"How does it fit?" I shouted to be heard over the din of the Florians' smithy. They had even more apprentices now, trainees to handle the increasing demand for nails, horseshoes, mail rings and everything else that did not need a master blacksmith. With the war preparations in full gear, pretty much every smithy on the island had more orders than they knew what to do with.
Instead of answering, Jorah flexed his fingers and then his arms, stretched, hopped in place, then drew his sword and started going through stances. Low guard, high guard, back right, hanging right, inside left, close left, close right, short guard. Then he cycled through them in reverse, faster than the telling would take. Sword flashing, he went through a dozen strikes and parries and dodges in half as many seconds, not quite as fast as he could have but a hell of a lot faster than Hollywood liked to show people in plate armor move. Dull black steel plates shifted with the clink of metal on metal in every move yet every motion was smooth and uninterrupted even when Jorah did forward and back rolls or hopped over a wooden beam in the same motion one would use to climb a horse.
"A perfect fit, my lady," the nine and thirty year old warrior marveled. "Even better than my old suit of plate." He flexed his fingers again, the articulated plate never locking or catching anywhere. "Lighter too."
"I do not think that is true," the more outgoing Florian twin said, looking at the armor critically yet also with pride. He had reason for the latter; it was a very good suit of full plate. "This suit of plate may not be the heaviest I have ever made," his eyes glanced to my guards momentarily "but it still is closer to tourney armor than not, my lord."
"Not a lord any more," Jorah muttered under his breath before shaking his head as if trying to shake off the weight of past mistakes. "Then why does it feel lighter?" he asked then in a stronger voice.
"Have you considered that you have been training harder in the past few months than you had since before the Greyjoy Rebellion?" I reminded him. Probably harder than he ever had, the magical healing having a considerable impact on his stamina, to say nothing of the repeated vitality infusions. "It probably feels lighter because you are stronger and healthier." And not just in the training yard, if Lynesse was to be believed... which was proof she should cut down on the new spiced wine, at least while I was around. Oversharing was not my idea of fun.
"Mayhap you are right," the middle-aged knight agreed. He sheathed his sword and turned to the white-haired, pale-skinned smith. "Master Florian, my compliments to your skill. This is a finer suit of plate than I have ever worn."
"It was my pleasure to serve, sir knight, my lady," Florian gave us a small bow and I smiled at him while Jorah winced. "Truly, working with something new was treat, a way to further my skill in the art. For that I am ever grateful." My smile widened. He did not sound nearly as pleased when he was cursing up a storm at how hard the heat-resistant metal had been to work with.
"Don't worry, master Florian!" I 'assured' him. "When the time comes for my own armor there might be yet another new metal to work with. That will surely push your skills beyond those of any other smith in this island!"
If his exasperated glare was any indication, for some reason my words did not reassure him at all.
xxxx
From the Florian brothers' smithy, the seven of us moved further south through the fruit plantations and small farms; me riding on the rickshaw, Jorah walking to get used to his new armor and how it would handle a long march, and all the wights I had fully covering armors for for escort. We cut through the curated woods around the city that pretended to be wild forest for the tourists' benefit, leaving foreign nobility and wealthy merchants to their parties in the woods and their fake safaris with so-called wild animals released by their hosts not far ahead of the hunting expeditions. The multi-layered fragrance of rotting wood, fresh foliage, moss, wild ginger, honeysuckle, and even the musky scent of worms and the distinct smell of petrichor gave way to the simpler, lighter scent of damp, decaying vegetation, rich earthy soil, and the sweet, pungent aromas of various plants and fruits. The enormous palm trees framing the road were the only members of their species in evidence as the curated forest of the resort gave way to more... practical concerns.
Coconuts, bananas, mangoes and some fruit I did not recognize were grown in whole forests worth of trees, interrupted by farmland every so often. I was pretty sure most of the bean plants were soy rather than the varieties I was used to, and the other most widely cultivated plant was a weird small bush with very thick roots that often protruded from the soil in clumps like a dozen carrots bunched together, though still the light brown color and texture of roots. Unlike the soybeans I had no idea what those were. Grains were cultivated too, some weird variety of wheat that grew in more muddy soil than was normal. It was odd to think that for all that Lys was a resort, most of the land outside the city was dedicated to growing things than being pretty... and all the fields were worked by slaves.
Normally, I would only travel through these lands overnight. The slaves only worked during daylight hours, and each time I saw them I had to remind myself that burning everything to the ground would do far more damage to the innocents than the slavers that deserved the flame. Unfortunately, I had yet to find an alternative solution, mostly because the working conditions in the plantations were better than for most smallfolk I had seen back in Westeros... and that was a major problem. Daenerys had tried to end slavery in both the books and the television series, a naive teenager with too much power and idealism and too little foresight and preparation. Where her rebellion won, famine and plague had soon followed, making things worse than before. I did not want to make the same mistakes, especially when the slaves here in Lys were all relatively happy.
Was it possible to violently upturn the order of the city, shatter the slave-owners' control? Bombing runs from tropical birds loaded with with wildfire-equivalent, farm and cargo animals rampaging, venomous snakes and other predators sneaking into villas guided by a human mind, wight assassins hitting anyone trying to organize a response under cover of night, all of it done remotely from a hidden location or even off-shore... a few months without another mage to counter me and my power would slowly build from the victims until the city finally fell. It would not fall easily or quietly though and far too many innocents would die in the chaos. The panic of the attacks from foes unknown, fires that might run out of control, the riots that were to follow in the wake of the fear and the loss of the merchant princes' power... Lys would turn into another Meereen, for I lacked the numbers to enforce order street by street just as much as a legion of Unsullied under the Mother of Dragons would have in canon. At the same time... what would I replace the slave princes and merchants with? I had no more idea how to run a city properly than Daenerys did.
"Why the increased escort, lady Belaerys?"
Jorah's question broke me out of the spiral of fantasizing about slaver deaths, worrying about the consequences, scrambling for an answer that would not come. I shrugged off worries that belonged at least a year in the future and turned my eyes back to the present and the sell-sword company that would be involved in a war in only a few weeks. Already the first recruitment offers had reached Tregar's desk. Nothing serious just yet, more probing to see if the new guys on the market would bite, a chance to measure their teeth and claws and conviction. Suddenly I laughed.
"Did my question amuse you, my lady?" The former knight gave my antics the dubious look they deserved.
"No, Jorah," I managed between giggles, "It just occurred to me that our new sell-sword company is in need of a name... preferably before we sally forth towards our first battle."
"I see..." the middle aged knight mused, looking at the six armored wights silently marching at the rickshaw's sides and the one tirelessly pulling at the wagon's handles. I'd had the runner's position rotated among the wights every few miles for appearance's sake, but from his expression Jorah was already suspecting something was mighty odd about guards that did not speak, did not eat or rest, and never pulled off their armor in his sight. Whatever thoughts he had he did not share but something needed to be said, even if the secrecy of the wights was running threadbare the more time Jorah spent with them. The man had been a spy in the other timeline that would never come; he was neither stupid nor unobservant, merely impulsive, ruled by his desires.
"I woke up... restless this morning, Jorah," I finally told him. "With a pressure to move, to act more than I had in recent weeks, a sense of..." I grasped for the right word to explain what had made me get the former knight to Florian's smithy the moment his new armor's final adjustments had been made. "...apprehension." An apprehension with no apparent cause, that was. Everything was going well.
"Does it have to do with the jewelry?" he suddenly asked and I blinked. He must have seen my confused expression because he went on. "Lynesse told me you made some jewelry for the men, the day before yesterday." He sighed. "I thought it odd and she did not know much else so I did not think of it further. We had..." He suddenly blushed. How did a man pushing forty still blush like a teenager after three years of marriage? "...other things in our minds."
"Good for you, Jorah," I told him with a smile. At least that much was going well. Maybe he and Lynesse would have time to fix their problems. "And it wasn't just any jewelry. But I don't want to spoil the surprise."
Then we crested the next hill and the problems began....
xxxx
Jorah Mormont had made many mistakes in his nine and thirty years of life. He had had one marriage at a young age to a wife he did not really care for at the word of his father. Jorah had held no rancor for the Glover girl, but being forced to marry someone he did not love had left him cold and angry for a decade. As for the girl, she was sickly and never gave him children before she died in childbirth. Jorah mourned, more because he felt sorry for her than anything else. He had focused on his training afterwards, but he never tried to catch the eye of some famous knight, to make a name for himself. He had walked in life like a ship unmoored, dragged away by the strong currents and freezing winds of the Bay of Ice.
Then his lord father had abdicated and taken the Black, leaving the lordship to Jorah decades earlier than he'd ever expected to inherit. Why did he do it? The Old Bear had never said and Jorah had never asked. Back then it had felt like another duty he had not chosen, that he had not been ready for. Only months after came the war, Balon Greyjoy's great folly, and Jorah had seen it as freedom; freedom to fight for a cause, battles to throw himself at to win the glory he had not pursued as a younger man. Somehow, by the grace of the Seven, the Valyrian steet of the Mormonts' ancestral blade, and a great deal of luck he had survived them all without crippling injury or worse. He had been second in the storming of Pyke after Thoros of Myr and his burning blade and finally earned the glory he thought he deserved. He had been knighted, he had entered the celebratory tournament at the war's end, he had won there too. Not just the tourney but Lynesse's heart and hand in marriage.
That had been the one thing he did not see as a mistake, now, but more mistakes followed, greater than before. He'd thought himself the Warrior made flesh and a deserving lord, but it was not the Warrior that runs a household and Lynesse had been too young for it, or so he thought. More fool, he. And when he had to run away in shame and fear, Lynesse had chosen to come with him. That... he did not know if it was a mistake. Mayhap he should have sent her back to her family, for Lys was more dangerous by far than Bear Island. Yet they had stayed together and then... opportunity. A merchant prince and a Valyrian lady asking for them by name not two days after their arrival to the island paradise.
Lynesse had been suspicious then, especially when Lady Bealerys had declared herself a sorceress. But what else could they do but work for her and Tregar Ormollen? More than just the life of a sell-sword that had been his only hope, Jorah found himself a commander of men. A position he had not been ready for in truth, but he was learning and Lady Belaerys was both generous and had some unusual ideas... but now it was Jorah's turn in suspicion and worry. His beloved wife was learning sorcery! Couldn't she have remained the one to run the merchant prince's household, remained in safety and away from dreadful things that could hurt her? Jorah could not understand why Lynesse had taken Lady Belaerys up on her offer... did his new position offer her just as many luxuries as she had grown up in? Why did she have to get involved, to grasp for a sword that might not have a hilt? Jorah himself did not feel confident with such things, despite the benefits of his new armor.
"Jorah, what do you make of this?" his employer asked as they crested a hill... and saw a collapsed palm tree blocking the road a few dozen yards ahead. Immediately, all thoughts of the past, all doubts of the future vacated his mind and were replaced by alertness.
"Do you think it is natural, my lady?" he asked, the doubt in his tone making his own thoughts on the matter clear.
"Lys is not supposed to have bandits," the silver-haired young woman said with a pretty frown... then she looked around cautiously. "Which means it could be something worse than bandits." Without needing to be told, without any orders given, all six of their guards raised their weapons and prepared for a fight. If there was an ambush, they would not be caught unawares.
"Should we stop?" he asked, peering into the gloomy thicket of strange trees around the road, trying to pick out any bandits lying in wait. "Turn around perhaps?"
"When someone blocks the road, Jorah, they want you to stop. Why would we do as potential enemies wish?" Why indeed? While the strange two-wheeled, hand-drawn carriage kept moving and the rest of them guarded it from all sides, lady Belaerys turned around and pulled at a thin silken blanket thrown over a niche made by a trunk and a pile of supplies behind the cart's single seat. There rested the lady's owl, the largest example of its kind Jorah had ever seen. "Wake up, sleepyhead," the young sorceress called out fondly. "Time to get to work."
The bird opened a single eye, closed it again, then turned its head away from the two of them without moving the rest of its body. Seeing it was disquieting, though Jorah could not explain why. His employer did not seem to feel the same however. "Yes, I know it's the middle of the day but a potential threat just came up."
The clacking of a beak that followed sounded annoyed even to Jorah's ears. