight. Looking at them, one would not have known they were capable of what they had just done. Indeed, he saw nary a ripple. Next to the ruins they had made of the dwellings of men, their sparkling serenity looked almost obscene.

Two-hundred feet above, Stannis sat and watched, mind wandering.

My work, he thought. My work, all of it. I unleashed this. I have opened the gates of the seven hells and let the demons in.

Anno Nusaris was dead at his hands, and Braavos humbled. He had had his vengeance. He knew the magisters of Essos, petty upjumped merchants that they were, would not dare cheat him again, for fear of what he had done here. He ought to be with his fellow sellswords far below, celebrating in the streets. He ought to feel triumph, instead of emptiness.

I have sacked the Queen of Cities. For what? For coin that was owed to a free company that I only joined because I needed to eat, as I should not have needed, and would not if only Robert had not banished me?

The authors of that banishment lived still. Maester Cressen, the traitor. The Tyrells, who no doubt had poured poison into Robert’s ears, conspiring against Stannis, and who had turned Renly against his family and thus forced Stannis’s hand. And Robert himself, that grinning gutless ungrateful fool who had stolen his home from him, who did not have the wit to see Stannis had done what must be done. I killed the wrong brother. He did not doubt it now. How happily he would have sheathed his sword in the flesh of that quivering wineskin on legs and treasured its scream, were it not for the duty he had to his mother.

I am a stranger on these shores. Essos is not my place; it never will be. All my true enemies are in Westeros. Yet here I am and here I will remain, as long as I cannot bring myself to defy Robert’s decree, make war on him and kill the last of my family. Here, far from home. He remembered men in a river screaming as it swelled and swept them away; horsem*n charging bravely at the great black burning thing that had haunted their nightmares; himself walking out of the House of Black and White over a clutch of corpses; the Titan of Braavos toppling into the sea. Here, in the heat and in the blood, fighting wars that, if not for Robert, would not be mine at all.

They had called this place the Queen of Cities, once. Not the richest in the world, perhaps, but bright and bustling and pleased.

Was it regret, this thing that he felt? He did not think so. The Braavosi had stolen from him, along with his fellow sellswords. Justice demanded that they must be punished, so they were. Cutting off the fingers of that vile cur Nusaris, an upjumped petty thief who dared to rob the fighting men whose place ought to be higher than his, remained a joyful memory.

No, it could not be regret; but a certain sadness lingered. This should not have been necessary. This was not his place.

There he sat, half-dreaming, perched on the edge of oblivion, looking upon the ruin he had wrought of Braavos.

“I thought I’d find you here.” A voice—light, pleasant. Stannis had heard the footsteps tapping on the stone behind him, too many to be one man. “You oft make your way to high places such as this, Sunsetlander. It seems you have a fondness for brooding in tall towers.”

Stannis recalled a spiked fist of pale grey stone that reared high over the earth and he ached with longing so fierce that he could almost taste it. I know. They remind me of home, he thought. He did not say it.

He stood, turned and inclined his head. “Commander.”

“There is not much looting yet to be done,” said Aro Isattis, called Handtaker, commander of the Company of the Cat, surrounded by his usual cluster of unsmiling armoured guardsmen. “I daresay you could have taken more than nigh any of us. The others would have allowed it. Yet as far as I am aware, you’ve taken none.”

There was a question there, though Handtaker did not speak it.

Nonetheless Stannis felt obliged to answer. “That is so, commander. I am not inclined to such things.”

“Hmm,” Handtaker hummed. “This sack is likely the best opportunity you will ever have; ignore it and you’ll regret it for a lifetime. Should you wish to change your mind, I would advise you to act quickly. The city is largely ours by now—the City Guard is crushed, only the last few of those pitiful little militias hold out, and they will not live long—and I do not tolerate my men looting from each other.”

“I shall bear that in mind,” said Stannis. He looked idly up at Handtaker, then down again at the cat banners that protruded everywhere above the ruined city. It was strange, he thought, to have such a powerful man be represented by such a feeble thing, but in time he decided it was fitting. Cats, too, like to play with their food before they eat it.

“Friendly advice on pillage was not why I sought to speak with you, however,” Handtaker said dryly. “Lately I have been speaking, at length, with the magisters of the late Ferrego Antaryon’s faction. You will recall that they support the privileges of the wealthy against the faction led by Nusaris and by Banero Prestayn before him, stirring up the anger of the poor and downtrodden.”

“Is not Nusaris of the wealthy?” asked Stannis. “He seemed so, to me.”

“I daresay Anno Nusaris before he became Sealord lived in more luxury than your brother the king of the Sunset Lands. The Nusaris family are—or were—obscenely rich. None of the politicians in Braavos are poor, you must understand. Only the richest of merchants are deemed magisters, and only magisters and Iron Bank keyholders can vote for the Sealord. But some of them pretend that, from their pleasure-barges and their gilded manses, they truly worry for the plight of the common people.”

Handtaker’s snort showed how much he believed of that.

“All lies, of course. Our friends in the late Antaryon’s faction assure me ever-so-sweetly that we shall have the eternal friendship and undying gratitude of Braavos for deposing the false Sealord, Nusaris, who usurped Antaryon. They tell me we should restore the legitimate government of Braavos—that is to say, themselves—and place the old families back in power. With our help, they will have all but obliterated their rivals; they will be well-placed to rule. And indeed they will rule in Braavos for many, many years, as a Free City disposed to favour us and to employ us whenever it can.”

Stannis kept his face cold and not revealing but was ever more appalled. Handing this city over to magisters? They are not men of the sword; they are merchants upjumped above their rightful place, ever full of ambition and deceit. No doubt they’ll betray any agreement we sign with them as soon as they please. And our men fought and bled to take Braavos, at our own expense, not for magisters’ gold; why should we give it up to those who did nothing?

“Philenio has counselled me to accept,” said Handtaker, speaking of Philenio Zometemis, the foremost captain of the Company of the Cat, more commonly known as Bloodbeard. “I am minded to agree. A friendly Free City would be useful indeed. Sunsetlander, what say you?”

Stannis tried to gather his thoughts and to speak them with clarity and strength. “Commander, with the greatest respect, I do not think it is wise to trust Antaryon’s magisters. They are only summer friends. In our hour of need, when Nusaris betrayed us, these ‘friends’ in Braavos did not lift a finger in our aid, to see us paid; they cowered before the thief-Sealord to save their miserable hides.”

“That is true,” said Handtaker. “Then what would you suggest?”

“The magisters of Braavos should not prosper by their betrayal,” Stannis said coldly. “Besides, you made them a promise: they make peace by the terms you told them or they die. A man must keep to his word, else his threats mean nothing and other men will disregard him. We shouldn’t give them the city. I say we kill them all.”

There was a drawn-out silence.

Then Handtaker laughed. “Of course I will.”

Stannis was bemused. “What—”

“You have learnt well. Fear not; I never intended to deliver Braavos into the hands of those preening peaco*cks. It was you I meant to learn about, not the magisters, and I am pleased to say that you have acquired the necessary ruthlessness. You see, I lied; Philenio counselled me as you did, and, regardless, my mind was already made.”

Aro Isattis swept a hand over the hundred islands, with all their streets, all their homes, all their peoples, all their triumphs and tragedies, in the midst of the glasslike clear waters of the lagoon two-hundred feet below him.

“Be welcome, Sunsetlander, to my city.”

Stannis’s jaw dropped at the sheer ambition of it. “But—commander—the other free companies—”

“I have spoken with their commanders,” Handtaker said. “Some will leave us. Some will stay, and I have promised them great lands and wealth and high positions in the new order. But none will try to take power from me. They are not nearly strong enough; they know that.”

It was true, Stannis knew. No other free company in this war was half the size of the Company of the Cat. Handtaker had reached out to other free companies, but only to smaller ones. He must have been planning this since the day we had the meeting about Nusaris’s betrayal, Stannis realised, and told none of us.

“You mean to be King of Braavos,” Stannis breathed.

“Look down at that city.” Isattis gestured. “See all those cat standards. My standards. Braavos’s, too, now, for they can hardly use the Titan.” He looked pointedly down at the arch of dark stone where they now stood, formerly the hips and legs of the Titan, now full of contorted bronze sheets and beams that had once held the Titan’s upper body in place here. “My armed men hold the streets at my bidding; my will is enforced. There is no ‘mean to be’. I am King of Braavos in everything but name.”

Stannis thought on this. Aro Isattis was no rightful king; as far as he knew, the Isattis family had never ruled. But he was no less rightful than the disgustingly rich magisters, the tiny number of wealthiest people in Braavos, and the Sealords whom those magisters voted for. At least Handtaker was a man of the sword, not just a merchant. That made him more suited to rule than upjumped coin-counters like Ferrego Antaryon and Anno Nusaris.

“As king—” he began.

“ ‘Sealord’, Sunsetlander. None of Valyria’s daughters are fond of the word ‘king’—too strong memories.”

“As Sealord, then,” Stannis said, “I suppose you’ll wish to wed?” The thought of Handtaker with a wife felt profoundly bizarre to him.

“whor*s will suffice.”

“But surely for your heir—”

“Why in the names of all the gods should I desire that some mewling brat should rule after me, just because I f*cked the c*nt that whelped him?” Handtaker sounded honestly curious. “You may be an ocean away but you are still a Sunsetlander at heart, I daresay. No. I expect the Braavosi will return to that absurd system of theirs; I doubt they will be quiescent when the fear I have inspired in them dies with me. They’ll rise up, and quite possibly they won’t wait for my death before they do it. If not that, I’ll be succeeded by another fighting man who can hold the confidence of the army. And I daresay a man like that will not have the patience to wait for me to die, either.”

Stannis was bewildered. “Does that not matter to you? The thought that everything you have achieved here will be undone?”

“No,” said Handtaker. “I cannot lose in life, because I have already won. Born in the gutter, son of a Tyroshi whor*, spat on by the magisters’ sons and daughters and their ilk as dirt beneath their feet… but I was a better fighter than they were, always, and now I have risen to rule the Queen of Cities. However long or brief that rule may be, I will always know I obtained it.” He shrugged. “The rest of life is just waiting to die. And so what does it matter to me who should rule after I am dead and gone? It matters not at all.”

This, little as it was, was the most that Stannis had ever heard about Handtaker’s past before he had been Handtaker.

“I imagine you did not come merely to tell me your ambition,” Stannis said.

“Indeed. I came to offer you a choice.”

“What choice?”

“My men are sellswords, and some wish to remain so. I will not compel them to stay here and settle as my army in Braavos if they do not wish to, for that would be unwise. All those who wish to part ways are free to go; my army will be better without them. Most of them have chosen to stay, for the risks will be meagre and the rewards will be handsome. I have been generous with promises of the magisters’ land, you see; the magister class might object, were it not that I have killed them all already. And that was for the common soldiers. For you I offer something more.”

Stannis’s eyes widened. Could he…

“I know it does not please you to sell your sword,” Isattis went on, as if this were something they had discussed every day rather than something he was only revealing now. “I know you would prefer a more peaceful life. You can have it. Settle here and I will grant you an estate in the Braavosian Coastlands with a great swathe of towns, to make you as rich as a lord in the Sunset Lands. You will be a warlock in my service, and in the meantime, you can be a lord again. You can have land of your own, to belong to yourself and your descendants, and pass it on to a son.”

It was true that Stannis did not take delight in the life of a sellsword for its own sake. He did not whor*; he did not rape; he did not keep the company of women, only of armed men. He did not drink anything stronger than water. He did not eat more than the bare little enough to keep himself alive. He did not even like to fight.

Stannis had never expected such an offer from Handtaker, because Handtaker in his head had become closely linked with the life in which he had encountered Handtaker: the life of being a sellsword. But Handtaker, commander of the Company of the Cat, was now Aro Isattis, Sealord of Braavos, and Isattis the Sealord possessed the power to grant rewards that Handtaker the sellsword never could.

Stannis thought of himself living in a great manse in Braavos and an estate in the Braavosi countryside. He imagined himself heading to the city for the occasional errand as Handtaker’s sorcerer but living in some rural idyll of a town, marrying a Braavosi woman, siring and raising Braavosi children in a pleasant, warm Braavosi home…

He said, “You are kind, commander, and I thank you for your generosity. But no.”

Isattis lifted an eyebrow. Stannis sweated through his robe, seeing the guardsmen who surrounded Handtaker, knowing from personal memory the instant brutal violence that could be unleashed with the slightest twitch. “Why not?”

“I cannot go home again,” Stannis said. “I have accepted that, now, though for many years I denied it. I am a son of Storm’s End and House Baratheon. That is my only true home, and though I will never lay eyes upon it again in my lifetime, I will not replace it in my heart, not now, not ever.”

“So you will wander,” Isattis murmured.

“So I will wander,” Stannis agreed.

“And I suppose,” Isattis said, “that you also do not wish to remain in my service, since your chastisem*nt after the Great Northern War?”

Stannis cursed under his breath. That, too, had been part of his thinking. He had chosen not to voice it. His heart beat very quickly. He wondered if he were about to die.

Isattis had already guessed, so Stannis decided—hoped, guessed, prayed—that honesty would be the best approach. “Yes, commander, that is part of it.”

“Very well, Sunsetlander.” Isattis’s voice was queerly calm. “That is as I expected, I must admit. I hoped elsewise, but I cannot pretend to be surprised. I did say that those of my soldiers who wish to can part ways from the Company of the Cat as it transforms into the new army of Braavos, and I will hold to that. But for you, there is one more thing, ere I release you from your contract to me.”

“Name it,” said Stannis.

“I want your oath, Sunsetlander, never to fight against me or Braavos or my servants, unless we fight you first. Either by yourself or by any plot or instrument of yours.”

“And you would believe that?” asked Stannis, wondering. “Forgive me, commander, but that does not sound like you.”

“From another man? I wouldn’t if I had given him all the gold in Qarth and he had sworn it half a hundred times upon his father’s grave,” Handtaker said. “From you? I know your word will be enough.”

Then indeed Stannis swore the oath that had been demanded of him. “Will you, in turn, release me?”

“You are released from our contract,” said Handtaker.

Stannis thought he ought to have felt a sense of lightness as a great burden was lifted off his back. He did not. Seven years he had spent under Handtaker’s wing, with the Company of the Cat as his companions. All that he felt now was the uncertainty of being thrust out flailing into the world.

They faced each other then, one tall dark-clad figure as broad as an ox, the other in resplendent garb, short and lean. Stannis studied his commander’s face—the small dark eyes, the hooklike nose, the smile that spoke of murder and worse—and considered the man that he could see. Handtaker was a cruel man who took delight in maiming people. He was endlessly afraid for his own life, keeping a guard of big, strong, loyal, armed and armoured men at his side wherever he went. He was too lowborn to deserve to command someone as high as a Baratheon, though at least he was a fighting man, not just some merchant. He believed staunchly in the value of fear to set examples, treating enemies with merciless viciousness in order that possible future enemies would be too afraid to decide to be enemies. He was ruthless in the extreme. He was utterly intolerant of aught he might consider treachery. He was selfish and careless of family legacy.

He was also the man who had taken Stannis in. Stannis had learnt a lot from him.

They parted ways, then, with a final, firm shake of hands. “Fare well, Your Excellency,” Stannis said, and was surprised to find the sentiment was genuine.

“Fare well… commander.”

A giant figure stood upon a dais in Braavos’s least damaged public square, shaking his fist and bellowing to a crowd of sellswords who cheered his every declaration.

“And I will bring you glory!” the huge man thundered. “Great glory! These men—the men who broke Braavos—are the finest in the world, but even the best metal needs its forging. I will be the smith. Right now, we’re the fragments of a dozen free companies, those that chose to roam on instead of taking Handtaker’s offer. This army needs a man to forge it into a single sword, to harden it and temper it, and I’m the man we need! I’ve fought at Handtaker’s side in countless battles, we’ve won countless battles, and with my leadership we’ll win countless more—”

A smaller man, from the direction of the pier, slipped through the crowd and hurried towards a knot of five men in a corner, paying the speech no heed.

“Captain!” cried Alequo Nudoon, a great green-haired Tyroshi almost six feet tall. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

The man from the pier pulled down the hood of his cloak, revealing pale skin and short-cropped black hair. “Alequo,” he said, by way of greeting.

“Captain,” nodded Marro Namerin, a small dark Braavosi with a fondness for wicked-looking dirks. “I found the girl you sent me, and I put her on a ship to Pentos as you asked. Mind saying what that was about?”

Because Robert would have killed her, Stannis thought. Robert would have done it instantly. He would have wanted me to do it, too, and I could, but I didn’t. If naught else, to prove to myself that I was hunting Viserys Targaryen for my own purpose—the sacrifice—and not for Robert’s. To prove I am not Robert’s hound, hunting his enemies for him and coming back no matter how often he kicks it.

All of this he thought. Aloud, he said simply, “She was too young. I pitied her.”

“It’s been days,” said fleshy, white-blond Justin Massey. “Where have you been, ser?”

“Thinking,” said Ser Stannis, in a tone that suggested he did not want to say more.

“Leave Ser Stannis alone, ser,” said the latest addition to their party, a thin, scarred, dark-haired Westerosi knight by the name of Ser Richard Horpe. Alone of them, he had not fought in the Great Northern War between Braavos and the Pact of Four, only in the Sellsword War. “If he doesn’t wish to be disturbed then he shouldn’t be disturbed.”

“Does that mean you haven’t eaten for three days?” asked Marro.

“Not a great deal,” Stannis said.

“Captain—”

“Do not call me that!”

Marro exchanged looks with the others. “You know we know about your demotion, ser,” he said. “We think it was undeserved, so we call you ‘captain’ anyway. Moon knows you’re better than anyone else Handtaker has saddled us with. If you dislike it, we won’t.”

“It is not that,” said Stannis. He drew in a deep breath. “I have spoken with Handtaker this morning. I am no longer contracted to the Company of the Cat.”

A pause.

“So,” said Bozyno Vunel of Pentos, “we’re leaving, then.”

“With Bloodbeard, I take it?” Justin cast a scornful glance at the huge red-bearded man on the dais.

“No.”

That terse, bald word struck like a thunderbolt.

