The final tally of what Lord Manderly had paid for my work came up to another seven hundred gold dragons. At his request, I'd made another seven of the door-sized mirrors over the second week of my wait for a ship, working through the mornings at the workshop. Despite all assurances as to the sturdiness of fused quartz, Maester Theomore had kept fussing about the large mirrors' durability, wringing his hands as he ordered around the servants sent to carry them away as each one was completed. He even had them wrapped up in several layers of wool before strapping them securely in carts for the short trip through the city.
My patience with the guy had run out on the third repeat of the whole rigmarole and another half-hour lost to my workshop being crowded by far too many useless idiots. Thus I'd ripped a branch thicker than my thumb from the nearest tree and had proceeded, to the blonde Maester's horror, to rap it against the latest mirror so hard it broke. The branch that was, not the mirror; at a thickness of about an inch, I doubted most people could break it without a hammer or similar heavy blunt object. Unlike the brittle glassworks the locals were used to, mine were pretty safe from the occasional bump. The only real danger was dropping the larger mirrors on stone or other hard surfaces; they were heavy enough that lifting them by myself was a struggle. They had to weigh around three hundred pounds and that kind of weight dropping down would hit harder than a knight swinging a warhammer.
My work on the smaller, decorative orbs turned out better in some ways and weirder in others. It was halfway into my stay in White Harbor that I noticed the flowers in them were surprisingly lifelike. As in, more lifelike than before being covered in molten quartz. No matter how carefully or slowly it was done, the drying process to avoid rot always had the delicate bits of plant matter losing something of their natural beauty and vibrancy. Yet after the first couple hundred pieces, the flowers in the orbs were turning out more and more vibrant-looking, noticeably more so than just after the drying. It was an oddity I couldn't really explain, not at first.
If that had been the only change nothing would have come of it, but on the second week Wyman Manderly had asked me whether I was trying something new with my glassworks. When my response came back negative, the overweight lord had taken me up the stairs to the castle's treasury where all the works he'd bought from me were being kept. Once the two of us were inside, he had shooed the guards and the torch-bearing servant out... then closed the door. Instead of being left in the utter darkness of a windowless room though, we could still see from the light of my latest creations. Not the literal glass candles or the amulet of health; those were locked up in an actual vault along with most of the Manderly gold and their most important relics.
No, it was the four dozen glass orbs faintly glowing in the dark. Not by much; all of them put together didn't even match a single glass candle. Too faint to be noticeable in the day or even under torchlight but in the total darkness they stood out like sore thumbs. I did not know why they glowed in the dark, was completely embarrassed by my inability to provide an explanation when Lord Manderly asked. The genial man had laughed and waved it away by calling it "just a bonus" and was fully willing to keep buying them all the same, but the difference had first surprised, then disturbed me.
Thus the second week's evenings found me soaking in a self-heating bronze bathtub - as in, I was heating it myself - trying to find what was going on with my works. Examining multiple spheres both before and after the change had yielded no results; I was not doing anything differently, nothing about the creation process had changed. Same materials, same melting and refining through simple conjured heat, same drying of the flowers with heat and fire resistance, then the sealing in molten quartz. Everything was as it should be... except for the flowers looking too vibrant and the spheres glowing in the dark.
In the end, I had resorted to making several extra orbs that would not be sold, confirming the new differences, then melting them open and examining the interior. The flowers retrieved from them... did not feel dry. Oh, they were perfectly devoid of water content but instead of being brittle enough to crumble if handled indelicately, they were almost as flexible as they had been when alive. In addition they were quite a bit tougher, reminding me of the plastic flowers of my previous life. The effect was perishable though, as least once they were taken out of the glass orbs; within an hour they would not only grow stiff and brittle but start getting brown and only a few hours later they would fall apart into ash.
The phenomenon was obviously magical, but try as I might I could neither sense it, nor guess as to how or why it happened. The kind of magic I was used to involved melting rocks, starting fires, or taking over large animals. Minor effects on something as small as a flower was akin to warging into insects; too small for me to handle and probably disastrous if I tried to produce it deliberately. The whole thing was frustrating enough I thought of investing the gains of my latest milestone into the eleventh Flame... but in the end I decided against it. Not only would I need those investments elsewhere once I crossed over to Essos, but for all I knew such an investment would make my Pyromancy stronger but even less able to handle the small stuff.
By the time another ship from Lys finally arrived to White Harbor, my only answer was that tiny bits of magic were leaking into my works from the spells I used in their creation. Odd, but since the changes seemed benign not really alarming.
xxxx
Shayala's Dance was a Lysene galley with a bronze figurehead, a weird amalgam of 17th century French galley and far more primitive ships of earlier times. It had two masts with a large triangular sail each, twenty-five pairs of oars for a hundred and fifty oarsmen total, and an aftercastle where both the Captain's cabin and a clay-tiled cooking area was. That was the only place where fire of any kind was allowed, and for good reason; with a third of their mass being hemp, sails and pitch, sailing ships were giant floating torches. Of the ship's total crew of a bit over two hundred, a hundred and fifty were slaves, all of them oarsmen. These demographics didn't result in very healthy conditions, even if one discounted the usually cramped accommodations in preindustrial sailing ships, or that all of that crew plus passengers had to make do with only two privies - and one of those was for the Captain's use alone.
All in all, just looking at the thing left a sour taste in my mouth, but it currently was the only way to cross the Narrow Sea. Frankly, life at the Neck had been cleaner, but the worst part was the cramped conditions. The voyage to Lys would take nearly a month assuming standard conditions at sea. A month during which I'd share with two hundred people a space barely larger than my adopted family's crannog in the Neck - and I'd spent more time outside the crannog over the years than inside. A month during which there wouldn't be anywhere for me to go, no hunting trips through exciting new places, no using pyromancy that could have disastrous results at the barest mistake or loss of control, nothing for me to really do.
This promised to be a very long trip...
xxxx
The first week of the trip was every bit as bad as I'd expected and more. Not because of the smell, though the ship was smelly, not because of the crowds, though the sailors were annoyingly loud well into the night, not even because of the food, which I'd expected to be terrible but had been pleasantly surprised when both officers and honored guests dined on the best lamprey-based products White Harbor had to offer. In fact, such products made up a sizable portion of the ship's cargo upon departure because apparently Lyseni in general and the Captain of Shayala's Dance in particular loved very rich, very fatty seafood.
No, the problem had a rather more personal cause, namely that I kept spewing my guts every hour unless I stayed in bed and only nibbled on hardtack and some cheese. The seasickness that had plagued me in my previous life had returned with a vengeance and in Martin's death-world I had to deal with it for far longer than half-day trips on steel boats much larger and far sturdier than any galley.
The ship's only saving grace - as in, why I hadn't set the thing on fire an hour into the trip then swam back to Westeros - was Captain Sathmantes. Despite a bony, if quite young face and piercing pale blue eyes, long and wild black hair and a trimmed beard that made him look positively villainous, the man was both approachable and friendly. He'd been quick to offer me his own cabin when he saw I was sick and even before that had welcomed me in the one dinner with his officers I'd managed to attend despite me being some no-name orphan girl from Westeros. Even my obviously Valyrian looks couldn't explain the favorable treatment; Lys had more people of Valyrian descent and very strongly Valyrian features than any other place in the world except possibly Volantis. No, the man was just kind, which was a rarity in this world and something I would remember.
The only thing about him that was disagreeable - other than his use of slave labor - was probably his weird name. Who named their kid 'Khorane' anyway?
xxxx
Most of the first week I passed in the Captain's quarters, trying and mostly failing not to feel miserable. I was nauseous more often than not but I was still hungry, the meager food I could stomach far from even the amounts I had been hunting by myself as a little kid, let alone the nightly feasts in Lord Manderly's table. In contrast, Featherball had really hit it with the crew after only a few hours of awkwardness. Avoiding me in my waking hours, the annoying bird perched in the open and often dived for fish in the surrounding waters, a behavior that somehow was counted as entertainment by the ship's crew. Her going into a hunting frenzy and catching way more than even her gluttony could consume probably had something to do with it as the fresh fish added to the crew's rations went hand in hand with the not-so-little miscreant's soaring popularity.
Meanwhile, I was reduced to going through my newly purchased books and spying on people through the ship's rats. The two activities proved surprisingly synergistic. Most of my studies focused on a primer on the Valyrian language I'd been given by Maester Theomore because looks aside, I no more knew Valyrian than did any other crannogwoman. The primer helped keep my mind off the nausea with its neat penmanship and frequent snide commentary by the former Lannister man and only a week into its study I was fairly sure I could get the gist of Valyrian texts. The rats on the other hand helped with learning to speak the language because much of the crew were Lyseni and spoke in a musical, flowing dialect of High Valyrian, but a few of them weren't from Lys, often leading to mixed discussions and at least one of the youngest, non-Lyseni officers being helped to learn as I spied on them.
While a month-long trip would not normally help as much, my ability to follow four or more conversations at the same time or hearing the same conversation multiple times by spreading my awareness across multiple rats let me make far more progress than should have normally been possible. The seasickness was a powerful motivator to keep practicing, because the rats did not feel seasick at all; as long as there was more of me sharing space with them than being miserable in my own body everything was good.
The seasickness went away during the second week and I finally found my "sea legs". I didn't know if I'd ever feel truly comfortable on one of the fragile, highly flammable, slow-as-molasses excuses for ships this world had, but at least I was functional. I kept on my language lessons via rat spies though, because as I slowly became more fluent, the information I got out of them became more interesting. The kindly Captain Khorane was actually a pirate in service to the Prince of the Narrow Sea, the great sellsail, merchant, smuggler, banker and pirate lord Salladhor Saan. He might be one of the least violent of his kind and according to the plans he discussed with his people he leaned more towards smuggling and privateering than actual piracy, but it was still a wake-up call that personalities more than just appearances could also be deceiving. He would not be the first kindly, honest smuggler in this world, after all.
From the third week on the trip became more pleasant. I joined the Captain and other officers more frequently in their dinners, practiced splitting my awareness between rats performing different tasks, and tried to make floatstone. Pumice and Scoria, the natural versions of such stones, were made by rapidly cooling volcanic glass that had a large amount of gasses diluted in the mixture, gasses that escaped as the pressure after the volcanic explosion rapidly dropped, forming bubbles in the solidifying stone. Having no way of providing such explosive conditions, especially on a ship, I instead used my Pyromancy on small pebbles to shape them as they melted and cooled. The bowl of water I kept at hand for testing their buoyancy also helped put out fires in the unlikely cases I made a mistake or lost control. Very, very unlikely; it only happened thrice.
The experiments showed limited success. Floatstone by itself would not be very useful as it eventually became waterlogged and sank, but I was hoping to work the same concepts with metals. Metal foam materials were almost as strong for the same size as solid metal when correctly made and if I could produce them in large quantities they would be useful in many projects down the line. By the time we'd passed the Stepstones and had turned towards Lys I'd just had my first success with a tiny bit of foamed silver.
Only an hour later, the barrelman shouted about a black sail on the horizon from his watch on the mainmast...
They will be upon us by midday," Captain Sathmantes said, lowering his Myrish Eye. "It's an Ironborn Longship, they fly no flags, they turned to follow when our bearing changed." His words visibly shook the men close enough to overhear but none of them said anything. Everyone had been busy for the past couple of hours, with weapons pulled out of chests, crossbows inspected and test-drawn, ammunition handed out, buckets of water and bags of sand placed in strategic places across the ship.
"The Black Goat take those Squid scum!" a burly, dark haired, dark-skinned man said and spat, his words echoing oddly. "Anything more we should know, Captain?"
"They're too far away to see gear or numbers," Sathmantes said with a shake of his head. "I'd have liked to know more about their rowers myself, but that's just wishful thinking."
"What if it wasn't?" I interjected, walking out from the shadow of the ship's mainmast. The young officer standing against it yelped and leaped away as, from his perspective, the six-foot Valyrian girl he'd probably been dreaming of half the nights had just appeared out of thin air less than a yard from him. Contrary to their intended purpose, my latest improvements could be very flashy.
"This is no business of yours, woman," the burly officer said in a long-suffering tone. "We have bloody work to do and no time to entertain flights of fancy."
"Funny you should mention flight," I shot back with a smile as Featherball flew in at that moment and landed on my shoulder, claws scraping against the steel scales now covering the leather at that point. "Because a bit of flight could bring information."
"Ye got a fancy bird, so what? Will it tell us how many squids are coming?" the same man challenged while the Captain remained silent. I just smiled but Featherball squawked and jumped down to the ship's deck. The same talons that had scraped against steel had little trouble gouging lines into wood. In but a few moments there was an arrow sign pointing at the guy and five letters across its length. IDIOT.
"Featherball could, but she doesn't have to," I half-lied. I did not know how much the still growing owl had been changed from hours of shared mind-space between us, but I doubted it truly extended to writing... at least not yet. "As I can see and hear what she does, I could relay any details immediately."
That gave the sailors pause, including the big guy. The right information could be worth their lives in a few hours and all of them knew it. I also saw how the way they looked at me changed, from desire mingled with various levels of condescension to something different. The desire was still there, but now there was also a hair of caution and unease in the sharpness of their gaze, the sudden tension in their stances.
"You're a warlock!" the youngest man among the decision-makers yelled. It was the same guy who'd jumped at my stealthy arrival, a blue-eyed platinum-blond with a bit richer clothes than anyone save the Captain. His inexperience showed by how nervous he was and if he was a day over twenty, I'd eat a lizard-lion raw.
"No, I'm a sorceress," I shot back with all the derision his accusation had deserved. "Warlocks are male." Also evil, though some Warlocks of Quarth might disagree on both counts.
"If you could give us more information it would be greatly appreciated," the Captain interjected before another argument could start. "Focus on their numbers, equipment and condition, both for their warriors and their rowers. Any sigils, too."
Featherball had already flown off after her letter-writing stunt and was speeding off towards the pirates under the power of a stamina boost. She was tiny and barely recognizable as a bird even to my eyes at over a mile away and was rapidly shrinking into a dot, soon to disappear. Captain Sathmantes and his two officers waited as another minute passed, then two, then three. Around us the crew went through their preparations with practiced ease, apparently old hands at naval combat. Then again, they were pirates.
"Shit," I swore with feeling, once Featherball had gotten within a mile and a half from the other ship and slowed down from her flying sprint to something more sedate.
"What is it?" Captain Sathmantes immediately asked, the other two men tensing.
"It's huge, for a Longship," I told them, half my attention in Featherball's superhumanly sharp eyesight. "Fifty yards from bow to stern, thirty-two pairs of oars... and the oarsmen are not sitting on benches," I added as Featherball flew steadily lower and closer, giving me more details. "They're sitting on chests and wearing leather or mail."
"They're all fighting men, not thralls," the Captain realized, tone grim. "A hundred and thirty Squids, at the minimum."
"A hundred and forty on the deck," I counted, Featherball gliding lazily a mere six hundred yards over the longship's deck. "There's no crossbows or longbows but I count at least forty smaller bows with their axes and spears and the team who's not rowing is setting up a ballista."
Nobody said it but we were all thinking it. Shayala's Dance might be a pirate vessel but its crew were more smugglers and merchants than warriors... and its rowmen were neither trained nor equipped for battle. I still didn't know how many of them were slaves but even if they all could and did fight they'd still be cut down by a hundred and thirty well armed, well-trained killers. And if our rowers couldn't fight, the remaining crew of fifty would be barely a speedbump.
"We c-could outrun t-them!" the young platinum blond piped up, voice shaking. That got him my most disdaintful glare for the magnitude of his stupidity.
"That longship can make eight more knots than this ship could on its best day," I told the clueless boy, because that should have been obvious to anyone that even casually learned about sailing ships, let alone an actual officer who would live and die on one. "The only reasons they're going that slowly is that they want our oarsmen to be tired when they catch up and everyone else to have had hours to stew in fear. Far easier to catch slaves if there is no fight at all."
"True," the burly guy agreed with a surprised grunt. "Ain't changing the fact we can't take those whoresons, or escape them."
"You'd be surprised," I said and lit a tongue of flame upon my palm.
xxxxMy knife sliced into the shoulder of the last rower that could not, would not, or were not allowed to fight, the oldest of the two dozen slaves among the rowmen. The slave looked on fearfully as his blood was drawn away by sorcery, obviating the need for him, his benchmates and the men on the paired oar to stop rowing as ritual ingredients were collected. The thin crimson stream flew off and was collected in a bottle before a touch from me sealed the wound over the course of a minute. At the beginning I'd rushed through these 'donations', hoping to get more time to boost the crew, or something similar. Yet working with humans had proven a lot more tiring than working with glass and after fixing pre-existing injuries and sickness on the ship's fighting men, another hour of working through smaller rituals, plus another half-hour of collecting blood, I was beginning to slow down.
The blood sloshing in the bottle hummed with potential, but felt less... dense for lack of a better word. While the total amount of power collected from nearly fifty people was considerable, it felt closer to multiple animal sacrifices than a single human life in what it could do. There seemed to be an element of quality in the power from the sacrifice that quantity couldn't make up with numbers, similarly to how I got almost no permanent growth from animals now, while people were another matter entirely. Rather counterintuitively, as what I could accomplish without sacrifices and just with innate power increased, the worth of sacrifices became less... or perhaps the lesser sacrifices were no longer of worth and importance to who I had become. They still had some power in and of themselves though, which should be very useful shortly.
My first thought had been to burn the other ship from a distance, much like I'd started that great fire to heal the Old Man back in the Neck. The logistics of that ritual however had proven prohibitive. For one thing, I'd marked the whole island to be within the boundaries of my ritual, magically declaring it to be under my control. There was no way to replicate that with the enemy ship at all. For another, I couldn't just extend power through vast distances willy-nilly; my blood, serving as the vehicle of ignition through its connection to me, had been directly applied to the ignition points. Overcoming those limits was not a question of just power but also control; without such links I was limited to fifty, maybe sixty feet unless I wanted the spell to explode in my face. I would survive; the ship would not.
Climbing out of the rowing deck, I came face-to-face with a jittery, almost manic Captain Sathmanes. The long-haired, bony pirate's face was flushed with more energy that he'd ever had in his life, the result of several boosting spells working in tandem. That had been my other bright idea; a bit of Sorcery to accelerate and redirect metabolism akin to an adrenaline rush, a touch of Pyromancy to prevent overheating, a mix of both for sustenance and to prevent adrenaline crash, and finally another bit of Sorcery to prevent blood flowing from wounds. Someone with all four would not just be far more capable of fighting but also highly unlikely to die or pass out to less than immediately lethal injury. A crew of such men might even beat the more experienced, better-armed Ironborn in an otherwise even fight.
Then I'd noted that applying all that to one guy took a good five or six minutes even when the duration was cut down to mere hours. In the time we had till the Longship caught up, I'd manage to enhance maybe thirty men at the cost of everything else I could possibly do, not only because of time but because I'd be wrung out of every bit of power and need a long recovery. No small army of bootleg, cobbled-together, experimental fire-wights to crush the enemy with, but a small group to delay the inevitable. So at the Captain's urging I'd worked my spells on the ten best fighters among us, himself included, before moving on to other preparations.
"You look tired, my lady," he commented, taking in the now unhealthy paleness of my skin.
"Half of this," I waved the large bottle that must once have contained rum at him, "is mine. Let's see you lose two pints of blood and still stand."
"Two pints?! You... you should be bedridden, not walking about!" he cried, once again confirming my observations of his kindness.
"It will pass," I waved off his concern. "I'll be fit to fight again in an hour, which I might not need to if this works as intended." And with that non-explanation, I melted the bottle's neck sealed and started shaping it into a 'T' of solid glass by adding pieces from a second bottle. The Captain stood by my side, ready to catch me if I fell. Joke was on him; he should be trying to catch the bottle instead.
"Fascinating," he murmured, looking on transfixed along with several sailors who should have been doing their jobs. Then again, it wasn't every day they saw actual sorcery. "What does it do?"
"It's my little gift for the Iron Islands' finest," I said with a nasty smirk as Featherball flew in and perched on the bottle, her talons closing firmly against the T-shaped neck. Perfect. "And a warning that their reaving ways will not be tolerated forever. A lesson they should have been taught a long time ago."
Featherball flew off, her powerful wing-beats carrying the five-pound weight with not much of a drop in speed. I rode with her all the way, sharing mind-space with the irritable juvenile raptor and exerting more direct control than I usually did. She did not complain; she understood the threat on the other ship well enough and that we only had the one gift to give.
Crossing the intervening distance took long, drawn-out, stressful minutes even with the raiding ship only a few miles away now. I had Featherball fly lower until she was practically on top of the other ship, only six hundred yards above it, before turning around and carefully adjusting her velocity and flight angle while my brain struggled with basic physics due to sheer stress. This would be the first-ever bombing run in the history of this world; if we missed, all the future sorcerers running their own bombing squadrons would laugh at us. Assuming that we survived, that was. When I was fairly certain the bomb would be delivered smack in the middle of the ship, right behind the base of its single mast, I had Featherball's talons let go.
"Bombs away," my body back on Shayala's Dance muttered, though I doubted anyone would understand.
The bottle fell off like a rock, going faster and faster and faster... too fast. A little over ten seconds later it struck, not at the base of the mast as I'd calculated but several yards ahead. It fell on the sail and due to the impact angle and softer surface tumbled instead of breaking. It was deflected to the front and right, shattering amid the starboard line of oarsmen and splattering everything within a two-yard radius with its bloody payload. Said blood promptly exploded into roaring purple flames akin to wildfire.
The men struck directly and set on fire were screaming and jumping around haphazardly, some of them jumping overboard. Others further away looked on in shock and horror or leaped back to avoid the flames. But their immediate reactions were pushed aside by the question of what had gone wrong. I'd triple-checked everything, every mental calculation. There was very little wind and it was steady enough. With Featherball's instincts and sharp senses and my mind, there was no way we got the distance or flight angle wrong. Not by even close to enough to miss that badly. Had the bomb dropped at the intended spot behind the mast, the mast itself would have caught fire and with the blaze right at its middle the ship would have been doomed.
Now, half the blast radius had been wasted over the sea and the blast itself was in a far less critical location. The Ironborn were already throwing buckets of water at it and while that didn't put out the flames, it was conceivable that the ship could be saved if they found another way... and find it they did. An enormous Ironborn warrior, a guy head and shoulders taller than the rest, with limbs like tree trunks, lifted an entire water barrel and threw it twenty feet or more at the blaze's heart. Three hundred pounds of water washed over the conflagration. The magical flames refused to die but some of them were washed out at sea. Then he did it again and again, displaying a level of strength way beyond my own, clearly superhuman. When the barrels ran out, he started throwing sand and other Squids joined him. The remaining flames guttered and slowly died.
"It didn't work," I told the Captain glumly. "They lost twenty men and four oars, got slowed down and panicked a bit, but their ship is still seaworthy..."
We'd soon have a battle at our hands.
"They're coming in faster," Captain Sathmantes said and lowered his Myrish eye before turning to me. "Your attack seems to have angered them, on top of causing significant damage."
"As I said it did," I responded, not looking up from my job of sifting through another box of arrows. Shayala's Dance had a significant supply of the things like any vessel that engaged in piracy and naval combat would have, but that did not ensure either the arrows' quality or size... especially with how few of the Captain's men were archers instead of crossbowmen. "You did not question my relayed information earlier, why now?"
"It is good to have... confirmation," the black haired man said with some discomfort. "Magic tricks and rumors are one thing. Magic that can decide battles..." he trailed off, looking away from me nervously. The other sailors were giving me a wide berth too, now, except for the burly guy that cursed too much. I wondered how much they knew of the monsters hiding away in Essos; a two-bit warg and a pyromancer with a flask of wildfire could have done much better than my improvised spell without even a sacrifice. And there were hundreds of those guys back in Westeros.
"Ugh, all of these are useless." I threw the last box of too-small arrows aside and stretched. At least sitting down for half an hour after receiving the life-force of several burned or drowned men had done wonders for my earlier fatigue.
"They ain't useless girlie, yer bow's too large," the burly guy chortled.
"Look who is talking. Can you even swing that anvil on a stick you call a weapon?" I shot back at the guy, because his bearded axe was as long as a halberd and its head was approaching anime territory.
"Better than a lass of eight and ten can shoot, I bet!" His retort came with an impressive one-handed twirl of his weapon, one I doubted he could have managed before my magic had given him a temporary boost.
"I'll take that bet!" I shot back and the Captain along with some of the other warriors finally set aside their new wariness of me and laughed. As pre-battle banter went, the lines were stupid but served their purpose of breaking tension and not letting us dwell on the entire shipload of professional raiders closing in inexorably. Plus the joke was on the big guy; I was only thirteen... and my archery had improved significantly since the Ironborn ship showed up.
xxxxThe longship started shooting its small ballista at two hundred and fifty yards. Insignificant by the standards of the Game of Thrones TV show, a very long effective range for a shipboard ranged weapon of that size. Nearly three seconds later a dart only half as long as my own arrows but thicker than most people's thumbs flew across the deck of Shayala's Dance, narrowly missed two oarsmen's heads and several of the armed sailors on deck before going through an oar on the other side of the ship and maiming the oarsman behind it.
We ignored the man's screams and kept our eyes on the enemy ballista crew. The Ironborn knew what they were doing and not twenty seconds later another bolt came our way. With the range still long enough to see it coming, the burly axeman sidestepped and the bolt flew through where he'd been, but the rowers could neither see the projectiles coming nor move aside. Shot low across the deck as it had been and with that many stationary targets it was pretty hard for the bolt to miss everyone and another man died.
The third bolt flew high, missing the clump of warriors around Captain Sathmanes as they all ducked, scraping an inch-deep gouge in the mainmast before vanishing into the sea beyond. The actual damage of the shots mattered less than their impact on morale, however, because in theory the Ironborn could keep their distance and pound our ship with impunity for as long as their ammunition lasted. The only reason they were coming as quickly as they could - beyond their anger at my earlier attempts to burn their ship - was that they did not know whether we had another firebomb and how quickly we could prepare it. With its aerial delivery via Featherball they knew they could not outrun it if they fled, so their only option was overwhelming attack before we could hit them again.
"Two hundred yards!" someone behind me shouted but I was too busy preparing my next trick to notice who. I'd have preferred the raiding bastards all burned with their ship, or given me enough time to recover fully and bomb them again, but if a boarding was the only alternative I'd make do. I strung my bow, timed my breathing with the ship's sway, drew an arrow and aimed. At one extreme of the ship's pendulum-like motion when the speed of its sway fell to zero, I loosed. Then I drew again, aimed, waited for the other extreme, and loosed once more.
The Ironborn longship was still nearly twice as far as either the raiders or our own bowmen and crossbownmen could accurately shoot with the dinky hand crossbows and shortbows they had, to say nothing of how potential targets could take cover while projectiles were still in flight. But ballistae were larger than men and were stationary targets, the enemy ship's approach at a yard per second notwithstanding, and with my now four investments in the seventh Flame I had the equivalent of two decades of experience backing my shots.
Once, twice, three times did the heavy arrows launched by my warbow bite into the Ironborn's ballista before its crew could be ordered to return fire by that huge warrior on the other ship. For some reason the bastards seemed reluctant to risk themselves in the open and by the time the big guy could intimidate them more than my arrows it was too late. I closed my eyes, reached across the diminishing gap between the ships, and ignited the blood the arrowheads had been coated in with magical fire. Purple flames burst from three different spots in the ballista, where the blood had both scraped against and been shoved inches deep into the wood. Unlike before, the flames did not stop there. I'd hit the target personally and directly, within line of sight, from far, far closer than my prior efforts and had the lingering power of several kills to put into it; the Ironborn crew fell back in terror as the ballista's body went up like a giant torch.
While everyone else scrambled for water and sand, the seven-plus foot tall warrior ducked under the flames, grabbed the ballista by its still-unlit base... and with a mighty yell that could be heard clearly a hundred and sixty yards away threw the entire weapon overboard. Then he ducked under the shot I'd been lining up against anyone trying to put out the flames, my arrow barely scraping against the shield strapped to his back.
"That guy's a monster," I muttered with a scowl while lining up my next shot. Not at the same guy, or any of the ironborn free to move, this time. No, I was taking a page out of the damn raiders' book and shooting at the men still working the longship's intact oars. I didn't hit the man I'd been aiming at but I did hit the guy behind him, the man's chain shirt doing nothing to stop the arrow from drilling through his torso. He didn't die immediately but he was pretty much a goner all the same.
"Nah, I can take him," the burly axeman next to me boasted. "My axe is bigger than his!"
None of us laughed. I kept shooting as quickly as the situation allowed, my lethality dropping as the Ironborn raiders dropped their oars and took up axes and shields or bows now that the oversized longship was too close to stop. Five shots, ten, twelve, then the ships were close enough for the other ranged attackers from both sides to shoot accurately. Twelve of ours... agaist forty-one of theirs. And with most of Captain Sathmantes' men being crossbowmen, the rate of fire would favor the Squids even more.
A full third of the Ironborn archers fired at my position from the very first volley, fourteen shots aimed at the very obvious white-haired threat with the huge warbow standing in the middle of the ship with no cover in reach. Five of them still missed, the hundred yard distance and conditions reducing accuracy despite my becoming the easiest as well as the highest-value target. One of the archers died to my own shot a split-second before he could fire. The other eight were on-target.
That was when a rectangle of fire as wide as my shoulders and and as tall as I was flared into existence a foot in front of me. Eight arrows struck the door-shaped construct of solid flame and failed to penetrate. A second later the construct vanished, the arrows dropping to the ground even as I loosed my own follow-up shot. I couldn't see through the flames any more than the raiders could but four nearby rats had no such problems, allowing me to pick targets, draw and roughly aim without exposing myself. Only a last-second correction was needed and being able to see where the enemy was aiming and where they were ready to fire reduced the danger considerably.
Ninety yards, eighty five, eighty, seventy-five, the closer the ships came, the deadlier ranged fire became but with me both disrupting the Ironborn and picking their archers off one by one, Captain Sathmantes' men did a lot better than they would otherwise have. They still died, but crossbows didn't need that much skill and could be picked up by others if their wielder was shot; the same did not apply to the raiders' bowmen. We didn't need to kill them either; crippling injury took a man out of the fight all the same.
By the time distance fell to fifty yards, I dropped my shield and tapped into as much of the lingering power of my kills as I could handle. Warmth became fire, fire became agony, like boiling iron flowing through my veins as I drew five, ten, two dozen times more power than I could easily handle. Much of the power slipped through my mental grasp, thus the backlash, but the remainder I threw across the fifty-yard divide and every oiled string caught fire. The Squids yelled, dropped their bows and tried to stamp out the flames, but the damage was done. Even if the scorched weapons could have handled any more shots, none of our enemies would trust them while the obvious sorceress that had set them alight still lived.
Oars shattered and grappling hooks flew as the two ships came together in a deadly embrace. The unavoidable collision was what had thrown further plans to burn the enemy ship by the wayside after the torched ballista was thrown overboard; had they worked, the Squids would have both the time and the opportunity to take us with them out of spite. And Squids lived and breathed spite as much as any Lannister.
A hundred reavers jumped, climbed, or Tarzan-swung upon Shayala's Dance and were met by less than half their number of warriors and another sixty desperate sailors with neither armor nor weapons better than pointy sticks. Captain Sathmantes, the burly axeman with his enormous bearded axe, four experienced sellswords wielding Braavosi dueling blades, a Summer Islander with a greatclub and the ship's three most experienced spearmen threw themselves in the middle of the enemy lines. Those ten men being enhanced by my magic was the only reason our defense did not immediately shatter.
The clang of steel on steel, the yells of two hundred men, the screams of the injured and dying, they fell on me like a tide. Compared to the near-silent lethality of swamp monsters invading my personal space, the cacophony of my first serious fight felt... pretty mundane. I let it crash over me and pass me by as I continued shooting while keeping out of the way of the melee. Of the sixty arrows I'd started with I was down to thirty-four and I needed to make every shot count. Here, I nailed a reaver dual-wielding axes through the eye before he could overwhelm a pair of sailors. There, I shot a spearman through the shoulder, foiling his thrust and leaving him open for Captain Sathmantes to kill with a slash through the neck. On the other side of the ship, I pinned one of the bigger Ironborn through his shield, its oaken surface failing to stop a shot from my warbow at what was basically point-blank range.
The Squids were not idiots. A whole group of a dozen broke off the rapidly devolving melee to deal with me. The first to charge got a war-arrow through the guts, the second had his left knee destroyed by my next shot and the remaining ten opened the close-up fight with a volley of throwing axes. Another brief barrier of solid flame stopped those, then I was already stabbing their leader through the throat with my spear before falling back.
Unlike my fights with bandits, these guys proved actually competent fighters. Had they attacked the me that had just left the Neck they'd have overwhelmed me in seconds. Had they attacked the me of yesterday, even a pair of them would have given me serious trouble in melee. Now... now they just seemed slow and clumsy. The butt of my spear broke an axeman's fingers, forcing him to drop his weapon while a lightning-quick trust with its point took another out of the fight. A slice and two lunges came too slowly to stop me from rushing through the attackers' lines, tripping one with the butt of my spear, kicking a second one's knee from the side then dodging or parrying their retaliation.
The rest tried to mob me but I leaped straight up, small constructs forming footholds for me in mid-air. If I could not kite them across a plain, then I would leverage superior reach and levitation to negate their numbers. Taken by surprise via magic and unable to think of a solution mid-fight, the remaining attackers died to either my spear when they came close or my bow when they turned tail and ran.
A barrel came flying at my face and I reflexively formed a shield, but stopping arrows or thrown axes was one thing; stopping something that weighed more than I did thrown by a guy stronger than anyone back on Earth was another thing entirely. Both my construct and the barrel shattered, the pieces pushing me off my mid-air footholds and into a twelve-foot drop to the deck. Then that huge Ironborn warrior that had foiled my plans twice before charged at me while I was still trying to get my bearings.
The burly axeman that had made all those boasts earlier slew his opponent with a backstroke of his bearded axe and charged out of the melee to intercept what had to be the enemy leader. He was not a small man and he'd been enhanced with my magic to boot, but when his opponent leaned into his charge and bashed him with his shield he was thrown back, reeling. Then the seven-foot-tall Ironborn warrior started swinging his own weapon with precision and speed that proved he was no idiot relying on strength alone.
I forced myself up, nocked an arrow, and sent it flying at him. He turned faster than either me or the burly guy thought possible, his shield coming up and letting my arrow shatter against it. The skeletal hand painted over a blood-red background upon it seemed to wave mockingly even as its wielder took a step back and leaned away from a swing of the huge two-handed axe.
"The Black Goat take you!" the burly guy spat. "Stand still!"
Instead of replying verbally, the taller, leaner but more muscular reaver turned aside from the follow-up blow, ducked under my next shot, then bashed his opponent with his shield hard enough to knock him down. I reached out with a mental thrust, putting as much force as I could manage after my prior exertions, then immediately felt like I'd knocked my head against a castle's walls.
The giant swung his -relatively- much smaller axe at the burly guy, arm swinging down like a catapult's limb. The other axeman tried to block but his axe's haft was shattered then his ring mail was split by the remaining force of the blow. The injury would have been crippling, possibly even lethal in any other case, but refused to bleed thanks to my magic. Then the big bastard turned around and charged towards me shield-first, denying me an easy target.
I dropped my bow and tried to outflank him and stab him in the side his shield didn't cover but he proved a lot faster than his bulk had led me to believe. He was also a far better warrior than anyone I'd ever faced, casually parrying or dodging thrusts, leaping over attempts to trip him and delivering lightning-fast swings I only barely dived aside from. I tried to set his hair on fire and they started to smoke, then a lightning-fast shield bash knocked me bodily off my feet, through a good ten feet of air and slammed my back into the ship's railing.
I barely managed to conjure a shield of solid-flame against an overhead swing, his one-handed swing powerful enough to split my construct halfway through. Ribs aching, I took advantage of the split-second the disappearing barrier afforded me to roll under his weapon arm, into his reach, conjure a dagger of solid flame and stab him in the guts. The thick leather belt he wore over suspiciously Roman-style armor both resisted for another split-second, then the flaming construct dug deeply into flesh with a hiss.
Then a meaty fist the size of my head slammed into my jaw with the strength of a charging bull and threw me overboard...