“I do not trust Bloodbeard,” Stannis said. “I served under Handtaker, lowborn as he is, but at least Handtaker has a mind to him. Bloodbeard is a reckless oaf and I will not have him as my commander. Nor will I stay here and settle down on some Braavosi estate. I mean to found a new free company, to be called the Swords of the Storm.”

He stopped for breath and looked over them all. “But this can only come to anything if you are with me.”

“I am with you,” Alequo Nudoon said at once. “Now and forever.”

Bozyno Vunel spoke softly, simply. “Always.”

“I do believe, ser, that, despite the commander’s name on the contract, you are well aware whose allegiance I was sworn to when I joined the Company of the Cat,” Justin began, “I am, of course, your sincerest and most faithful serv—”

“I’ll join,” said Marro Namerin, interrupting him.

“It wasn’t Aro Isattis I went looking to serve,” said Richard Horpe. “I think you know who.”

Stannis’s lips quirked. “I know.”

They were all behind him. They had not deserted him. This thought sent a thrill of hope tingling down his spine.

“As my most trusted, you will be my captains,” Stannis said. “I want you to find men who have fought beside me, be they of any free company. Men who saw the Battle of Nyrelos and the Battle of Lakimys and the Titanfall, if you can, but one is enough. Men who know what I can do and won’t be surprised by what I’m capable of. I know most of the men are staying here, at Handtaker’s offer, and most of those who are not are going with the… so-called ‘Company of Blood’.” He gestured at the crowd in the rest of the square. “But there should be at least a few of those who can be talked to.”

“It will be done, commander,” said Bozyno.

“If we’re recruiting, we should have banners to bring men to, to help them find us,” said Justin. “What should they be?”

“Baratheon banners,” Stannis said at once. “Only…” He hesitated. “No gold. Gold is the colour of treachery, like Anno Nusaris and his ilk.” And the golden rose of Tyrell.

“But ser,” said Ser Justin, “if we take Baratheon colours and remove the gold, that leaves only black.”

Mourning colours. Stannis thought, unwillingly, of Renly, the brother he had loved.

When the Swords of the Storm marched in neatly ordered ranks southward, their spears were sharp. Their bows were dry. Their quivers were full. Their armour was gleaming. And the standards above them were all mourning black without sign or sigil, snapping in the wind.

It is a cold clear morning, and the sky is icy blue. A few wisps of cloud are twirling in the heavens. To the east the golden summer sun has risen, nigh to noon. To the west beckons the neverending swell of deep, open sea. To the north, the summer sunlight dances on the rocks of the Shield Islands, gleaming off sharp edges that cast shards of brilliance into the spray.

To the south, men are at battle. Warships great and small ride the waves, all of them of Westerosi making. All are vessels of the royal fleet, hoisting royal black-and-golden banners in honour of the king. The question yet remains: which king?

The ships of the first fleet are big and bristling with men. They carry strong complements of mailed men-at-arms and longbowmen to ward off unwanted encroachment. Some even have scorpions mounted on their mighty decks. It is a day of weak wind, but that is little hindrance; the great vessels of the royal fleet, ‘galleys’ though the king may call them, are equally well readied to move by sails as by oarsmen. It is the oarsmen who are at work today, groaning with the commands of their taskmasters and the lashes of whips on their backs—thugs and lawbreakers, or at least men whom the goldcloaks of King’s Landing have lately declared are such. Those weary arms push their ships forth along surging trails of spray. They are the royal fleet of King Robert Baratheon, the First of His Name… the latest such fleet he has sent. Few of them have much respect for their glorious monarch, nowadays.

The second fleet has a thousand ships, twice the first fleet’s numbers. Their ships, though, are sleek and smooth-bottomed and lean—well-made to carve through the water and turn with alacrity that far surpasses King Robert’s cumbersome galleys. Yet it also can be said that Robert’s galleys much surpass them in size. The second fleet has many such galleys amongst it: a hundred big mainlander ships that have been seized in prior victories. They are the royal fleet of King Balon Greyjoy, the Ninth of His Name… an old man who sits on Pyke and does not lead them. Few of them have much respect for their glorious monarch, nowadays.

“Dispatch Ser Wylis’s squadron forward to port,” their high captain orders calmly, crisply. “I want them flanked; we’ll have no escape to the Sunset Sea.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The white ships with the mermaid banners veer to cut off the escape path of the outnumbered ironborn.

“Instruct Ser Tygett to advance to replace them.”

It is done. Ships with red-golden lion banners move forth to fill the gap the Manderlys left behind, forming an unbroken chain of royal galleys.

“And the Hightowers, my lord?” volunteers one of his lieutenants, a northman named Ser Mathis. He looks a little abashed. “Not me—they’ve signalled to ask their part in the advance.”

“To remain in place,” the high captain replies sharply. “I need them guarding the stonethrowers. The ironmen scum will try their very best to get our stonethrowers undefended; I do not mean to let them have a sporting chance.” Glory-hunting Reachmen, he thinks with scorn, but does not say it. “Lord Hightower’s ships are to stay where they are, come hell or high water. Am I understood?”

“I’ll have that message sent, my lord,” Ser Mathis says, and scrambles to bark orders at the man on the mast with the signal-flags.

The Lannister and Manderly ships continue boldly forward, leaving a trail of spray. The common-born sailors’ arms and whipped backs ache as they row as fast as they can on this cold windless day. From the deck of his command-ship, the high captain watches as chain of ships extends forth on the left flank of the Baratheon royal fleet—long, but compact and deadly, several ships deep, to prevent a breakthrough and breakout.

The ironman longships do not evade, which surprises him. If he were the ironman commander, at this point he would flee. But then again, whatever their flaws, they have always been a bold people.

“We’re getting them!” one of his crewmen whispers to another, bright-faced.

The men are excited. The high captain does not allow himself to show signs of such. He remains cold, crisp, in command. Yet he too thinks, At last. They have played a merry game thus far, and inflicted losses on the Seven Kingdoms, but those losses were not grievous. The Greyjoy rebels may have destroyed one of King Robert’s fleets, and then another; but the stormlands and the north have many more trees than they do, and this third fleet is vaster than the first. Now the ironborn are surrounded, outnumbered and out-armed.

And now, perhaps, House Grafton can remove the stain on its honour of backing the wrong side in the Rebellion by winning the decisive victory over the ironborn that Jason Mallister and Wyman Manderly could not. And maybe that will stop the men muttering about how they wish they had Ser Eldon Estermont—the king’s uncle and the victorious commander of the Battle of Dragonstone, dismissed by King Robert after that selfsame battle in a fit of capricious spite—instead of him.

The ships of the port flank continue moving forward and around. The rocks of the Shield Islands to the north, the rocks of the mainland to the east, the extended flank to the west and the main royal fleet to the south… The Iron Fleet is pinned in. There is nowhere they can flee to.

“Convey my compliments to all the captains,” Lord Gerold says crisply, “and issue them, if you will, with this command: Close in.”

They do so.

“Oh, and send one further order,” Gerold says lightly, as if making merely some remark. “To the heavy galleys at the rear, with the stonethrowers. Loose.”

“This is madness!”

A huge round rock crashes into an ironborn ship with a hideous brunch of wood and human bone. The oaken mainmast snaps like a twig. Two sailors are crushed into a grisly paste, red smears on the deck. More are slain by flying splinters. The deck is pierced in several places, and the moans of the wounded mingle with the terrified cries of their watching comrades as the water-level begins to rise: “Bail! Bail! Bail!”

The sinking ship rocks violently back and forth. The calm windless waters have been stirred to rocking by the frantic motions of ships, both sinking ones and those still floating and trying to avoid that fate.

Struggling to stand up straight, a huge broad man in full plate armour shoves his way to the starboard side of his ship’s deck. “This is madness!” he repeats, yelling at a man standing by the mast of the neighbouring ship, slenderer and shorter and less imposing. His ship rocks in a wave that is sent as another ship crashes into the water; despite his bulk, the impact flings him aside like a child’s toy. He stands, spitting blood, grey hair struggling to escape his helmet. “They’re butchering us!”

The man at the mast turns. He is slim, well-dressed, and breathtakingly lovely. Sunlight lingers as if longingly upon him: a curtain of lush black hair framing a face pale as moonbeams, with an eye the same shade as the open sea.

An eye. The other is concealed by a patch, you see.

“Why, hello there, Victarion,” he says with a radiant smile.

“What are you doing, Crow’s Eye?” Victarion Greyjoy roars.

“You will see.” Euron turns back to gaze upon the Baratheon galleys closing in towards them.

“When?”

“When it is time,” says Euron Crow’s Eye. His voice is mild, unperturbed. His ship the Silence is nearly struck by a scorpion-bolt; under its impact the sea trembles, and the Silence rocks side-to-side. Several crewmen are knocked over. Euron loses his footing and crashes onto the up-angled side of the deck.

“It must be time!” cries Victarion, flinging out a hand to gesture to the oncoming fleet. “Our longships aren’t built to fight like this! Those heavy ships are too close; we can’t evade them without hitting the rocks; we have nowhere to run. Whatever cunning scheme you’ve got up your arse, use it now!”

“Have faith, little brother,” Euron says, rising to his feet, sounding more amused than offended. “I have not led you false before. This is not the first fleet they have sent against us, I am sure that you recall. There was another, and another. Where now lies the Lord of Seagard, tall and proud? Where is the Lord of White Harbour? Where now fly the bright banners they carried into battle against us?”

“At the bottom of the sea,” admits Victarion.

Euron’s smile slips; it is no longer quite so handsome. It is somewhat like a shark’s smile—almost perfect, but a tiny bit too wide. “Oh yes. We have achieved so much together, you and I; your prowess in battle, and my skill in command. Be not afraid! For I am with you; and that matters more than anything.”

A shriek rings out as a man on the Silence is struck with a scorpion-bolt. The bolt is ten feet long and wickedly sharp; it impales the unlucky ironborn sailor and makes shredded ruin of a sail before it plunges into the sea. Both of the Greyjoy brothers stumble; Victarion keeps his feet, and the lighter Euron does not.

“We cannot fight like this!” Victarion howls.

Euron struggles to his feet. “We will wait,” he says through teeth bared. “We must.” Then suddenly he smiles—angelic, dazzling. “Believe me. Trust me. Do you not love me, after all this time?”

Victarion, looming and gigantic as he is, actually flinches. The Crow’s Eye laughs at him.

Slowly, surely, the Baratheon fleet close in. The ironborn are fighting. The ironborn are dying. Guarded by great Hightower galleys, the heavier ships at the rear with mounted stonethrowers and scorpions are sending a hail of rocks and bolts upon the ironborn, while the further-ahead galleys attack the longships with arrows and boarding parties. The ironborn are trapped in the narrow strait between the Shield Islands and the mainland, surrounded by rocks and greenlander ships on all sides. There is nowhere to run. There is nowhere to hide.

The Silence itself is nearly sunk by a stone that splashes into the nearby water. The grazing blow sends violent waves that hurl the ship from side to side so fiercely it is almost upturned. Many of Euron’s mutes hit the deck. So does Euron. No-one is immune to the ship’s woes.

Euron gets up, bloody and bruising. “Message to all ships,” he spits through broken teeth.

“At last,” murmurs Victarion, watching with panic and fear as his people are dismantled before his eyes.

“Get the captives,” Euron calls, as his mute tongueless crewmen frantically move their signal-flags. “Kill them.”

“What?!?” Victarion cannot hide his horror. “I thought you had a plan!”

“Be silent, brother,” Euron snarls. He looks back to the man with his signal-flags. “Instruct them: this is of the highest importance. I do not expect you to understand. I insist. Cut the necks of the greenlander captives on the prows, or you will not live to see the morrow’s dawn.”

“You’re leading all these men to die!” Victarion is incredulous. He is not afraid for himself, but— “How could you? You, even you of all men, how could you? How could you lead us into this? Your pride has brought doom to our people.”

Euron ignores him. Striding forward, as if to show how it is done, he walks to the captive; he leans over the aft of the quaking ship; he undoes the gag.

Words spill out. Brown eyes are wide with terror. “No, don’t! My lord cousin will reward you, I’m a Tyrell, you hear me, a Tyrell of Highgarden, he’ll pay ransom, whatever you like, you don’t dare, I’m your captive, you mustn’t, you don’t need to, you don’t—”

Euron flicks his wrist, dagger in hand. With all the dignity he would give a pig, he slits the Tyrell’s throat.

Blood gushes out like the words before, thick and red and pulsing. All across the ironborn fleet, at the prow of every ship, trembling ironborn sailors do likewise. Euron’s smiling eye stares straight at the Baratheon fleet, and his blue lips hiss:

“Ás táf tàth.”

The ocean shudders. Ships bob up and down like corks in a bath being splashed by a child. Great greenlander galleys are thrown about as easily as the ironborn longships. Countless sailors are physically thrown up off their feet and fall hard on the decks or waters.

Only Euron stands, straight, still as pillar, as fixed as the foundations of the earth, even as the ships careen from side to side like drunkards and the ocean trembles beneath his feet.

He smiles. It is almost serene.

“Ás táf tàth.”

The ocean screams. A high-pitched cry comes from beneath the waves. All the seabirds for miles take off and wheel away in fright, save only a passing eagle flying high in the distance. And in a circle half a mile wide around the Silence, including all the ships of all the fleets of all the kings, underneath the pale clear cold sky the waters darken. Blacker than blue, blacker than the deeps, blacker than midnight… The waves thrash like drowning men begging for succour.

They receive none. Straining with effort, through gritted teeth, the voice of the Crow’s Eye calls through the dark: “Ás—táf—tàth—shii.”

The ocean convulses. The waters beneath their feet are rent as if by a sword-thrust. Deep inky blackness bursts up from beneath the waves, drinking sunlight out of the sky.

Then, as the blackness spreads, you can see it is no longer blackness. It was never black at all, only, it was so dense you could not tell so. The writhing water has turned to blood.

More than a thousand ships are sailing upon an ocean out of nightmare. The placid waters of summer morning have turned to churning blood that repulses all things living. To their horror the mainlander sailors see the hulls of their ships, built for water, convulse and crackle at the unnatural touch of the red writhing sea. Wood bubbles, hisses, splinters, gives way. And when it does…when it does, the bloody tide lays its lethal touch upon the men.

Whenever they fall into the water, even the bravest men are turned to quivering children, weeping and crying with helpless fear. The sea of blood swallows them slowly, muffling their cries. Ships shudder and shake apart, spilling every man of their crews to the most grisly of fates, their bones moaning and shattering in the eldritch sea while they are drowning.

Yet the curse of the water does not cease. No such fate befalls the Silence.

Indeed, it is more than that. Through the chaos, gradually you realise that every ship with the sacrifices’ throats leaking into the waves is spared. The sea of blood spreads from them, it does not consume them. Only those who listened to the Crow’s Eye are protected. No such luck goes to those who were sensible and careful, focusing on the battle. The ironborn ships whose captains did not heed every mad command are being devoured by the bloody tide as remorselessly as the mainlanders.

On the ships that gave sacrifice, ironborn watch wide-eyed as their comrades on neighbouring ships die screaming.

Some of those ships’ crews dash to their prows, desperate with fear and fading hope, wantonly slaughtering their fellow-men with none of the knives and spells and knowledge that their master used. It is too late. It is far too late. The massacres avail nothing. They are, and remain, doomed.

Among King Robert’s royal fleet, chaos reigns. Full-grown men are sobbing, calling for their mothers. As he yells his orders, struggling to be heard over the screams, amidst the end of the world Gerold Grafton somehow hears a small soft voice.

A young sailor is kneeling on the deck, shaking, eyes closed. He cannot be more than four-and-ten. “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”

“See!” Euron is laughing, drunk on power or drunk on blood, you cannot tell. “You thought yourself my equal, little brother? See what I am! Do you not see? Do you not see? Do you not see?”

All the mainlanders are screaming now, from lofty lords to whipped oarsmen. They fight desperately to keep their ships afloat for one more minute, one more second, one more moment—knowing what will befall them if, when, they cannot.

The sea of bubbling blood is eating through the thick beams of their hulls. Greedily it reaches for their flesh.

No more thought is paid to the ironborn. They think only of escape. They think only of survival. Lofty lords and overseers drop their whips, fall to their knees and man the oars of their galleys with the utmost of their strength, toiling fiercely to row out of the killing zone as their ships disintegrate beneath them.

It is for nothing. Only one small ship escapes the massacre, a ship of a sort. Its crew are four screaming sailors, maddened by the madness they have seen, missing toes or hands or legs that briefly touched the water. What they are clinging to is no ship, just a piece of scorched driftwood which—be it by the will of the Crow’s Eye or by pure blind luck—is caught by a current that bears it out of the sea of blood, out into clear clean water, half a second before it would have been consumed entirely. Through them, the folk of mainland Westeros will learn what has befallen their fleet when they wash ashore on the beaches of Lannisport, incapable of everything except to writhe wild-eyed and babbling without end “The blood!—the blood!—the blood!—”

Slowly, as the last of the Baratheon ships collapse to skeletal timbers, blood turns back to water.

All the king’s ships and all the king’s men availed him naught. Robert has been defeated yet again, this time more terribly than ever. Boneless chunks of ships and men drift on the water’s surface, covering the sea with the detritus of the countless dead. Barely half of the ironborn survive. Those who do look with stupefied awe upon the Crow’s Eye.

There is a vast, ghastly silence.

Then a great cloud crosses the air, dark against the sky. Euron looks up, idle, cat-quick, curious. It grows, and grows, and grows…

…you see, it is not a cloud at all. It is not growing. It is coming closer.

A crowd of crows are rushing here from the nearby land, drawn by the overpowering scent of blood. Crows in their tens of thousands—no, hundreds of thousands—no, crows in their millions are here to feast upon the corpses of the slain. When they descend, their extraordinary numbers nigh block out the sun.

At the same time, the sea, once blue, once red, turns grey with a feeding frenzy of thousands of sharks swimming up from the depths. They dine on the sinking stinking chunks of sailors, snapping and fighting with one another for their share of this banquet of carrion beyond anything seen in the circles of the world.

A thousand miles away, a pair of dark blue eyes snap open.

Upon awareness, attendants come rushing close. “My prince, what—”

“Commander—”

A low rumbling voice speaks over them all. “I am going to find Euron Greyjoy. And I am going to kill him.”

There was a candle in the dark. It twisted and turned and painted the chamber in flickering shades, flickering beasts, flickering faces, flickering pictures. He fancied he could see such things, hereabouts. Mayhaps that was only the wine.

A knock. Polite, firm. “May I come in?”

“Come on in,” he mumbled, pressing his face into a pillow.

The door opened. A rectangle of white light shone through into his bedchamber: cold, bright, unwelcome. Urghhhh. His head was still being trampled by horses’ hooves hammering. He saw the stooped thin figure at the door, robed in blue and white. A face approached and peered down on him with concern. He saw the liver-spots, the prominent nose. He knew that face.

“Jon,” he said, reaching out with one hand, as warmly as he would to anyone. Certainly more than to his wife.

“Robert,” his foster father said, clasping his hand, not tightly; Jon’s grip was ever so frail. “A difficult night?”

“A little,” said Robert, sitting up. He did not wish to dwell on it. “Why now?”

Jon’s face tightened, just a little, but enough for him to see. It saddened him. Robert did not like to disappoint his foster father, but it happened so often he wondered how he could stop. He loved that old man and was vexed by him in equal measure.

“You did not come to our meeting yesterday, Your Grace,” his Hand reminded him. “I specifically asked you to find time to come.”

“Oh, another of those,” said Robert. He did not know why Jon kept bothering. He had told the old man enough times, it surely ought to be obvious by now. He thought to turn over on the bed and press his head against the furs, to calm the stamping in there, but he could not find it in himself to do so. It felt too awkward when Jon was there, watching him.

“Yes, another of those,” said Jon. “One more important than most. Your councillors await your attention as we speak.”

“In the council chamber?”

“No. Outside the door.”

Robert groaned and sat up. “Why can’t you decide for yourselves?”

Jon stepped gingerly between half-empty wineskins on the floor, took Robert’s hand and moved to pull him up to his feet. In truth it was Robert who did most of the pulling. It would have been elsewise, once, but Jon no longer had the strength for much, and Robert could not bear making him feel weak out of pettiness. Like any man, his foster father had his pride.

“The power of all your councillors and courtiers is what you give them,” Jon said, with the air of a man who had said the same thing many times before. “All right and law in their decisions flow from you. Underneath all of it, all the ceremony, all the silks and smells and castles and pretensions, court is where the king is. The king is power; to be close to the king is to be close to power. If you are not at court, court will come to you.”

“I never wanted it,” said Robert.

“Do you want a Targaryen to have it?”

Robert was up at once, his voice a snarl. “Never say that.”

“Then it is yours.” Jon shrugged. “Who else’s could it be?”

The servants were called in. They helped Robert out of his wine-stained garments, washed him, trimmed his beard and put him in new clothes. By the end of it he was draped as splendidly as a king should be. A crown shone forth atop the pale, glistening, sweaty skin of Robert’s head, and fine walls of black and golden silk concealed the bulging rolls of fat that had been arrayed before Jon this morning.

Jon strode briskly to the council chamber, flanked by the rest of the small council and three sworn brothers of the Kingsguard. Several times he caught himself going ahead and slowed down for the king. They strode through bright-lit corridors, with the king blinking bleary-eyed; curious onlookers rushed close to call and jostle for royal attention, but were warded off by the white shadows. The torches were scented like honey, trees and flowers, sweet, sometimes sickly sweet. Those smells contested against the fumes of refuse, raw fish and stinking unwashed sweat that wafted ever up from the markets, dungheaps and brewhouses below them. Usually, the perfumes could prevail over the urban desolation underneath.

When at last they reached the council chamber, he began at once, not wishing yet further delay. From that walk the king was already sweating. “As you will be aware,” Jon said as he sat down at the table, “we have received word from the war in the west.”

“More of the ironmen?” said Robert, leaning in. A thick-backed chair next to Jon groaned and shuddered as he sat. “I would know more of the battle.”

“As would I,” said Jon.

There must have been a battle. That much was clear. But all that they knew about the great sea-battle that they must have lost were some terrified peasants, reporting a great din and the sound of screaming and a swarm of crows afterwards, and the words of some madmen Lord Tywin’s men had found washed up on the westerlands’ shore. My best men have interrogated them at length, Lord Lannister wrote, and no expense has been spared, I assure you. Yet ever they refuse to say aught at all, save for endless rambling about blood.

Jon found much to fault in some of his fellow councillors, but they were old and seasoned enough to know that peasants’ and soldiers’ tall tales would always make whatever they had seen seem more fearsome. Ofttimes a frightened villager’s imagination would turn a foraging party into a company or a company into an army ten-thousand strong. Noise? Screams? Crows? Green young troops sickened and unmanned when the truth of bloodshed did not match their boyish dreams, becoming broken men? These were features of every battle ever fought. It was exceedingly vexing to have spent so much of the treasury upon the king’s latest fleet, lose it, and barely know anything about how it had been lost.

He went on, “Yet that is not what we hear.” He hesitated. “It is a different sort of word. Grand Maester?”

“A raven has come from Pyke,” quavered Pycelle, under the king’s intent gaze. “House Greyjoy has sent to Your Grace for peace.”

Of everything Robert might have expected, it had not been that. His jaw dropped. “Now?”

“Now,” confirmed Jon.

“Lord Balon has just won his greatest victory yet,” said Ser Harys Swyft of Cornfield. “Why would he be reaching out to His Grace?”

“It is not Lord Balon who asks. The letter is sent in the name of Lord—they say ‘King’, of course—Dagon Greyjoy.”

The wispy-bearded master of laws blinked. “Dagon Greyjoy has not lived for many years.”

“Not the Dagon our fathers knew, Ser Harys,” the Lord of the Eyrie said irritably. Doddering old fool. There were not many men of whom he would or could say that; Harys Swyft was among them. “It is another Dagon, named for that one. The son of Maron Greyjoy, I am given to understand, and heir to the Seastone Chair in the days of Lord Balon.”

“So Balon’s dead,” said the king, taking this in. He laughed all of a sudden. “Thought I’d outlive that squid-faced old bastard.”

“Yet Dagon son of Maron would not be reaching out to us,” remarked Lord Varys. “In five moons and a week it will be his twelfth nameday.”

Jon refused to let himself be daunted by Varys’s seemingly boundless memory for such things. Did he know about the letter already, or does he remember all things so well?

“That is so,” Jon said, dipping his head. “It is sent on Lord Dagon’s behalf, not by him. The sender who claims to speak for him is Euron Greyjoy.”

There was a heavy pause. It was broken by the king’s uncle Ser Eldon Estermont, a green-clad knight sitting down at the other end of the table, near where Jaime Lannister stood. The man had grey hair and well over sixty namedays, but Jon supposed he must seem the very picture of youthful vigour next to the master of laws, the Grand Maester and Jon himself. “The dangerous one among the Greyjoys—the one who sank Mallister’s fleet and Manderly’s, likely Grafton’s too—is now regent of Pyke.”

“Yes.” Ser Eldon had every right to be wary, the Lord of the Eyrie considered. He had lately risen back to his old post of master of ships, thanks in part to the queen’s influence and in part to the fact that… well, who else was there for it? If things went awry, he would be the next high captain to lead an expensive fleet out to be slaughtered on the Sunset Sea.

“Well then? Out with it,” Robert demanded. “What does Greyjoy want?”

Grand Maester Pycelle began to read in his ponderous, creaky voice. “In light of the unfortunate conflict that has prevailed between the royal House Greyjoy and the royal House Baratheon, which in the eyes of the heavens must truly be accounted a curse, and in their mutual pursuit of a just and lasting peace that shall resolve all issues presently outstanding, His Lordship—”

Mother spare me. “They’ll stop their raiding of our shores,” Jon interrupted. “Lord Euron promises to enforce that himself. The ironmen to keep the islands they have taken, for we have failed to retake them. A small tribute of twelve-thousand dragons per year. And Your Grace’s recognition of the iron islands as a sovereign kingdom unto themselves, as they were of old.”

“Never,” said Robert.

Jon took in a deep breath. Here comes the danger. He prepared to speak—

—until someone else did. “I would advise Your Grace to accept it.”

“Accept it?” Robert erupted.

“Do you lack faith in His Grace and in victory?” cried Harys Swyft.

Jon was just as shocked. He had been about to give the same counsel, but he had not foreseen support from any on the small council save for his own bannerman. He had not expected a lackey of Queen Cersei’s to be responsible enough to give Robert sound, unpopular advice.

“In my judgement as Your Grace’s master of ships,” Eldon Estermont said, “Your Grace’s realm is not ready for another attempt against the ironmen. Command me to go forth to the ironmen in another paltry handful of years and I will do as you bid me, Your Grace; but I must warn you that I do not expect it to bring you victory. If we do the same thing that cost us the past two of three sea-battles, we’ll lose.”

“What if I don’t trust that judgement?” snarled Robert.

Jon flinched. That would be reopening an old wound.

“You should,” Ser Eldon told his nephew. “I won the Battle of Dragonstone for Your Grace; I defeated the Targaryen fleet, the greater threat, when all the inadequate replacements you found for me have failed to crush the ironmen as I would have. If any man in your realm knows how sea-battles are won and lost, I do. And I tell you, building a fourth fleet to do the same as the first three will not be enough. Each fleet will be worse than the last.”

“Why?” said Robert. He made an impatient gesture. “Let the lumberjacks have at the whole kingswood if that’s what it takes. There’s enough godsdamned trees in there anyway; I don’t need them all.”

“Oh, we have timber,” said Estermont, “and we’ve no lack of flax for rope and sailcloth, thanks to the marshes of the Neck. What Your Grace cannot grow so easily are decent sailors. Aerys levied thousands of men from the port cities for his royal fleet, then you for yours—the first one, that I led—then twice more, for the fleets you gave to Lords Manderly and Grafton. Is it any wonder Greyjoy beat them? I could have led the fleet that fool Jason Mallister dropped at the bottom of the Whispering Sound and with them I may have defeated the Greyjoys. Lord Grafton’s fleet may have had more ships, but I would not so fancy my chances.

“A fleet is like an army, Your Grace. It is made of men, not just of wood and sail. The best, most seasoned sailors in the realm have already been sent to die—fleet after fleet of them. Oh, we can build more ships, not a doubt, more ships than the ironmen ever can. ’Tis the men who are the trouble.” Ser Eldon drew a deep breath. “Your Grace, if Rhaegar had plucked up a thousand confused green peasant boys from across the riverlands, handed them pikes and sent them running at your host, would that have won him the Trident?”

Robert snorted. “Not a chance. We’d have put them to rout.”

“Just so. Your Grace sees clearly,” Eldon Estermont said with an ingratiating bow. “Well I tell you, as a captain of fleets—it is the same folly as to send out seasick landlubbers to fight the Greyjoy fleet. And levying some poor hapless crewmen from merchants’ cogs would fare little better.”

The comparison seemingly struck spark in Robert. The king was still angry, but he was listening.

“I hear what you say,” Robert said, “but the ironmen must be crushed.” He had beaten Rhaegar. The very idea of letting Balon Greyjoy beat him made his blood boil. “If we can’t levy the sailors for our fighting ships, we’ll hire them.”

“We have hired sellsails against the iron islands already. Half of Lord Manderly’s fleet was of those,” Robert’s uncle reminded him. “They went down anyway, when Euron Greyjoy confronted them off the coast of Dorne, and most of them fled the battle when it turned sour. The blood of Lord Manderly, Lord Blackwood, Lord Crakehall, Lord Meadows, half a hundred knights and lordlings and thousands of smallfolk of your realm is on their hands—them and their cowardice. What makes you think they’d do better this time?”

“There is a company of sellsails and sellswords that was not hired, back then,” observed Harys Swyft. “A company that does not flee; has never fled before.”

The world came to a halt. Cressen’s voice, trembling, hesitant. “I hate to tell you, but I must”… “I’ve reason to believe a terrible deed has been done”… Sacrifice is never easy, maester. Or it is no true sacrifice. A knife covered in blood. A voice chanting spells. A child screaming. It was like a nightmare, but he was awake—he was awake—

“No,” Varys broke in. “Absolutely not.”

“Never,” Robert swore.

“Why not?” asked Ser Harys. “There is no other free company like the Swords of the Storm. No sellsail yet, nor any other captain has defeated the Greyjoys at sea, yet let us not say it cannot be done. Their record is replete with impossible victories. Was not the pride of the Archon of Tyrosh trapped and caught and burnt at anchor? Were not ten-thousand screaming horselords, the horde of Drogo, broken on an open field? Was not Braavos, Queen of Cities, sacked and dethroned?”

“Your Grace must not. The peril is too great,” urged Varys. “The Sealord of Braavos was dethroned indeed, and might not be alone. Hire the Swords of the Storm to kill the ironmen and perhaps, perhaps they would prevail. If they do, how long would Your Grace wear a crown afterward?”

“Stannis Baratheon would never steal your crown,” Petyr Baelish dismissed. The copper-counter’s boyish face had too much certainty. “He hasn’t the heart for it. He’s never stayed in one place long enough for that. From Pentos to Volantis, from Yi-Ti to Ghiscar, from Ibben to Sothoryos… he rarely stays in the same kingdom for more than half a year, let alone the same city. A man like that, settling down to be king?” His voice was one of open disbelief. “Not a chance. He’s a sellsword through and through.”

“You do not know Stannis like I do,” Robert said darkly, scorning Baelish’s earnestness. “You don’t know what he’s done.” He spoke it like a chant, some superstitious screed to ward off shadows. “You don’t know. You can’t know.”

Nonetheless, black memories rose in his head, both imagined and real. That godsforsaken day echoed oft in his thoughts; Robert supposed it would never leave him, for the rest of his life. His brother striding into his royal hall, tall and proud and haunted, skin tight to his bones, so gaunt he looked more like a skeleton than a man. Robert had not wanted to believe what Maester Cressen had told him. The first efforts, playing at decency as a mummer’s farce, as if nothing was wrong… trying to hide it, but not quite having the will…

Poor child.

My heart grieves for him. I wish he’d chosen otherwise.

Stannis had sought to hide his sin, and Robert had hoped that Cressen was wrong, somehow, though the old maester was not one to lie to him. But Stannis’s glee at his hideous accomplishment had shone through too bright to conceal.

We’ve no fleet. The ships of Gulltown and White Harbour aren’t nearly enough. Until we build one, Balon Greyjoy and the dragonspawn are untouchable.

That smile. That smile. Barely a smile at all, yet Robert would never forget that cold little twist of lips. Doubtless Paxter Redwyne thought himself so.

Was that smile the last thing Renly had seen? His poor, poor brother, barely more than a babe, a sweet little boy who had tickled and giggled in Robert’s arms whenever he visited. The thought of anyone wanting to do him harm was unimaginable. Had it been quick? Had he screamed?

The final moments. Robert, enraged, upright. Stannis, thin as bones, half-dead and utterly unrepentant for the monstrous sin he had committed. His last appeal. Everything that I have done, I’ve done for you.

Robert shuddered, drenched in disgust deeper than anything. “No. No.”

His small council were exchanging glances. “Yes, Your Grace,” said Ser Eldon, cloyingly, bowing his head. “It will not be done. You will be obeyed.”

Slowly, Robert came to breathe more shallowly. “It’s bad, I understand,” he said. “But not Stannis, in all the gods’ names. Never him.”

A placating murmur: “Yes, Your Grace.”

“I know it’s bleak,” King Robert thundered. “Sellswords are the answer. If we don’t have the men to face down the Greyjoys, we’ll get more. We can afford more ships and men than they can.”

“Your Grace must pardon the question,” Jon said, treading on eggshells. “I must say, or at least somebody must: Suppose that you send out another fleet. How do you pay for it?”

His foster son looked straight at him, overcome by shock. “You aren’t going to say we give those ironmen co*cksuckers what they want because of stags and coppers?”

Carefully, Jon said, “With respect, Your Grace, that does not answer the question.”

Robert waved a hand with impatience. “Borrow some. We’ll pay it back when I’ve a drinking cup of Euron Greyjoy’s skull.”

Petyr Baelish said, bluntly, “From whom?”

“Same as always,” said Robert. “Lord Tywin, the High Septon, Lord Mace, the…” He trailed off.

“The Iron Bank of Braavos,” Lord Baelish completed his liege’s thought. “Precisely.”

“My brother,” the king breathed. “My f*cking gods-damned brother. Not again.”

“Pardon me, my lord, but your hopelessness seems unwarranted,” interjected Grand Maester Pycelle. “Lord Tywin, as His Grace’s leal and generous subject, would doubtless be willing to offer some assistance to his goodson in this time of hardship.”

“Unless he can sh*t out a whole treasury, Lord Tywin doesn’t have the coin for it,” retorted Baelish. “Not on his own, nor with the High Septon, nor with Lord Mace. I have already borrowed much from all three of them, before and especially after the Iron Bank’s fall.”

“He need not be on his own,” said Pycelle. “The Iron Bank still stands. At least, Sealord Aro insists it does and all its vaults are now in his possession. Would he not be willing to extend us a sum, to win the gratitude of the Seven Kingdoms?”

“Accepting the Sealord’s will would be a calamity for the realm,” Baelish snapped. “Your Grace owed five and a half million gold dragons to the Iron Bank before the Titanfall. All of that, we wrote off when Braavos fell. If not for that, His Grace’s debt would be more than double what it is today.” His voice turned pleading. “Your Grace, Aro Isattis has said he’ll only offer loans to those who recognise the Iron Bank today, under him, as the same Iron Bank they owed coin to. If you take a million-dragon loan from the Braavosi, you will have to pay six dragons for every dragon you get from them.”

“Six dragons in the future,” said Ser Harys. “Versus one dragon we need now.”

Jon did not say a word. He just looked at him, witheringly, with undisguised contempt. No wonder your House grew so poor you had to give up your daughter as a hostage in place of the coin you owed to House Lannister.

That Kevan Lannister had ended up marrying the aforesaid daughter, thus perchance uplifting Ser Harys to prominence and inflicting him on the rest of the world, was, if nothing else, proof that the Seven had a sense of humour.

The king had moved on. “What of the other Free Cities? Will they give us a loan?”

“No,” admitted Baelish. “Pentos won much land and gold in the Great Northern War but she has lost a lot of it to horde after horde of horselords. She is richer than ever, these days,” he added, for the king’s sake, “and less defensible than the other Free Cities, you see, so they go there for tribute more than anywhere else. Volantis is by miles the richest and mightiest of them all, but since the Tigers came to power, she is too intent on asserting her grasp up the Rhoyne to have the coin to spare for us. Tyrosh, Lys and Myr are slaughtering each other, as always. And the rest have not the coin for it.”

He wished he did not have to say it. The rest of the small council knew all of this backwards. As a boy, Jon had loved Robert’s joy and liveliness—it was a virtue in a child—but he had hoped that, as his foster son grew, he would grow more responsible. Instead, it felt sometimes as if the fostering had never truly ended.

“Then I will have to raise a tax,” said Robert, with some trepidation.

“More?” asked Jon, appalled. There was no law against it, but it was perilous for a liegelord, be he lord or king, to levy a tax without the consent of his bannermen. That had ever been so. “That would warrant a council, and I doubt the lords of the realm would agree. Father Above knows it scares me how much they are grumbling already, and that is just for the tax we levied two moons after you came to the throne, to suppress the ironmen. That tax has lasted a dozen times longer than they thought when they accepted it. Demand more, for what has been a manifestly unsuccessful war? You’d face revolt.”

“If you want to continue the war,” Lord Baelish said, “I see no other way, Your Grace.”

“Then it must be done,” said Robert, grimly, “for all the risk of it. I won’t suffer Balon bloody Greyjoy to beat me.”

Lord Petyr, who had been driving at the opposite answer, manfully struggled not to scream.

“Why so?” said Ser Eldon. “Peace would not be victory, but need not be defeat.”

Robert blinked at him. “Don’t be absurd, Uncle. How wouldn’t it be?”

“The first thing Your Grace must recall is that the ironmen are not winning this war,” Ser Eldon said. “They are not losing, true, but they are not winning. Their first raid on Oldtown was a failure and their second raid failed more embarrassingly than the last. Lord Balon’s right arm, severed at Ser Garth Hightower’s feet, is testament to that. When they tried to surprise us by striking elsewhere, Maron Greyjoy’s march on Highgarden two years ago was a calamity from start to finish. At sea the ironmen are kings. On land they are an annoyance.”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted the king. “You say nothing I don’t already know. How does that serve us when we cannot get to them?”

“Will Your Grace hear me?”

“Get to the point,” said Robert.

“Most of the ironmen’s victories in this war have been raids or skirmishes, or sacks of defenceless villages and minor castles, or surprise attacks at the war’s very beginning when they seized the Arbour from Your Grace’s rightful rule,” Ser Eldon said. Not that we have ever ruled the Arbour, Jon thought. The last king in King’s Landing who had was Aerys. “None of those are beyond understanding. All their real victories, the great battles that cannot be explained, were led by one man—the same man who writes to us now. By this Lord Euron Greyjoy.”

“And?”

“The Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros has many strengths in this war,” Eldon Estermont argued. “More timber, more flax, more gold, more steel, more swords, more men to hold them. To match that, the ironmen have… one superb commander. Grand Maester, how many namedays has Euron Greyjoy seen?”

“Ser, if the records Pyke’s maester sent to the Citadel speak true,” Pycelle said, “eight-and-fifty.”

“And there we have it,” Ser Eldon said with satisfaction. “Let us take time, for the passing of time is on our side. Our weaknesses are the lack of ships and war-sailors, and time will heal those. The ironmen’s weaknesses cannot be healed. Every year of peace tilts the balance further in our favour. And when it has tilted enough… then, then there will be a reckoning.”

Light dawned in Robert’s eyes. “You don’t mean me to keep my word to the ironmen?”

Jon blinked, genuinely taken aback. “Good Heavens, no, of course not. Why on earth would you do that?”

“I beg your pardon, Your Grace,” Eldon Estermont said, “I understand your objections better now.”

“No, I never meant to keep the peace with the ironmen. Such a peace would only be an armistice for the next war,” said Jon. “Let them have peace now. Let them keep Fair Isle, the Shield Islands, the Arbour; Warrior knows it is not as if we have the power to retake them, in any case. Let them have their tribute.”

“It may sound like much,” Petyr reassured the king, “but it’s a great deal less than we’ve been spending to pay the army, and to build beacons and fortifications up and down the coast.”

“Thank you, Lord Baelish,” Jon said with a respectful nod. The clever, earnest young Valeman owed Jon everything he had. Honest Petyr was the only one on the small council whom Jon could trust. “Let them have this peace where we lose nothing, except acknowledging what we’ve already lost. And then, in ten years or thereabouts, we come back, rested, strong, and set their dirty little kingdom to the torch.”

Jon’s heart had risen. It might work. We might truly persuade him.

“In ten years,” repeated Robert.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Ten years of disgrace. Ten years of defeat. Ten years when they’ll laugh at me,” said Robert, purpling. “Ten years when those f*cking godsdamned smallfolk keep calling me Robert the Weak.”

That isn’t what they call you anymore, Jon thought. It hasn’t been for years. Jon was old, but his ears were sharper than the servants and the cityfolk sometimes guessed, when his wheelhouse took him about the city on business. Ofttimes he overheard things he guessed they thought he would not. Nowadays it was ‘Robert the Fat’ that was said by smiths and merchants and educated folk, and ‘Fatarse Bob’ by the rest. Even ‘Craven Bob’ he had heard more than a few times.

Judiciously, he did not say so.

“Ten years to recover,” Jon told his foster son. “Ten years to make your kingdom strong again.”

“Defeat is what it is.” Robert spat. “No, Lord Arryn. I will not have it. Levy a tax. Reach out to Lord Tywin, Lord Mace and the Sealord. We’ll hire the next fleet with their gold.”

“Pardon me, Your Grace; that is folly,” Jon said firmly.

“My mind is made,” said Robert. “I am still your king, gods damn you. Do it.”

“Every courtier will tell a king what he wishes. A king needs men whom he can trust to tell him what he does not want to hear,” Jon said. “Are you a king or a singer, to have your pride be coddled so?”

His foster son flinched, like he would when he had been a child. The question was stinging. But then, unlike the child he had been, Robert drew himself up in defiance of Lord Arryn. “Don’t you dare,” he snarled, flabby jowls quivering. “Don’t talk back to me like that.”

Jon stood. “I tell you, Robert, this will ruin you.” He used his sternest, lordliest voice. “Do not sacrifice your kingdom on the altar of your impatience.”

“Do it.”

“Very well,” said Jon.

Robert paused, surprised to feel resistance vanish. “You…? Good.”

“I have served you many years, foster son,” Jon said quietly. “I have acclaimed you as king. I have fought wars for you. I have toiled to keep your realm from bankruptcy, against your own best efforts. I have filled the offices of your court. I have persuaded foreign dignitaries that you will pay your debts. I have negotiated with your lords to keep them quiescent under you. I have put the entire ancient legacy of House Arryn on the line to protect you from Mad Aerys. At peril of the neglect of my own dominion, I have governed your crown’s fiefs, the stormlands and the Seven Kingdoms, all at once, as you will not do it yourself.

“All this I have done, for the love I bear you.” His voice was one of mounting rage. “If, in spite of all that service, you insist on this absurdity—if you wish to bring mutiny and ruin to the realm out of spite—then you can find yourself another Hand. For I will have no part of it.”

Jon took the golden chain of office from around his neck, drew it up and flung it on the floor. He turned his back on the king and started walking out of the council chamber.

“Come back,” called Robert. His voice rose. “Come back, Jon, I command you!”

“Nor I.” Young Lord Petyr was first, quick to rise to Jon’s side, as ever the fiercest champion of Lord Arryn on the council.

“Nor I.” Then Ser Eldon Estermont, whose reappointment he had long struggled against, whom he would never have thought of as an ally, but who had become one in this.

“Nor I.” Varys the eunuch rose to his feet to pad beside Jon. “I beg Your Grace to reconsider.”

Belatedly, upon seeing everyone else was doing so, Grand Maester Pycelle stood up. “Your Grace,” he stuttered, “I truly do not think this is the wisest course…”

“Oh, shut up, maester.” Robert sank back into his chair.

Jon stopped walking. He turned.

“I’ll do it.” Robert rubbed his face. His eyes were red and tired. “Just stop, godsdamn you.”

“I am glad that Your Grace has seen sense,” Jon said. “You are making the right decision.”

“I am?” Robert said, softly. “Yes. Right.”

“This is not defeat,” Jon said. “We are not a conquered people. The ironmen have failed miserably in their every attempt to make us that. This is a pause that will buy us the time to bring us victory.”

As Jon and the others filed out of the chamber, leaving him alone with silent white shadows like Selmy, Robert sank back into the comfort of the chair. The thick wood groaned under the pressure. He had always been a big man, but chairs did not always do that, he remembered.

This is not defeat, Jon had said. Robert wished he had Jon’s sharp, clear certainty. Even now he had not lost the sense of awe he had as a child, that his foster father seemed so strong, so sure, so proud. To him it all seemed murkier. They had fought a war to halt the ironmen’s bid to be a sovereign kingdom once again, and now the ironmen were sovereign. Mayhaps it was not defeat, but how could it not be? That did not feel to Robert like victory.

Would this be how they remembered him? He wondered it. A fat man sitting on a chair, cowering before his own councillors, helpless to prevent the ironmen from wreaking havoc on his realm. Would they blame it on him? It was not fair; he was no captain of ships, to fight the ironmen on the seas; but would they? Would they be saying, everything would be fine, if only Rhaegar Targaryen were king?

He mumbled, “Craven Bob.”

He was not as dumb and deaf as they thought him. Robert knew what the servants and the cityfolk called him; he had overheard it more than once, when he entered and left King’s Landing’s brothels and winesinks. It was one thing to be feared, thought of as cruel. A cruel king, at least, was strong. But this…? Craven Bob. The shame of it was like a spear to the gut. He had never thought men would call him a craven.

Gods, how had he ended up like this? Even he did not know.

“Tell a servant. More wine,” Robert growled. Ser Meryn Trant, grumbling something about indignity, went away from Robert’s side to find one. They waited a minute, then a serving girl entered with a bottle, a pale slip of a girl, mayhaps five-and-ten. She was hesitant, trembling as if afraid he would be in one of his dark moods.

“Come over here,” Robert ordered impatiently. She came close enough to hand him the wine-bottle. He took a great big guzzle from it. As she began to walk away, he thrust a meaty hand down her bodice.

The serving girl squealed, a sound that delighted Robert. His enjoyment of it was marred by Jaime Lannister scowling over him.

He had no taste for the Kingslayer’s silent condemnation. “f*ck off,” he growled; Ser Jaime stormed out in a fury. More tactfully, Ser Barristan stood up and walked to stand outside the council chamber.

Robert went on with his business. He wanted to feel like a man again.

Thus the king and his council drew their conclusions, from the best of what they knew.

Was it a bad plan, as Robert Baratheon believed? A good plan, as Jon Arryn would have said? Perhaps. That is all that can be said: ‘perhaps’. One cannot know.

For they did not have ten years. They did not even have one.

In nine turns of the moon Jon Arryn would be dead. Shortly later Robert Baratheon would join him. Things fall apart; the gods mock the certainty of men, and the best-laid plans of beggars and kings alike are torn up by the game of thrones.

It was the dead of moonless night when he heard the roar.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaah.

Jorah near jumped out of his skin. The ground beneath him shuddered. The block on which he had been sharpening his sword shook so badly the sword skidded off and well nigh cut him. But nothing trembled so much as the great slab of layered red sandstone.

For three helpless seconds he just sat there, blinking dimly in the firelight. Then the instincts that long hours of commands had drilled into him kicked him in the face, and he started hollering.

“’Ware! Beware! ’Ware! All men, up! All men, up!”

Swearing, moans of sleepy men, rough curses as men turned on their sides. “What… what…?”

“Up!” Jorah kept shouting. “Up, up, up, up! There’s something down there, I heard it! There’s some kind of beast under there—” he pointed with his sword to the great slab of stone— “and it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive!”

More swearing, foul sellswords’ curses so profane that half an earful would have deafened a whole septry’s worth of septas. But for all the grumbling, Jorah noticed, they rose quickly. In thirty seconds most men had at least a knife in their hands. In a minute most had all the armament the company insisted every man must know: a spear, a crossbow, a shield and a sword. In a minute and a half, most were mailed; pairs of men chosen long before this day kept watch for each other, so that one man was always facing the threat while the other pulled on a shirt of mail.

“What’s all this about, Ioras?” Beluros asked, a genial bearded man from Tyrosh stepping up by his side with crossbow in-hand. Jorah liked him. He spoke Tyroshi Valyrian, as Jorah did (while most of the company used Braavosi), and he was one of the few other men in the company who had seen more than forty namedays as Jorah had. Even if he could never pronounce Jorah’s name.

“Something under the trapdoor has woken,” said Jorah. “Something is trying to get out.”

“Ah. Hellish beast, I guess? Another one of those.”

“Is…” Jorah struggled. “Is this what it is always like?”

“We’re the Swords,” Beluros shrugged. “Comes wiv’ the job. Madness follows us around.” Misinterpreting Jorah’s appalled expression, he added, “No worries, you’ll get used to it damn soon. Well, that or dead, o’ course.”

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaah.

The slab of sandstone, heavier than ten men, trembled.

Years of drills and discipline brought Jorah’s companions swiftly to motion. Jorah was glad when he espied a figure in wrought iron plate riding on a white horse from elsewhere in the camp. Beside him rode a standard-bearer with a long lance from which there flew a sigilless black banner. One of the Black Captains, it had to be: someone in charge, who would know what to do. Richard Horpe, Jorah guessed from a brief glimpse of a lean scarred face, visible for just a moment before the rider jammed on his full closed helm. A good sign. Of all the Black Captains the man was reputed to be the most fearsome warrior in person. They would need that now.

“Who called alarm?” barked Horpe, not wasting a word.

Jorah stepped up. “I did.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, feeling very small, “I just heard it, this great noise that came from under the trapdoor…”

The Black Captain cursed, casting a dark glance at the slab. “I should’ve known. Gods damn it. f*cking commander, always takes us places like this…”

In an instant, his voice rose.

“Form lines, men! Half-circle! Rows! By the trees! Half-circle! Rows!” repeated Horpe. “Get in your lines! No not there, you fool, here—by the trees. Don’t stand there, you imbecile, do you want our own bolts to hit you? Form lines! Half-circle by the trees!”

More of the Black Captains were arriving now. A shorter one, whom Jorah guessed to be Captain Marro Namerin, rode up to Ser Richard.

“What’s the danger?” Curt, straight to the point.

“Don’t know,” Captain Horpe answered, in the same Braavosi tongue. “Something under the trapdoor.”

“Why by the woods?” Namerin pointed, wordless, at the other side of the camp, where most of the company was presently encamped. It would have been faster to get gathered on the other side, that said without saying.

“Don’t want it to escape into here. This way, if it runs, it’ll have to flee over open ground and we’ll get a clear shot.”

Namerin nodded. “Good thinking. A moment—” And he rode off. “Horsem*n! Horsem*n! Form ranks on either side of the half-circle, lances aloft, get ready to charge but not before my sign, you hear me? On my sign!”

“Load your crossbows!” the Black Captain Alequo Nudoon was shouting in the meantime. “Get y’selves loaded! I want a thousand f*cking bolts sticking out of that thing’s arse—but only when I order it, y’hear me? All other ranks, behind, ready to load and loose in order! We can handle it no matter how many arms and legs and tentacles this thing’s got. Loose at my order.”

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaah.

The whole of the ground below them shook. Jorah’s footing broke and he fell, only to be held up with an annoyed grunt by the man beside him. He gave a grateful nod. This was the loudest tremopr yet, like the world heaving. The ancient sandstone trapdoor heaved up and down like breath. Deep cracks had gouged through it.

Whatever lurked in the dark places of the world, the Swords of the Storm were waiting. Formation was complete: a hundred columns, each one twelve men deep, in a half-circle by the side of the trees. The trembling trapdoor lay at the centre of the circle. On the other side, only open plains awaited, and the far-off ribbon of the Rhoyne. The first row stood at attention and would step aside the instant they were done, for the second row to loose as well. From drills Jorah knew full well the deadliness of the threat they posed. If the Black Captains gave the order, the combined strength of any one of those hundred columns could send a sustained, unending hail of bolts, one in two seconds. Together they could turn a charging army into wet mush.

They waited.

It was an agonising wait. Jorah stood in the front row, his Myrish crossbow hefted, finger aching on the trigger. He was not a long veteran of the Swords like Beluros. He had not fought in the Great Northern War, nor the Sellsword War that they had fought against Braavos, as the older men still told hushed tales of around the fires at supper-time. He had only joined the company this year. He had yet to even see the Prince of Sunset. All he had seen was a company of despairing hopes and no-longer-iron discipline, falling apart, men slipping away in the night. Was this how he was to die? Betrayed and abandoned by Lynesse, taken by the Swords recruiters to some long-forgotten tomb the Prince of Sunset had wished to delve in, and then left there to rot and die at the hands of some nightmare that should have been forgotten?

A pause.

A pause.

A pause.

A pause—

CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!

—and the earth blazed with baleful light, as white and bright and blinding as if a second sun had been born here on the ground. The twenty-thousand-year-old sandstone slab was rent in pieces, blown flying high above the onlooking sellswords’ heads. After the light came a vast darkness: a choking cloud of ash rushing up out from inside the ancient tomb. He could see nothing of what might lie within it.

“Hold! Hold! Hold!” Nudoon was shouting. He sounded commanding, not afraid. “Don’t panic! Don’t loose till I give the order, you sons of bitches! Wait for the order!”

Slowly, ever-so-slowly, in minutes the dark cloud settled to the floor. It sank, first slowly, then a little faster. Its great bulge diminished. Its utmost height—once thirty times the height of a man—receded back towards the ground.

Except…

…It could not quite reach the ground.

From amidst the settling ash there was revealed the figure of the beast that had broken out of the darkness. It was completely black, covered by settling ash. It wore man’s clothes—a shirt, a breeches, a long cloak—like some grotesque parody of mankind, for the clothes were clearly of nothing like the right proportions for its body. Sleeves meant for large arms dangled loose from thin sticks of bone.

The figure shook itself like a dog. Heaps of heavy black ash flew off the long stolen cloak and head, revealing a cloak of the same colour, and hair of the same colour. It passed its hand—alive, clearly, for it was moving, but it looked dead, so thin that it was skeletal—in front of its head, clearing aside curtains of ash. The skin of its face was clinging tight to sharp shards of bone. And from its face, blinking in the light of the nighttime campfires, it opened its eyes: both dark blue.

Richard Horpe fell to his knees.

Fear struck Jorah’s heart. He had heard from the old veterans of the Swords of the Storm that some of the things in Valyria could do strange things to men’s minds. Was this creature such? Jorah kept aiming, and his finger tightened on the trigger, holding his Myrish crossbow steady for the shot. He looked to Alequo Nudoon to give the order to loose bolts against the beast. Then Nudoon knelt too, and his heart despaired. Then Marro Namerin knelt, then Justin Massey and Bozyno Vunel knelt too, the last of the Black Captains; and the Swords of the Storm in all their masses followed after them.

Jorah had no idea what was happening; he prayed he was not making a mistake; but he would not die for nothing if the whole company were to abandon him, and so belatedly he too hit the ground, both knees on the cold earth.

“My Swords,” said a low, hoarse voice, as cracked as the sandstone, from long disuse. “Rise.”

That was when Jorah Mormont realised who he was seeing for the first time.

Stannis Baratheon, exiled brother of the king of Westeros, commander of the Swords of the Storm, known and feared as ‘Prince of Sunset’ among the peoples of Essos, looked nothing whatsoever like how the other Swords had described him. The burly, thick-muscled, gigantically tall warrior-lord was nowhere to be seen. What Jorah could see was a figure so gaunt it was almost a skeleton, yet somehow still alive: tall, to be sure, but seeming-frail as twigs. Yet the slender man bore on his back a bow of burning gold, and all the Black Captains who knew him well by sight had knelt before him.

He is still alive. Jorah rose back to his feet with a gladdened heart. It had been too long, and the spirits of the company had been sorely beset; but their commander was back among them once more.

“My captains,” the commander went on, “come with me and retire to sup.” He looks like he needs it, Jorah thought. “We have much to discuss.”

Around them, the rigid order of the ranks dissolved. Jorah took deep breaths to calm his fear and shock. A low hubbub of noise arose. The Swords of the Storm were putting away their swords, spears, shields and crossbows. Helms were taken off, and shirts of mail too. Their dread had been needless. The horror they had feared arising from the tomb where their commander had vanished and never come out… well, perhaps it was a horror indeed. But it was their horror.

The Black Captains gathered around the commander, heading away towards the trees, to speak privily. Jorah was quietly glad of it. As deadly as the Prince of Sunset was to his enemies, and as good a sign as it was for the Swords of the Storm that he lived still and had returned among them, he was fearful indeed. Jorah did not wish to be too close to him.

“Oh, and one more thing,” the Prince of Sunset called out. “The one who kept pointing a crossbow at me.” He looked straight at Jorah. “Come too.”

It was the end of the world, and the sun was dead. The Shadow lay above them.

Blown by a cold wind, eleven ships plunged headlong-swift into the embrace of the everlasting dark. Their way was lit only by the flame of torches over the oars, and such was the weight of the dark that pressed upon them that they had to be relit every few hours. The fires cast a weak, flickering glow on the river through which they waded: grey, flat, still as death.

“After Qohor, after Yeen, after Old Valyria, perhaps you think yourselves prepared.” Wisps of wind brought the low voice to every man as if it were whispering behind his ear. “Understand this: You are not. We are heading into a place more hateful to living things than anywhere else on this earth. You may come out of here alive, if you heed without question every command I give you, no matter how mad it may seem.”

At the prow of the foremost ship, the figure of Stannis Baratheon was tiny as an insect. Every man felt nevertheless the gaze of those eyes glaring down upon him.

“Cursed K’Dath is dreaded by all in the Further East as the graveyard of emperors. Asshai-by-the-Shadow is the most sorcerous city in all the realms of men, and so most feared. Yet both are only at the edges of the Shadow. We are heading to its heart.

“You will behold beasts of wonder and terror greater than you can dream of. For the otherworldly power that flows out from Stygai nourishes great and terrible things in these lands, relics of greater ages too strong to survive in our faded world. But for all their dread, they are not the true peril. These lands are called the Shadow Lands because they belong to the Shadow. Everything that walks or grows or breathes in the Shadow Lands, is in its thrall.

“You must eat none of it. Consume nothing but the food we bought, that we have brought with us. Not this.” The prince cast an arm around him, to the waves of pale, white, wavy stalks that stretched everywhere to the horizon. “ ‘Ghost grass’ this is called, and it is the only plant that grows here in the Shadow Lands. If you eat it, it will seem the sweetest meal you have ever tasted, but every bite will drive you to take another. You will see things that are not real. Your mind will break to gibbering madness. And in the end you will suffer a fate crueller than death.”

“Like them soul-eaters in Yeen?” one soldier shouted up to the mast.

“Not at all,” said the prince. “Cruel enough the soul-eaters would seem a mercy.”

A shiver ran through the sellswords listening.

“Above all you must not drink the water of the river Ash. The Ash flows to here, but before that, its waters flow by dread Stygai, the heart of Everlasting Night, where the Shadow waxes stronger than the sun. Drink none of it. Be fool enough to eat of the ghost grass and you might, might survive, if you have the iron will to refrain from more. But a single drop of Ash-water will doom you till the world dies. Spare no effort to escape it. If your friend is drowning in the river, shoot him dead if he opens his mouth. His soul would thank you for it.”

The grim silence bespoke assent. Then again, of course, they never had a choice.

In Asshai, unnatural as it was, despite the shadows of the mile-tall towers and the greater shadow’s gloom that even noon could not break, at least there was a little sunlight. Henceforth, however, as their ships sailed upstream on the river Ash’s grey waters, every day was hotter and darker than the last. The very air felt sticky and oppressive. The landscape around them—always the same, swathes of ghost grass on every side to the horizon—shrank smaller and smaller every morn. For a bare hour at noon, the sun was dull as twilit evening. The rest of the day, the sun was gone. And at night, even the stars vanished entirely.

At times the river split in twain. Then, and only then, the Black Captains who ruled over this voyage went to their commander, to seek his will. The Prince of Sunset stood at the prow as if carved of stone, sleepless as a statue, silent as the grave, long cloak whipping and snapping behind him in the high wind. He never cast a glance back. His dark blue eyes were fixed only ever forward.

Days after they left Asshai, one night Justin dared to approach the Prince of Sunset. The wind was a high howling screech. It blew with such force it was hard to stand up, let alone walk. Justin was carrying nothing, yet to walk bare-handed felt like running with two men on his back. He staggered onto the commander’s ship and over across the deck, and he flung out a hand that grasped the railing just in time to stop himself from falling.

He stood there, holding on, panting from the effort. He did not speak. He knew Stannis Baratheon better than that. He merely stood, calm by his side, waiting.

Two hours passed before Stannis spoke, quite out of nowhere, as was his wont. “This land resists me as I’ve never felt before,” he said. “There is a will that rules here, in the earth, in the water, in the air. It seeks stillness. It dislikes moving.”

He had not turned. He had not moved, save for his mouth. His body was still as stone, still facing away. There was no way he could have seen Justin, nor in the high wind heard him.

But you are not moving, Justin thought. “Resists your magic, you mean? The wind you command?”

“I do not command the wind, Massey,” Stannis replied. “How could I? Try it. Command the wind: ‘here I am, do as I say’. Any fool can give orders, that does not make the world obey him. I’ve said this oft before. I am not some ‘master’ of the wind. It has none. I am the wind that hurls us onward.”

You’ve said it oft and it makes just as little sense as last time, Justin thought. He was not fool enough to say so.

“I noted something I wished not to speak of in the open, commander,” he said, instead.

“Which is?”

“When we saw Li Xinong’s corpse it surprised you.” Justin hesitated. “It seems to me, you didn't know he had died.”

“I did not,” said Stannis. He turned around and stepped down from the prow. The sails slacked. The high wind quietened; faltered.

Justin had suspected as much. Even so, the admission shook him. It scared him more than the everlasting darkness did. “You always see. Why not this time?”

“You were right not to raise this in front of the men.” Stannis drew in a deep breath. His whole body shuddered, skin like paper stretched over the bones. His frailty filled Justin with concern. He still needs to eat more, he hasn’t recovered yet, he shouldn’t be going into battle so soon. “The men must not know I am weakened.”

“My prince,” Justin said, “I do not understand.”

“The Shadow lies upon us,” Stannis said, as if fearful he might be overheard. “Upon us! All things in this land are in its power, even me. To be a greenseer is to be a self that lives beyond yourself. Yet so long as I am here under the Shadow, I dare not. In Asshai at the Shadow’s edge I could go a little, but here, not at all. For I go beyond myself into the everlasting dark, it will take… it will consume me.”

Stannis had been about to say something else, Justin was sure, something more revealing. He did not press it. “You mean, you can’t see things yet to come?”

“Things yet to come,” said Stannis. “Things long since passed. Things that were not, yet might have been.”

“Then that is not so bad,” said Justin. From the prince’s frailty, he had feared worse. “You still have eyes and ears. You can see as all men see.”

“It is!” Stannis stamped his foot. “You do not know; you cannot miss it. It is like a sighted man gone blind. I am a greenseer, Massey. To stand beyond space and time and possibility is my strength and my shield. For years I have seen far and wide. Now I am forced to march through Fate like a child fumbling in the dark, and it daunts me.”

“Then be daunted,” Justin said sharply, “but march on. You have a thousand men beside you, and powers that none of us have, too. Your men have less than you, and we go on, for we have trust in you. So have trust in yourself.”

Stannis was silent at that.

“If not your sight,” said Justin, “how are you guiding us which way to go, when the river forks?”

“Naught but scraps of memory,” Stannis admitted. “Li’s notes are lost to Euron Greyjoy. Our guide is what little I recall from the runes in the tomb of the Bloodstone Emperor.”

“Azor Ahai went here before.”

“Yes,” said Stannis. “The only man who has ever gone to the City of the Dead and returned alive.”

“Then I would know of the man whose footsteps we are following,” Justin said. “You said the myths are ofttimes wrong. Who was he truly?”

Stannis hesitated. “It is not a sweet tale. I would think you would rather not know. It has no happy ending.”

“There are no happy endings,” Justin said. “You should know that by now.”

“Very well.” Stannis dipped his head, acknowledging. “Azor Ahai was a prince, second-born to the emperor of the land that we nowadays call Yi-Ti, though it did not yet bear that name. As the eldest son, he was destined to sit the throne. But he had a keen love of the higher arts, the powers not of this world that some call sorcery. His father's chiefs and courtiers feared him. And so they persuaded his father the Opal Emperor to set him aside and raise up his sister in his place, though the custom had always been that sons came before daughters, and there had never before been a woman as emperor. Azor Ahai was sent into exile.”

Is this myth or memory? “You feel akin to him,” Justin said. His tone made it a question.

Stannis did not deny it.

“In truth this did not much displease Azor Ahai, for he did not love power nor worldly things,” Stannis went on. “For a time he lived in peace with the men of the Tiger clan, the clan of his wife. Not forever. The Empress sat unsteady on her stolen throne, capricious and cruel, ever fearful of imaginary plots against her. Oft she would favour some clan over others, then, in an instant, decide they were her enemies and send men to slaughter them to the last. In time, she sent men to kill her brother. He, his wife and their household escaped and fled into the wilderness, but the Tiger clan’s home burnt behind them, though they had done no wrong. The Amethyst Empress ordered it put to flame and all the innocents there massacred. In so doing, by her foolish malice, she made real the plot that she had conceived in her fevered thought. Her warriors pursued the clan’s few survivors. Fearing for their lives, they fled to the only place no-one would follow: here. The Shadow Lands.

“And thus he went beyond my sight. I only have old myths, distorted by thousands of years of tellings and retellings, likely with as much falsehood as truth in them. But I with my eyes have seen that he entered the Shadow Lands fleeing, empty-handed; and my eyes have seen that he returned, mighty and terrible. The runes of his tomb say he sacrificed his wife, Nissa Nissa of the Tiger clan, for what he gained there, though he loved her dearly. I know, at least, she did not come back with him. Whatever the truth of it, Azor Ahai walked out of the Shadow Lands with a great black stone, and he began the war to take back the throne that was his by rights.”

It should not have been first to his mind, but Justin was struck at once by the difference between the truth Stannis said he had seen and the myth as Justin had always heard it. “A rock?” Justin said. “Not Lightbringer?”

“Myths change, Massey, I told you,” said Stannis, dark eyes narrowing. “You should know by now that power is not born of smelted ore, it is born of agony and sacrifice. Lightbringer was never more than a sword. Any fool spilling his own blood can light a flame, if he but knows the way. Those with power in their blood, if they can bear to spill it, can call fires great and terrible. You have seen me do it twice before.”

He had seen it indeed, though he had not thought of it like that.

“The Amethyst Empress’s partisans were great in number. Her brother’s numbered few, near none. Only the Tiger clan’s remnants stood with him. But he had powers that no man could fight, no matter how valorous. From the stone he conjured a terrible pestilence whose curse reached all the land. Men at the time gave it two names. The black-death, for its victims would cough up black ooze instead of snot or blood and die screaming as a million writhing bugs devoured them from within. And the crowning-plague, for it would strike down only those who held to the usurper-empress. Villages would be struck down and start dying, one by one. Then in their hour of despair the prince would appear, and the touch of his hands was healing.

“Soon Azor Ahai had amassed an army. The usurper-empress sought to stop him, but every time she tried, she was thwarted. From the black stone Azor Ahai called forth the Taken, living shadows that could not be slain and yet could slay. The empress’s captains would raise armies, yet surrounded by their guards their throats would be slit when they rested in the night. At last Azor Ahai descended on the capital. A great host of men stood against him, mighty in number, brave and strong and full of spirit. And they were swept away before the dark. The white city fell, and the prince of the plague and the darkness took back his father’s throne that had been stolen from him.

“The new-crowned Bloodstone Emperor reigned for years unchallengeable. Chieftains, kings and kings-of-kings sought to fight him and were undone, for against the powers of the black stone there was never hope of victory. His power grew, and the lands that paid him tribute stretched further than the farthest boundaries of Old Valyria. All mortals fell before him. Triumph was his. But power has its price, and the Bloodstone Emperor could not escape the dreadful bargain he had struck with the power in Stygai. Over every land he ruled, from every subject who owed him allegiance, a great darkness spread forth. The sky grew dim. The sun failed, faded. And all the peoples of the world suffered just as the Shadow Lands: an everlasting night.”

Everlasting night. “The Long Night,” Justin said breathlessly. “This was it. The Bloodstone Emperor brought it, then? I knew the Yi-Tish myths said so, but our myths—and you said they’re real—the Enemy—the Others—”

“I said the Others are real. They are,” said Stannis. “Yes, our myths say the Others brought the Long Night, and the two were on the same side. But myths are just the tales men tell one another to explain the world, wizened by time. Think not of what the men of Westeros said to explain what they saw. Think of what they saw. Do you see how they made their mistake?”

“They saw the Others come when the Long Night came,” Justin said. “So they thought the Others brought the Long Night. And you’re saying—you’re saying they’re wrong. The Long Night brought the Others.”

He stopped. The sheer enormity of it blew him over. The world was turned on its head. Because if that was true, that meant—

It cannot be.

And yet—

Justin tried to throw it off, but could not. The remorseless chain of thought rattled round to its awful ending. “The war between mankind and the Enemy. The war you told us in Volantis was the true purpose for every contract you ever chose for us, every place we’ve gone since we left Handtaker, everything the Swords of the Storm have ever done. To find a way to win your secret war.”

“Yes,” Stannis said, unashamed. “It is why I am what I am. Power comes with duty; mine is the Enemy.”

“Thousands of years, thousands of thousands dead. That war started with the Long Night,” Justin said. “And you’re saying the Others didn’t start it. We did.”

He looked to Stannis, seeking to be wrong, willing him to deny it, hoping, for once, to hear the commander’s deep voice scold him for being wrong.

But the commander had turned away. “This world has so many monsters,” Stannis murmured, scarce to be heard as the wind rose back to howling fury. “I ofttimes think men are most monstrous of them all.”

There was little to be done aboard the swan-ships of the Swords of the Storm. In better times, in better places than this foul darkness, where the sun shone in the sky, Justin would have liked to spend his evenings with a joint of venison, a bawdy song, a cup of fine wine and a pretty whor*. None were here now. Like every free company, the Swords of the Storm had camp followers at least as numerous as the fighting men: cooks, singers, messenger-boys, women of the night, often the children begat by said women and the sellswords. It was a part as sellsword life. Much as Stannis disliked it—he never slept with anyone, nor drank anything but water—even he knew he could not ban it… until now. Of course Justin knew why they could not take them along into the dominion of Everlasting Night, but it still rankled. Even the cooks were banned. The men had to have their stale bread, salt meat and greyish vegetable broth by themselves.

So when he had finished his day’s overseeing and drilling his men, there was nothing to do but brood and dwell on the tales he had been told.

Justin lay in his hammock in the perfect darkness of his cabin aboard the ship Herald of the Storm. The hammock did not rock, for the Ash allowed no waves. The river was too still. So he just stared sightless at the ceiling, listening to the wind’s cold blast.

Azor Ahai, the man who had saved the world, had also doomed it. He had defeated the Enemy of mankind, for a time, not forever. He had also caused those Others to become Enemy in the first place. The Enemy had not come bringing the foul darkness that swept across the world in ancient days. They had come to fight it. White was black and black was white, and old myths were upended like old certainties. Like the certainty that Justin would continue to serve Stannis Baratheon. The commander had never shaken Justin’s faith in him as hard as he was shaking it now.

Justin had come to the Free Cities, not far from the Seven Kingdoms, to serve an exiled prince mere years after his exile, in the hope of ingratiating himself to a prince and soon-to-be Lord of the Seven Kingdoms. It had been a gamble but a reasonable one, he had thought at the time. Robert had only one infant son, babes-in-arms were like as not to die from some ailment, and Justin had no better path since Cersei had cast him down from his high place at King Robert’s court. Now Robert’s succession looked steadier than ever. The king had three children, all of them beyond babes’ fragile years. The chance of Stannis being king had shrunk exceeding-slim. He was further from the Seven Kingdoms than ever before, and he had sworn himself unknowing to a greenseer whose true purpose had not been disclosed to him.

Often, in the days since Volantis, he wondered whether he regretted taking that pledge. He was rich beyond his younger self’s imagining, for the prince paid his Swords wages that dwarfed those of any free company else. That would do him no good as a dead man, so it seemed poor cause to suffer never-ending peril in the most fearful places in the world. Should he, then, take his leave? Resign his captaincy, sail back to the Seven Kingdoms, wed some comely girl of some old and famed House that had fallen on hard times and needed a wealthy suitor? He was past his fortieth nameday now. He had served Stannis since he was under thirty. How many lands he had he travelled in those years? How many men had he slain? How many armies had he battled? And for all that time, he had lived a lie.

It was the mistrust that cut sharpest, Justin decided. He, Alequo Nudoon, Richard Horpe, Marro Namerin, Bozyno Vunel, every captain and every cohort, all of them had been used unwitting by a man whose will ran alien to theirs. The men were still being used unwitting. Justin had told no-one, not even his most trusted lieutenants of his cohort, who looked up to him. Ser Justin Massey was a man of his word, still, though his liege was not. He had thought he and Stannis were of the same purpose, comrades-in-arms in a free company fighting for gold and renown. Instead he was a pawn in a war he barely understood, enlisted against an Enemy ancient and terrible. And Stannis had lacked the decency to tell this to the men who fought and bled for him. It was not, ‘Why leave?’, but rather, ‘Why stay?’

Justin’s eyes wandered in the dark of his cabin, a reflection of the depthless dark outside, the sun and stars extinguished in this realm of everlasting night, and wondered how a comely young knight from the Crownlands had ended up in such an accursed place as this.

He had sworn Stannis his sword, as knight to liege. He would not break that oath. Ser Justin did not consider himself ever-so righteous, but he had his pride and he would not soil the Massey good name with such deep shame. There was no shame in leaving an oath that both men agreed to release, though, and he felt sure Stannis would agree, so long as he swore his silence. Of course he could not leave now, craven in the middle of the chase for battle. He would see this fool’s errand through to its end. But once it was done, if he yet lived, what then? What if Stannis forsook the golden contract from Volantis, to go off explore some other godsforsaken place of nightmares like this one? Would he follow? For that matter, would he have followed, back when Stannis asked him to be a captain in the Swords of the Storm, if he had known what the commander’s real purpose was?

Justin himself did not know.

He lay there, drifting in and out of sleep, til a loud noise rudely awakened him. Too soon. Day and night were nigh the same thing, here in the Shadow Lands, but he knew when he had not slept enough.

“Captain.” A young soldier’s voice, breathless. “A signal.”

From half-sleeping, Justin jolted up, blood racing. No sellsword who was slow to rise could live long. “Bring my armour to the deck,” he said, already beginning to step out of the captain’s cabin, the night’s thoughts banished.

“Captain, you’re in night-clothes, don’t you want to get—”

“I’m captain. Armour later. Orders now.” He sprinted up the stairs and burst out into the light aboard the deck of the Herald of the Storm. There was little of it: flaming torches that should have been bright, but whose glow could not reach far in the Shadow Lands. Of all eleven he could see three ships: his Herald, the Dark Lady behind, and the Knight of Night ahead.

“Captain.” Sharp salutes.

Justin left them no time to tarry. “The message from the signal-flags.”

“Enemy approaching,” the man on duty on the mast shouted down at him. “Airborne.”

Flying monsters. Delightful. At least it wouldn’t be the first time.

“Sleepers being woken?”

“Said it,” said Munio, one of his lieutenants.

“Good. You, you and you—” he picked out men he could scarce see— “stop donning armour for now. You pile more firewood on the torches.” Firewood had to be used sparingly here. The smothering gloom of the Shadow Lands would snuff out any light that lingered long, so the torches oft needed relighting. But if they were to be attacked, the time of need was now. “You, you—go to the armoury. Fetch Myrish crossbows first, you’ll see them, the rainproof cases. Aught else afterwards.”

More men were emerging bleary-eyed from belowdecks. Justin glanced at Sergeant Haenis, wordless. Their eyes met. That was enough. The sergeant ran over and began shoving the men towards the armoury.

He looked up the mast. “Signal that: get crossbows, spears.”

“Another message,” the man with the signal-flags called down to him, instead of answering. It was hard to hear him over the wind. “Head west.”

“You heard him! Arms to the oars.” To Balni, the sellsword on the mast: “You send that message.”

“Still passing down the last one, Captain.” Balni’s voice was cracking with fear and strain.

Half-armoured sellswords scrambled to reach the oars. Before they could, the wind turned sharply. From blowing the Herald upstream, it was now battering to push her sideways towards the west bank of the river. The wind could do little when it was against the flat of her sail, though.

Once the Herald was pointing the right way, Justin ordered the oarsmen, “Off the oars. Finish donning armour.” He trusted the wind would do the rest. “To all—crossbows at the ready. Load, don’t loose. Spears beside you, lean them close, ready to pick up if it makes a pass.”

The torches were blazing from fresh firewood, and a greater light of icy blue shone from one ship, near the middle. Witchlight, he thought. Then that ship had to be the Stormborne. Justin glanced ofttimes at the Dark Lady, which was in his own cohort: his men, his duty. That was Lieutenant Paraz Holqonak’s command while at sea, however, and it was folly to seek to command two ships at once, as anxious as he might be. Besides, Holqonak was a seasoned man. Justin had to trust him. He had appointed him, after all.

Up on the mast, Balni cried, “Arrivin’ any moment.”

All eleven ships were half-way to the river-bank now, though the Ash was so wide it would take them some while more to get there. The wind that shoved them forward was shrieking. Onward, went the ships. Justin’s teeth clenched. He willed them onward…

Then, upstream from them on the river, caught in the witchlight and the light of the torches, rising over the horizon, there flapped a pair of gargantuan wings.

The earth trembled. A pair of golden eagles scattered different ways, twisting and turning desperately in the air. Every man’s ears were deafened by a roar louder than the trumpets of an army. Then they caught their first glimpse of a massive head. From its open mouth, lined with huge teeth and wide enough to swallow whole a horse, blazed forth a dark red glow.

Terror came upon them all, then, and a hundred voices screamed: “DRAGON!”

One more flap of those enormous wings carried the great beast wholly over the horizon. It had a long, sinuous body, like a snake. It was hard to see where body ended and tail began. Two legs came next, each with gigantic hooked talons that could have slashed a house in twain. It was flying high. And its snarling head was pointing straight for them.

For a moment Justin stood, frozen with horror. The creature was immense. It was bigger than any of their ships; no, bigger than any two; no, bigger than all eleven. It was the kind of monster that had conquered Westeros, only, this beast looked bigger than Balerion. Were it flying under the sun, not here in Everlasting Night, a city could be covered by its shadow. It was huge, horrible, hungry. There could be no doubt it would eat men. Seeing such a beast, every instinct in his body was screaming at him: RUN, RUN, RUN!

Justin forced his terror down, stayed in control, in command. “Crossbows at the ready!” he repeated. “Don’t loose til it’s eighty feet. Don’t waste bolts, they’ll just come back down again. Eighty feet. Then loose.”

A golden eagle darted down and landed on the deck of the Herald of the Storm. It was a fierce bird, with a wingspan broader than half a man’s height, yet it seemed tiny. It flapped queerly with one wing, hitting the deck. It stared expectantly at Justin. When he said nothing, it did it again, hitting one wing at the deck. Then it flew and perched on him, one sharp talon gripping his arm. He cried out at the pain, then noticed the other talon was on his crossbow.

“Wings!” he said, suddenly understanding. “Aim for the wings! They must be lighter, less armoured. All, aim for the wings!”

The eagle soared off to the Knight of Night.

From that ship, only barely over the high wind, Justin could make out the much-too-loud voice of the Swords of the Storm’s worst captain:

“Get it in the wings!” roared Richard Horpe. “I want every man of you on it! Get its wings. Nail it down and it’s just a f*cking ugly horse, you hear me?”

A reply drifted over from a panicked shouting soldier: “Horses can’t f*cking breathe f—”

“Shut up, Drongo!”

The air jolted from wingbeats louder than a lockstep-marching army. The dragon was getting closer. The ships were achingly close to the shore, a bare hundred yards. Close. Not close enough.

“Eighty feet!” Justin shouted again. “Not yet! Wait for it to be close!”

But it wasn’t close enough. The dragon was too far over their heads. It opened its mouth wider. Its teeth were like greatswords. The bright blood-red glow in the back of its throat turned even brighter.

A brilliant jet of crimson flame erupted from out of the dragon’s gullet, heading straight for them on the ships below. For half a second he felt like he was being bathed in boiling water. He closed his eyes…

…and was struck by a blast of icy cold air. The still grey waters of the Ash went wild as they caught the mere outer edges of an enormous gust of wind which rammed into the jet of dragonfire. They struck each other with a bang that put the dragon’s roar to shame, like a whole waterfall hitting the ground at once. In one second the heat of the air around them jumped and plunged wildly, turning from boiling-hot to piercing-cold and back and back again. Tangled streaks of red and white light formed a churning tapestry for a moment in the sky. Then they faded away.

“Oh my Moon-mother,” Balni said, dazed. He giggled as if drunk. “I’m alive.”

The dragon’s huge golden eyes, the size of kiteshields, narrowed. They fixed on one ship—the Stormborne—and on one man standing on it.

Then it let out a roar of fury that shook the waters and the earth. Its wings went flat to its sides. Talons that could carve an elephant were thrust outward. And it dived down, straight towards the commander.

Justin only had a split-second to notice. “Loose!” he roared by instinct of a leader of men, though he knew it was useless against the noise of the dragon. “Loose! Loose! Loose!” He loosed for himself, and that was the only true hope: that they would see him, and follow along.

They did.

All his men followed, and the men of the other cohorts too. The dragon dived like a bolt of lightning, so fast that even with its size it was a tricky shot, but the Swords of the Storm had been hardened in fights like this, as no other army in the realms of men. More than a thousand heavy Myrish crossbow bolts were loosed within two seconds. Several hundred of them went plunging through the leathery flesh of the dragon’s wings.

They hit, ripped, tore. It worked as well as it possibly could have. The giant monster shrieked with pain. Its wings were shredded in countless places.

None of that stopped the dragon’s scale-armoured body crashing down into the Stormborne.

The Stormborne was a well-wrought ship, made alike to the craft of the Summer Isles, peerless among shipwrights of this world. The dragon was diving fast and heavier than most castles. She shattered instantly. Planks of wood went flying in all directions, a few with men still clinging to them. Dozens of men were slain by flying splinters. Dozens more were crushed to red smears beneath the dragon’s scaled belly. The prow of the deck, where Stannis was standing, was hit worst of all: slashed to pieces by two huge talons that cut through hardy oak like knives through ripe cheese; then crushed by the slamming-down weight of the rest of the dragon.

The keening wind fell silent.

Notes:

Hullo to all readers. You have my sincere apologies for the long delay.

As you'll be aware, there wasn't a great deal of progress on 'Scream' in 2020. I offer the reason as an explanation, not an excuse. After what I could politely describe as a 'not particularly great' year, including an encounter with the lovely Lady Corona, I am at something which vaguely approximates ordinary working order, or some facsimile thereof.

I completely empathise with & understand those who'll no longer continue with the story, considering the long delay. For any who happen to wish for more, that wish is granted with a chapter. Fair warning—Brace yourselves, it's a big one. Both in sheer size (one of the biggest I've ever written) and in—well. You'll see.

Notes:

Deep in the Shadow, where light was dead and night was everlasting, two men stood facing one another on a great heap of earth before the Only Gate.

Forces greater and more terrible than mankind swung their gaze to regard this. In the Tower of Wailing thousands of miles away to the north and west, in the cold heart of the Land of Always Winter, where a host of the reanimated dead marched a hundred-thousand strong, the Others on their frozen thrones turned away. Eyes burning like blue stars fixed their icy stare on Stannis Baratheon and Euron Crow’s Eye. Lords of ice and darkness, lords of undeath, scions of a civilisation that had been ancient for aeons before man emerged upon this world… and in that moment, nothing mattered to them but here. Nothing but this.

To that light, the darkness answered. From dread Stygai, just on the other side of the Only Gate, an enormous presence smashed like a battering ram into Stannis’s thoughts. Thundered a voice Stannis had heard once before, in an ancient temple; a voice deep like bottomless chasms, a voice larger than the world, a voice of vast and burning darkness:

STORM-BORN, STORM-FEEDER, STORMCHILD. YESSSSSSSS. The enormous voice of darkness thrummed with glee. COME TO ME. YOU HAVE COME SO CLOSSSSSSSSE.

___________

To my lovely readers—I am terribly sorry for the long delay. No apology feels sufficient. Today's update is the climactic moment Stannis and Euron meet face to face and I have been obsessively perfectionist about it—writing it and then deciding it's not good enough, throwing up my hands, deleting it and starting again—over and over and over. It is important to me to get that moment right. It had to be perfect. That then became a grim joyless process which led to me working on the story less and less. And, in turn, losing touch with the ASOIAF fandom, due to discussing it less, working on it less, thinking about it less.

Well, enough of that! This story is my baby and I'm finishing it, damn it to the seven hells. I'm not letting it go. I've put in a renewed burst of effort and I've got a new chapter done.

This AO3-chapter is here because it has been literally years since this story last updated. The events of the story are probably more than a little hazy in people's recollections.

To help with that, here's some text, to remind you of the things you need to know about this story, and to get you back into the Scream Against the Storm ambience: the screaming of the wind, the voyage into everlasting darkness, the bloody hands, the cackling of crows, the lonely lord at the top of a tall tower, dark and dreaded and terribly alone. Sacrifice is never easy. Or it is no true sacrifice.

It's recommended to read this first; but if you want to skip ahead, the new chapter (on AO3, anyway) is the chapter that's posted straight after this one.

No, child, he recalled, you’ll never fly.

Stannis knew better now. The maester lied to me.

Stop! he called to it, to himself. Stop now! Be still! He brought to the fore his memories of his companions’ sacrifice and focused on them, let them swell, let them grow, and sent forth the blood and mess and mental pain and terrible finality to control what he had wrought.

But he was not the master now. The wind kept moving, pulling, turning, not against him, not even in spite of him but utterly ignoring his effort of will. His hold had not been broken. He was the wind. And yet he was not the master of himself. He felt as though he were running at great pace despite urging his muscles to be still. It was like nothing he had felt before. Stop! Stop! he commanded, but it did not stop. How? How was it going so wrong, when he did not feel a resistance force working against him?

And then he understood. He had cast his working and assumed his place in the sky, but his sacrifice had not been enough to bind the magic he himself had unleashed, to control what he himself had become.

The air was circling now, and he felt the sea stir at his touch. Cold air rubbed shoulders with hot, and he knew because he was both of them. Thunder rumbled, knives of lightning flashed like daggers falling from the sky, and the waves grew higher, higher, higher, ever higher…

The Windproud was lifted by a great wave, foundered, and turned upside down.

“Mother!”

For the first time since that dread moment, he found coherent words. “I’m sorry.”

“Hush,” soothed Maester Cressen, running wrinkled fingers through hair as black as Stannis’s sin, “hush, boy. I’m so sorry for what you must endure. Ofttimes the gods are cruel.”

“It wasn’t the gods’ fault,” Stannis sobbed, “it was mine… I was bad, the worst, no man more accursed… sorry, maester… I wish what you told me wasn’t a lie… I wish I couldn’t, couldn’t… I wish I was nothing… I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Maester Cressen told him firmly. He held the maester’s hand tight, wanting to believe. “Stannis, some things no man can control. Men can be mighty, and men can be wise, but even the mightiest wisest kings do not command the waves. They are natural forces and they answer only to the gods. It is not for us to reason why. All that we can do is scream against the storm.”

There is no-one else!

“No-one?” said Stannis, arching an eyebrow. “In all the world, no-one? I don’t believe that.”

One man in a thousand is born a skinchanger, the three-eyed crow said, and one skinchanger in a thousand is born a greenseer. And it is not obvious to me who I should seek. The best I can do is to send dreams to one who lies near death—they must be near death—and try to open their third eye as I opened yours. Of the dreamers who experience this, most lack the potential to be greenseers, or the strength of will to reach past the material world; most of them die, instead of flying. Few are blessed with your gift, and fewer still can be awakened to it.

“When you sent me that dream,” Stannis said, “I wish I died.”

There was silence for a long while.

The world needs you, the crow said at last.

“My family needs me,” said Stannis. “I owe my life to them for what I’ve done. I can’t be what you want me to be for the world. I cannot. I tried, and all it led me to was ruin. Send dreams to me as long as you want, but it will be of no use. I’ll not stop you. I’ll not use what you taught me. I’ll not be what you want me to be.”

“I understand,” Stannis said, and tossed him over the railing.

He looked down. A small shape plummeted into the waves with a scarce-visible splash. The wind swallowed his brother’s scream.

A great three-masted ship with lovely burgundy sails fell from the crest of a wave and was driven with sudden fury into a shallower part of the sea. She struck a great rock with tremendous force and it broke her keel. With a rending crash of splintered wood, the big ship collapsed into dozens of pieces. Plenty of sailors were killed by wood or rock in the impact. Plenty more spilt from her decks to drown in the unforgiving ice-cold water.

“That was Paxter Redwyne’s Arbour Queen.” Cressen had never heard Stannis speak in quite this tone. It sounded as if he were utterly delighted and yet utterly relaxed, as if his pleasure and excitement were great indeed but they were somewhere else, not here. His voice mixed languid laziness with hints of thrill. “The fleet that starved us is sinking, and a good captain goes down with his ship. It wouldn’t be fitting for him to escape their fall, don’t you agree? And the Reachmen who invaded us are cowering in their tents, pounded by the wind and pissed on by the rain as they watch their dreams die all around them.” He is guessing, Cressen thought. The Tyrell army was not visible from here. “How very appropriate for Mace Tyrell. That flowery fool had no idea what forces he was dancing with.”

He cannot mean that. He cannot mean what I think he means. “You mean the gods?” Cressen tried, hoping to believe it, wanting to believe it.

Stannis Baratheon turned around. Dark blue eyes gleamed in his gaunt and bony face. “Who do you think I mean?”

The script was of triangles and ellipses and rectangles and circles, loops and arcs and shapes for which he knew no name; it was nothing like any form of writing he had heard of, but it was writing.

He touched it with the tips of his fingers as the pain of his wound burnt in his left arm. He traced the shapes, as fascinated by the shapes as he was frustrated by his inability to comprehend them. He kept tracing along the wall, feeling as he went. He did not know their meaning, yet somehow it seemed to him that sometimes the words meant something comforting, sometimes they meant something grand, sometimes they were proud, or angry, or restful, or eager, or reluctant, or afraid…

Afraid?

Even as he had that thought, his fingers slipped onto the next shape along.

It struck his thoughts like the charge of a thousand thousand knights. He did not move; but he felt as if he had been lifted up and blown by the force of it. A voice swept through his mind, a great howl long and low and rumbling, like a tremble in the bones of the world.

STORM-BORN, it roared. STORM-REARED, STORM-FEEDER, STORM-CALLER… HERE YOU STAND WASTING YOUR LIFE AWAY, IN THRALL FOR COIN TO A MEANINGLESS MORTAL. HAS IT NOT OCCURRED TO YOU THAT YOU WERE MEANT FOR SOMETHING MORE?

He struggled for control. He struggled to stand still. He struggled even to understand the great voice that swept away his thoughts and left in its wake only ruin.

“You do not tell me my destiny,” Stannis growled. “No old greenseer does, and no ancient enchantment either. Only I decide what I am meant for.”

IT IS NOT YOUR DESTINY, the great voice thundered. IT CAN BE YOUR CHOICE.

“What do you want from me?”

ONLY THAT YOU COME TO ME, STORMCHILD.

“I am not a child.”

That amused the great voice. ALL MEN ARE CHILDREN TO ME.

Aeron notes the dark turn of Euron’s tone. “Other?”

“Another,” Euron says. His usual playfulness vanishes like a thief in the night. “Robert must be weakened and diminished, not overthrown. He is an utter failure and that’s as I like it. I do not desire someone who might not be to sit in his place.” Then he laughs again. Euron’s moods, Aeron notes, turn in moments, like the flicker of a flame. “That’s the matter, you see. My father wanted a little brother to replace me with.”

Nothing that Euron has said confuses Aeron as much as this. He has never known why Euron is so evil to him, Urri and Victarion until today. “You… hate us… because… Father… had more… sons?”

Euron convulses. He howls with laughter, shaking so hard that his arm holding the rail trembles and he almost falls into the sea.

“You…” Euron gasps. “You… Gods, it’s too perfect. You… You really think… How can you possibly be stupid enough to think I meant you?”

There is no ground beneath your feet, and though you see nothing but flat and neverending darkness you can feel somehow that it is rushing by, faster than you have ever fallen before. There is no press of air against your skin to slow you down. There is nothing. Nothing you can see. Nothing you can smell. Nothing you can feel.

There is nothing but the dark. There is nothing but the falling.

Terror comes upon you then, a terror more terrifying than any terror you have ever known. You try to grab, to hold on to something. There is nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

You try to scream, but you are falling so fast the tiny sound vanishes in an instant, miles and miles above your head.

“I admit I’ve delayed this moment because your stumbling blind arrogance entertains me,” Euron says, and you feel his breath hot on your ear, hideously close, “but the time has come to put it to an end. I am a greenseer, imbecilic whelp. Sending the spirit beyond the body is my domain. Did you truly think I would not see you? Have you never heard the old phrase?—When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks also into you.”

The abyss is more than looking at you now. It has consumed you. You are in its belly. The void around you—nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing to smell, nothing to breathe—is all-encompassing.

You can’t escape it. You can’t even touch it. Every time you try, you can grasp nothing—nothing!—less than empty air.

“You’ve read the carvings on the walls of Yeen, haven’t you? Don’t bother to deny it. My eyes in the seas and the skies extend even to Sothoryos. I know you have been seeking out the outposts of the Lords of the Deep. But did you decipher their meaning? He who can open the Only Gate will be granted two boons, one of strength and one of sight: power of times long past and knowledge of times yet to come… if he can appease the power that dwells within.

“And so I alone shall go further than all the fire-witches and prophets and shadowbinders of Asshai-by-the-Shadow have ever dared to go. I will not waddle at the far edge of the Shadow on this world, as they do. At this very moment I am making my way to its heart, to dread Stygai, the centre and source of Everlasting Night. There I will pass through the black gate of Stygai and ask my two boons. I already know what I shall require.”

But ever since that day, the Wall has been the fortress of the realm of men. And ever since that day, the Enemy have been seeking the Horn that Joramun stole from them.

Somehow you find the courage to speak defiance to the lord of the black abyss all around you even as he holds you in his thrall. “You cannot. You would not, even you. Surely you know the Others are reawakening? It would be the end of the world.”

“It would be the end of mankind,” Euron dismisses. “That is not the same thing at all. Ordinary men and women are naught but fodder for sacrifice. We both know this. They are no more than pigs or cattle to us—and if every boar in the farm must die to feed their master’s hunger, then so be it.”

The world. It is the whole world, everybody in it, that he proposes to sacrifice. That unfathomable selfishness leaves you lost for words; you can say only, “This is madness.”

“If sanity is surrender and madness is survival, who is truly mad?” The vast voice that echoes in the darkness sounds genuinely curious.

“You are mad if you think the Enemy will spare you,” you reply. “They hate all things but themselves. You preach survival over surrender, but your path is surrender to the Others. Their victory must be stopped; it cannot be survived.”

“It cannot be stopped.” Euron’s voice turns from idle humour to the dire, ringing tone of prophecy. “In the Tower of Wailing the Others are gathering the host they will send upon this world. A hundred thousand corpses have been raised. More will follow. A united mankind, in these faded days, has no hope of overthrowing them. The mankind they will face—a hollow shell, bled white by its own pointless wars—has less than none. Swiftly the tide of ice will roll over our world. All lands and seas will be covered white, and night will be forever banished by the pale light of a winter’s day that never ends. None shall be spared. Every city, every realm, every people of mankind will be extinguished. The age of men is at its close.”

That is why he is telling me this. That is why he did not seek me out and kill me before. He wants me to try to stop him, you realise. He does not want an easy victory; it would bore him. He wants the thrill of a battle between greenseers for the fate of the world.

Or at least, that is what he wants me to think he wants.

It makes no matter. Either way, he must be stopped. The three-eyed crow in his folly has trained a man who threatens all mankind. The crow has not reined him in, so someone else must—permanently.

“Then I will go to Stygai in Everlasting Night.” The vow is made in tones of steel. “I will go beyond Asshai, to the heart of the Shadow. I will pass through its Only Gate. And I, before you, will claim the city for my own.”

“I will be waiting.”

The black eye blinks; you seize the chance to flee. You have been dismissed.

“Nine years ago,” Stannis said, “before the Titanfall, before the Sellsword War, before even the Great Northern War that preceded it, I ventured down into the dark in a place on the Braavosi shingle shore, known to those of us who study ancient ruins as the Temple of the Pharakienat. It is six-thousand years old. It was built before the beginning of Ancient Valyria. But I suspected, and I proved, that it is home to something much, much older.

“Tens of thousands of years before, the world was ruled by a race of creatures known to us as the Lords of the Deep. They dwelt underwater, once, but by their cunning artifices and sorceries they came to rule over the land and air as well. Nothing escaped them. The giants, the children of the forest and the race of men were to them no more of a foe than cows and sheep are foes to us today. Their mastery was absolute, unchallengeable.

“Their empire spanned the entire world, land and sea and air. They ruled it for uncounted tens of thousands of years. Until one day, all of a sudden, they disappeared.

“No-one knows fully what befell them, not even the greenseers. We cannot see that time, in that place. It is too perilous, even from the otherworld for those of us who transcend space and time and possibility. Come too close to that day or that place, let alone both, and you are swallowed by the yawning abyss of the most terrible power the world has ever known.”

“By what?” said Andonno.

“Who knows?” said Stannis, not answering whether he did. “What I do know is, there is a power there, in the City of the Dead that was once the heart of their dominion. And when I explored the Temple of the Pharakienat, I found one of their outposts, and I heard a voice. It spoke to me.

“STORM-BORN, it called me. STORM-REARED. STORM-FEEDER. STORM-CALLER. STORMCHILD. It knew who I am and what I do. It knew things about me that no-one knows, things that no-one must ever know. It is real, it is powerful, it exists beyond the Only Gate, and if mankind is to survive against the Enemy, I fear it is our only chance.

“And so I planned to take that power and wield it against the Enemy… but not at once. I wanted to be careful. I want to know what lies in the dread city of Stygai, at the heart of the Shadow-On-The-World, before I seek it. The history of sorcerers is replete with those who disturbed that which should never be disturbed, and I did not wish to join them. So, over the years, I have been seeking out the outposts the Lords of the Deep left behind. I wish to understand them and the way they met their doom.

“Yet now there is no more time for my caution. I must make haste. Euron Greyjoy is a greenseer too, older and more powerful than I, and he too has been to the Temple of the Pharakienat. He knows of the Lords of the Deep, of dread Stygai, of the Only Gate into the night that never ends. He is heading there as we speak, and I must follow, as fast as ships can bear me.”

“Because the tomb belonged to a man known in the East as Azor Ahai,” the prince said, and all of the Black Captains drew in breath. “And in the Further East as the Bloodstone Emperor.”

“The—what? They’re the same?” Justin spluttered. “But Azor Ahai was a hero in Eastern myth, he saved the world, the Bloodstone Emperor nearly ended it. The myths—”

“Myths change,” Stannis said sharply. “Ask yourself: what do you know, and what do you only think you know? Mortal tales twist in the passing of time, from one generation to another. True parts are forgotten and storytellers fill the gaps with their own devising. But a greenseer sees.”

Parit approached. Giant spheres of green flame danced in his hands, and his voice spoke booming like a hundred voices. “I stand for Qohor that you burnt. I stand for the men, the women, the children you murdered. I stand for our ancestors whom you dishonoured. I stand for our people, for our city dead and yet reborn. And you, you despoiler, you coward, you brute, will meet—our—vengeance!”

Both hands held spheres of green flame, larger than men’s heads. The heat could be felt from fifty yards away. Even standing on the same street as him felt like diving in a furnace.

The sorcerer raised one hand, moved it back, threw it forward to hurl, and—

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

The street turned cold. The fireballs went out in an instant. And the sorcerer’s hand that he had thrown forward was clutching his own throat.

Stannis spoke very softly. “I think not.”

Parit spluttered. He tried to pull back his arm. His own grip was unrelenting. His free arm batted at the other one wildly, dealing heavy blows. No matter how hard he hit himself, he would not let go.

“It was unwise to approach me when you knew not what you are facing,” the commander said. He was not angry. His voice was calm, conversational, like a master guildsman lecturing his student. “Birds and beasts are my usual tool, for they have not the wit to grasp that my thoughts in their minds are not their own. Conquering the mind of a man is no easy thing for e’en the best of skinchangers, and for those like me who are beyond skinchangers. But you, you are vulnerable. I wonder: do you know why?”

The sorcerer sank to both knees, his breath juddering and coughing. A thin whistle of air escaped his lips, high and shrill. He fought to pull his arm down, wrestled with himself. He could not. His own grip on his throat was unrelenting.

“I thought not,” said the commander. No-one interrupted. His voice held every man out of the hundreds of silent watchers in its spell. “For most men, it cannot be done. Their minds are closed. But for Moonsingers, skinchangers, Faceless Men, waterworkers, necromancers, firemages, those of powers like mine… You are no common man, are you? You’ve opened your mind to powers that are not of this world, so that your thoughts may pull them into this world and wield them. You should have known that is a road, and every road can be walked both ways. When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks also into you.”

It was the end of the world, and the sun was dead. The Shadow lay above them.

Blown by a cold wind, eleven ships plunged headlong-swift into the embrace of the everlasting dark. Their way was lit only by the flame of torches over the oars, and such was the weight of the dark that pressed upon them that they had to be relit every few hours. The fires cast a weak, flickering glow on the river through which they waded: grey, flat, still as death.

“After Qohor, after Yeen, after Old Valyria, perhaps you think yourselves prepared.” Wisps of wind brought the low voice to every man as if it were whispering behind his ear. “Understand this: You are not. We are heading into a place more hateful to living things than anywhere else on this earth. You may come out of here alive, if you heed without question every command I give you, no matter how mad it may seem.”

“If not your sight,” said Justin, “how are you guiding us which way to go, when the river forks?”

“Naught but scraps of memory,” Stannis admitted. “Li’s notes are lost to Euron Greyjoy. Our guide is what little I recall from the runes in the tomb of the Bloodstone Emperor.”

“Azor Ahai went here before.”

“Yes,” said Stannis. “The only man who has ever gone to the City of the Dead and returned alive.”

“For a time he lived in peace with the men of the Tiger clan, the clan of his wife. Not forever. The Empress sat unsteady on her stolen throne, capricious and cruel, ever fearful of imaginary plots against her. Oft she would favour some clan over others, then, in an instant, decide they were her enemies and send men to slaughter them to the last. In time, she sent men to kill her brother. He, his wife and their household escaped and fled into the wilderness, but the Tiger clan’s home burnt behind them, though they had done no wrong. The Amethyst Empress ordered it put to flame and all the innocents there massacred. In so doing, by her foolish malice, she made real the plot that she had conceived in her fevered thought. Her warriors pursued the clan’s few survivors. Fearing for their lives, they fled to the only place no-one would follow: here. The Shadow Lands.

“And thus he went beyond my sight. I only have old myths, distorted by thousands of years of tellings and retellings, likely with as much falsehood as truth in them. But I with my eyes have seen that he entered the Shadow Lands fleeing, empty-handed; and my eyes have seen that he returned, mighty and terrible. The runes of his tomb say he sacrificed his wife, Nissa Nissa of the Tiger clan, for what he gained there, though he loved her dearly. I know, at least, she did not come back with him. Whatever the truth of it, Azor Ahai walked out of the Shadow Lands with a great black stone, and he began the war to take back the throne that was his by rights.”

“The new-crowned Bloodstone Emperor reigned for years unchallengeable. Chieftains, kings and kings-of-kings sought to fight him and were undone, for against the powers of the black stone there was never hope of victory. His power grew, and the lands that paid him tribute stretched further than the farthest boundaries of Old Valyria. All mortals fell before him. Triumph was his. But power has its price, and the Bloodstone Emperor could not escape the dreadful bargain he had struck with the power in Stygai. Over every land he ruled, from every subject who owed him allegiance, a great darkness spread forth. The sky grew dim. The sun failed, faded. And all the peoples of the world suffered just as the Shadow Lands: an everlasting night.”

Everlasting night. “The Long Night,” Justin said breathlessly. “This was it. The Bloodstone Emperor brought it, then? I knew the Yi-Tish myths said so, but our myths—and you said they’re real—the Enemy—the Others—”

“I said the Others are real. They are,” said Stannis. “Yes, our myths say the Others brought the Long Night, and the two were on the same side. But myths are just the tales men tell one another to explain the world, wizened by time. Think not of what the men of Westeros said to explain what they saw. Think of what they saw. Do you see how they made their mistake?”

“They saw the Others come when the Long Night came,” Justin said. “So they thought the Others brought the Long Night. And you’re saying—you’re saying they’re wrong. The Long Night brought the Others.”

“Tell the men to go back to the ships,” Stannis said. “I cannot ask them to go further. They cannot fight the Taken when they can’t even see them; it is a death-sentence. I will go on to the Only Gate alone.”

“That is madness. It would be your end,” said Justin.

“Yes,” Stannis admitted. “But I know that. I have always known.”

A cold chill crept up Justin’s spine. “Commander, what are you talking about?”

“I have often told you that a greenseer stands beyond space and time,” Stannis said. “Have you ever thought of what that means? I know much of my own future. I have seen my path ahead of me, known many of the battles I would face. To be a greenseer grants me many visions. And clearest of all those visions were just before the Great Northern War broke out between the Pact of Four and Braavos, when I was visiting the Temple of the Pharakienat on the Braavosian shore. There, a power showed me glimpse of what was yet to come. The first glimpse was a pale child on a pale horse, and that one came true mere minutes after I saw it, when Urynis came to fetch me for Handtaker.”

“So one vision came true,” said Justin. “That doesn’t mean they all will.”

“The others have come true too, one after the next, chronicling my life. All of them have come true, except one. The last vision was a great gate taller than ten men, wrought of oily black stone. Those were visions from the Temple, granted by a higher power, but my visions as a greenseer all end the same way. I have seen much of my life, but never further than that gate. The gate. The Only Gate, it must be.” Stannis trembled. “Thus I have always known that I will live to reach the Only Gate. From then on, I see nothing. My sight of myself shows only darkness.”

“Our whole quest for the Only Gate. The quest to stop Euron. All this time,” Justin said softly, “you’ve been walking to your death.”

“Yes,” Stannis said. He didn’t look afraid. Perhaps he had been contemplating his death for so long that he no longer had much fear of it. “It is a better death than I deserve, a man like me. At least I can die for a good cause. Die like a good man.”

“To be sure I understand—we start heading back now; then we wait ten days; then we come and get you?”

“No. You wait the ten days, and then you go. Leave this godsforsaken place. Cut mementoes from the dragon to bring with you. Go forth to Yin, to the Emperor of Yi-Ti. Thence to the slavelords of the Ghiscari cities. Go to Qarth, to Volantis, to the cities of the far west, to the Sunset Kingdoms beyond. Tell every emperor, every magister, every archon, all the men we’ve ever fought for, of the peril the realms of men will face. Tell them all that I have told you of the ways the Enemy and the restless dead can be fought.”

Justin said softly, “Then what of you?”

“Do not look for me,” said Stannis. “I… will have done my duty.”

The words fell heavy as hammer-blows.

“Then farewell, my prince,” Justin said. “Until we meet again.”

Stannis’s lips twisted. “We will not meet again. But I thank you for the kindness of your thought.”

He spun on his heel and strode off into the everlasting dark, alone.

There was darkness before him. A darkness darker than darkness, darker than a starless sky, blacker than the blackest void, darker than absolute absence of light. So black it drank in the very idea of light and made it unthinkable. He lifted a hand towards that thing of ancient darkness, taller than ten men; and he felt, beyond it, a darkness even more ancient fix its eyeless gaze upon the feeble spark of soul-light that dared stand beyond its walls. His witchlight almost went out from its regard; the effort of sustaining it slammed into him like a knife in his chest. He let out a muffled scream. The force of that gaze threw him at once onto his knees.

Then, with a tremor of terror and elation, he realised he had sensed something on the other side of the walls.

The Only Gate. It had to be.

Then he felt a surge of magic from behind him. It started small, on the edge of perception, yet soon swelled greater than anything he had ever felt before, so great that he had no idea how he could have failed to sense the slightest trace of it until this moment.

To one who was not a sorcerer, what he perceived cannot be understood. It was like a starving man scenting a banquet and a rotting corpse; the taste at once of the sweetest honey and bitter ashes; the touch of soft silk and jagged iron at the same time; the bugle of a thousand trumpets and the roar of the dragon plunging from the sky. How could he possibly have missed it until this? It was as if he had been standing in a starless night and then the sun rose, blinding, half an inch from his eyeball.

Stannis turned around. He did not need to. He already knew.

The man at the gate was slender and handsome. Neat dark hair crowned a pale high-cheekboned face, gorgeous as a maiden’s dream, except for the eyes—mismatched, for one was black as rot beside the other’s sparkling blue.

Stannis spat, “Greyjoy.”

“So you came. Good; I am tired of waiting.” Euron Greyjoy tilted his head in a mocking bow. “Well done, child, you’ve played your part. Now… this city is mine.”

Deep in the Shadow, where light was dead and night was everlasting, two men stood facing one another on a great heap of earth before the Only Gate.

Forces greater and more terrible than mankind swung their gaze to regard this. In the Tower of Wailing thousands of miles away to the north and west, in the cold heart of the Land of Always Winter, where a host of the reanimated dead marched a hundred-thousand strong, the Others on their frozen thrones turned away. Eyes burning like blue stars fixed their icy stare on Stannis Baratheon and Euron Crow’s Eye. Lords of ice and undeath, scions of a civilisation that had been ancient for aeons before man emerged upon this world… and in that moment, nothing mattered to them but here. Nothing but this.

To that light, the darkness answered. From dread Stygai, just on the other side of the Only Gate, an enormous presence smashed like a battering ram into Stannis’s thoughts. Thundered a voice Stannis had heard once before, in an ancient temple; a voice deep like bottomless chasms, a voice larger than the world, a voice of vast and burning darkness:

STORM-BORN, STORM-FEEDER, STORMCHILD. YESSSSSSSS. The enormous voice of darkness thrummed with glee. COME TO ME. YOU HAVE COME SO CLOSSSSSSSSE.

“The city is not yours, nor ever will be,” Stannis retorted. “Not so long as I breathe to prevent it.”

“Prevent it?” The Crow’s Eye laughed. “My dear brother, you are not here to prevent my scheme but to assist it.”

“If you think that, you are truly lost to madness,” Stannis said with contempt.

“Oh, am I? Go on. Use that feeble mind of yours. Indulge me.” Euron was grinning. “How did you think I got here?”

“You took your ship.”

“I tried. I failed.” Euron was cheerful in admitting this. “No normal crew will venture this deep into the Shadow Lands—not even mine. I cannot skinchange into all of them at once. Usually they are obedient enough to sail a ship and row like dumb puppets, mindless with fear of me; but not here. The sheer dread evoked by the Shadow is so powerful they cannot help but try to run.” Euron’s blue lips twisted with annoyance. “They are more scared of the Shadow than of me.”

Stannis remembered how it had felt when Marro had nearly been Taken. It had jabbed his heart like daggers. Euron spoke with clipped briskness, as if terrorising his men into risking their souls to everlasting torment were a mere tedious inconvenience.

“Even animals will not go this far into the Shadow-On-The-World. Instinct rebels against it. The only kind of creature that will go forward when every thought in their head is screaming flee! is thinking men.” Euron grinned, pearly teeth gleaming in the cold glow of Stannis’s witchlight. “So I needed thinking men to sail me to Stygai. Yours.”

Stannis did not believe him for an instant. “Liar.”

“Oh yes, often,” said Euron, unashamed. “But not this time. When you were fool enough to spy on me outside your body, I caught you and for three turns of the moon I held you in my thrall; and then I let you wake. Why do you think I let you wake? And why three turns of the moon? Because that was the time it took for me to sail to you from the west coast of Westeros. Just like Jorah Mormont, who did the same thing. I did fear that I might have been discovered when you called Mormont close. Without the unnatural winds I commanded for the ship that brought both him and me, his time at sea was far too short. But no, when you called my travelling companion, you just wanted him to tell you tidings of Westeros, to reassure you your blood-brother was as incompetent a king as everyone in the Seven Kingdoms already knows he is.” Euron’s blue lips twisted in a cold smile. “Sentiment is a weakness, little brother. Our father should have taught you that.”

Stannis had not thought to ask when Mormont had left Westeros. Mormont had simply never been important enough to bother asking. Had he asked… had he known…

“I joined your company as an ordinary soldier,” the Crow’s Eye said. “As soon as my entry to the company was secure, you awoke, because I wished you to awaken. Then you took your Swords of the Storm onto your ships, sailed them with the fastest winds you could conjure, and brought me right to my prize.” He dashed an elegant, mocking bow. “Much obliged.”

Stannis reeled. It could not be, it could not be that he had made such a terrible mistake, that he himself had brought the servant of the Enemy to his goal. It must be a lie. The Crow’s Eye was known for it.

“You are lying to me,” was all that he could bring himself to say.

“Am I?” Euron laughed. “Tell me, little brother, why do you think I let you wake up when I did?”

“You had to. You could not hold me down forever.”

“Plausible,” said the Crow’s Eye. “And yet… when we were in Asshai-by-the-Shadow the corpse of your friend Li was freshly slain. At most, days. You think it coincidence: the greatest length of time I could hold you was timed exactly that your arrival in Asshai and mine were so close?”

No. No. No!

Every bone in Stannis’s body rebelled against the notion. And yet the logic was remorseless as cold iron. That coincidence could not be believed.

“In truth, I joined you upon the Rhoyne. I’d say it was difficult, but why should I lie to you? It was easy. Some hair dye, an eyepatch, pretending my first language was Braavosi… shielding my magic from your senses was the only part that was actually hard.” Euron was enjoying this, Stannis could tell. The elder greenseer’s youthful handsome face was bright and smiling. “Then I reached into the dreams of that preening fool of a Qohorik who accosted you for what you did to his city, and I guided him to Asshai-by-the-Shadow to find you there.”

Then Stannis remembered the words of Monobho Parit, the red-robed Qohorik, the proud foolish sorcerer who thought he could best Stannis. Whom Stannis had slain. When you sacked Qohor, I swore I would be strong enough to avenge her. I gathered to me others who survived the Burning, studied the world’s dark and mysterious places, taught myself secrets of fire and blood… all for this moment. Urrathon Nightwalker of Qarth told me you would come here, and he was right, down to the day, down to the hour. And now I have you at my mercy.

Urrathon Nightwalker. Urrathon Nightwalker. An ironborn first name and a surname alluding to greenseers who walked in dreams.

Stannis cursed himself for a fool. Gods, it should have been obvious.

“Asshai is vaster than Volantis, and mostly unpeopled,” the Crow’s Eye went on. “It was easy for one Sword of the Storm to go missing from the rest, in the empty streets of that maze of a city. I killed Li Xinong an hour before you came to that house and wrote you the message in his blood. As with Xinong, so with Parit—I didn’t want to slow you down on your journey to Stygai. Quite the opposite. I just wanted you to think I wanted to.” Euron grinned boyishly. “That, and I admit I couldn’t resist it. The look on your face when you saw his corpse and my message there…” Euron giggled. “Gods, the look on your face.”

Stannis did not interrupt. If Euron wished to speak at length of all Stannis’s failings and follies, yielding secret knowledge that might be of use, Stannis would not stop him.

But beneath a blank mask of a face, Stannis’s thoughts churned and seethed with hate. He still remembered the old warlock he had fought alongside in Yi-Ti against the Bol Qo Rebellion. He had liked Li Xinong. Like Andonno Vanore, like Handtaker, he was one of the few leaders Stannis considered something of a friend. And Euron had murdered him, not as an enemy, not as a sacrifice, just for amusem*nt.

You will pay in blood for that, Stannis promised in cold silence.

“Then your own ships brought me here into the Shadow Lands. Well, most of the way. I faked my death during the battle with the dragon. That was easy also. Enough men died there in truth, lost and their bodies never found. After that, I set off single-handed, by other ways.”

The Crow’s Eye took a mocking curtsy, clutching his breeches. He lifted his voice girlishly high.

“Thank you for your help, my lord. I could not have got this far without you.”

Stannis clenched his fists with rage. Clawlike nails dug into his skin.

The Prince of Sunset spoke quietly, coldly, with deadly purpose. “Mayhaps you used me. You are such a liar, none can know the truth of it. Be it true or nay, I am here to stop you now.”

Euron was unafraid. “No. I am still using you. To open the Only Gate requires a sacrifice. The life’s blood of a greenseer will serve. A lord of space and time, the most powerful sorcerers in this world… yes, that will do nicely. Poor child,” Euron gloated. “This is why you shouldn’t believe in heroes. You came here through great pain and deadly peril to save the world of men—to stop me claiming the boons, claiming the Horn of Joramun and tearing down the Wall. And all you’ve achieved is to bring me on a silver platter the only ingredient I still required: you.”

Stannis laughed, a rasp harsh and cold. “You think I did not know what the Only Gate required?” he said. “You are arrogant, Crow’s Eye. Remember I started this quest before you. You were left trailing in my wake. I have read the signs on the walls of Yeen before you did.”

For a flash, Euron looked unnerved. Then it was back to smiling serenity. “Then why did you come here?” he sneered. “You walked into my trap.”

“Oh, I still had to come stop you,” Stannis said mildly. “You might have had other sacrifices prepared, to claim the boons without me. It would take a great many shadowbinders, skinchangers or warlocks to match one greenseer, but you could have gathered them.”

Euron giggled. “I could have,” he admitted, “if I had no better path. But I do have better. I have no need of those weaklings. I have you.”

“Do you?” said Stannis, his voice ice-cold.

From his side Stannis Baratheon drew a sword like soot and smoke. Valyrian steel, forged in blood and fire, taken from a temple of the Black Goat of Qohor when Stannis and his Swords of the Storm set the City of Sorcerers aflame.

Euron Greyjoy drew his own blade: a shortsword of castle-forged steel. No match for Stannis’s Valyrian steel blade. He stood facing Stannis, on opposite sides of an enormous mound of earth that lay before the immense black gate of the City of the Dead.

The Prince of Sunset took one step forward, then another. He trod over bare, lifeless soil. Even now, half-starved and skeletal, Stannis Baratheon was a mountain of a man, gigantically tall, broad of chest and broad of shoulder. He towered over the slim, delicate Euron. A duel between those two men was only going to end one way.

“I told you you are arrogant,” Stannis murmured. “You speak as if you have won before we begin fighting. Do you presume you can defeat me?”

“Certainly not,” said Euron, smiling.

Stannis blinked.

“You are the better warrior,” said Euron. “Certainly you could slay me. I confess it.”

Dark blue eyes narrowed. There were many things Stannis had expected: tricks, boasts, bravado. Not this.

Stannis was cautious of tricks and traps. This time Stannis’s mind was not venturing out beyond his mortal form, vulnerable to be seized and gripped by the mind of Euron. So why was Euron wearing that too-wide, sharklike smile?

“Before you slay me, one last question.” Perfect teeth flashed white in Euron’s too-wide smile. “Why is there no ghost grass under our feet?”

Stannis chanced a look down. Euron was right. Ghost grass grew everywhere in the Shadow Lands, everywhere—plain after plain of the stuff. Why were they standing on a gigantic mound of bare, churned-up soil?

A mound…

Realisation came.

Stannis sprinted, lunging for Euron. The Valyrian blade stabbed outward, reaching for Euron’s black heart.

Euron clapped his hands. Once, only once. And the earth…

…ERUPTED.

The gigantic mound of soil exploded outwards in all directions. Stannis was flung off his feet. He went crashing into the ground far away with a painful crash. Dazed from the force of that landing, he looked up and beheld the nightmares emerging from under the earth.

Great monstrous shapes, red as blood, surged upward out of the soil. First, a long shard of bone, as long as a whole jousting field. Another. Then vast spiderlike things, enormous in their own right, bigger than elephants, with wickedly sharp, curving legs… no, not legs. Claws. Huge expanses of blood-red flesh, like sailcloth, punctured with many arrows, stretching out between the very long bones.

Connected. They were connected.

This was not an army of nightmares Euron had buried under the earth to await Stannis. It was just one.

The nightmare unfolded itself under Euron. A monster that could put a city in its shadow. Talons that could slash houses in two. Razor-sharp wings were spreading, and spreading, and spreading, out and out and out.

Last to fully emerge—shaking off hundreds of tonnes of churned-up soil—was a great hulking mass, right under where Euron stood, blood-red and big enough to swallow a horse. The head of the dragon the Swords of the Storm had slain, hanging grotesquely loose from a neck that had been half-severed by the brave men’s axes. It was not alive. It did not need to be.

The dragon’s huge eyes, the size of kite shields, once coloured golden, shone a bright, icy blue.

For seconds Stannis forgot to breathe. Sheer horror froze him in place. In a mighty burst of muscles, the gigantic wight-dragon shook off the last of the dirt that had covered it and rose to its full height. Its wings had been pierced by hundreds of arrows. It could not fly. That was no comfort to Stannis. There were great castles in Westeros whose highest towers were not as tall.

Its eyes shone brilliantly with cold blue light, bright like icicles, bright like frozen stars—defiant of the Shadow-On-The-World that ruled around it. Euron sat perched on the dangling, part-severed head of the wight-dragon. He was laughing like a madman.

“Did you think me unprepared, little brother?” he giggled. “As if I would fight fair! I know the Shadow favours you. Do not waste your breath denying it; I could sense it from the beginning. So I sought aid from the forces of the cold and the light.” Euron was grinning. “Did you think the Enemy would remain aloof from this battle between greenseers? They know I seek to blow the Horn of Joramun, to let them past the Wall. They know you mean to stop me. Behold the gift of power they have given unto me!”

Gift? Stannis was not sure. Euron’s skin had turned pale as a corpse, his face crisscrossed with angry red lines. Stannis did not think the Crow’s Eye would long survive this ‘gift’. The power of the Others, the Enemy of all life, was not meant for the children of man. Stannis doubted Euron would survive it and doubted that the Others meant him to. Euron was a pawn to them, not an ally. They had no allies, only servants and victims. Once he had blown the Horn of Joramun, his usefulness to the Enemy would be ended.

He said nothing of this. He was beyond trying to reason with Euron Crow’s Eye.

Silent, resolved, Stannis got back to his feet. Euron watched from above with bemused fascination. Stannis turned his Valyrian steel sword to his left arm and brought it across in a slash. Blood welled out from shoulder to elbow, greenseer’s blood on the blade, hot and spurting. The blade burst into furious life. Bloodfire. Valyrian magic. The stronger the source, the stronger the flame. With greenseer’s blood willingly spilt, it would slash butter-like through solid stone or steel—impossibly bright, impossibly hot, white and bright and blinding.

“You think to battle me?” said Euron. Perched on the skull of the gigantic wight-dragon, he stared down at the tiny figure below, incredulous. “Me, with all the power of the Enemy, with a dragon at my command?”

Stannis gazed up at the fallen greenseer, knowing he was outmatched. Euron was older, more powerful, more practised, more learned in the sorcerous arts. He had been studying magic beside the three-eyed crow before Stannis had even been born. Blood magic was why Euron was still dark-haired, untouched by time, not youth. He had his mind, his sense of will, that had already proven powerful enough to overcome and imprison Stannis once before. He had cruelty too. Stannis had scruples, though few of them. Euron had none. There were things Euron would do that Stannis never would. And Euron had his wight-dragon, the fell power granted to him by the Enemy, power only granted to him because the Enemy knew he would wield it against the Wall.

If Stannis died here, at Euron’s or his own hand, Euron would use his blood and the Only Gate would open. Only Stannis stood between Euron Greyjoy and the power he wanted, to let the Enemy back into the world of men.

Sometimes a choice was no choice at all.

He lifted the sword, writhing with white flames. “Come at me, Crow’s Eye, if you dare. I have had enough of talking.”

Notes:

Hullo my lovely readers! :) Thank you all for your patience with this story. I'm exceptionally pleased to be able to say: IT'S TIME. The climax is here.

Fair warning: Chapter 22 is going to be a mega-sized super-chapter—possibly the biggest one I've ever written for this story. It's so big, in fact, that I've decided not to publish it all in one post. Doing it all in one gulp feels like it would be a gobstopper, but putting the pieces too far apart feels wrong too. It is, after all, one big climax-scene. So I've made the decision that the best way to handle it, for storytelling purposes, is to split it into pieces. Accordingly, one big meaty chunk of the massive climax-scene is going to be published every 48 hours until the whole climax-chapter is up for you. Rest assured there is not going to be a wait of months between segments. The next part—which will be published in 48 hours' time—is already 100% written. I'm just being dramatic. I hope that, this way, you'll enjoy the experience more as I wrap up the arc.

Without further ado… let's go!

Notes:

Right then, dear friends. Grand finale of the grand finale.

I hope you have fun! 😊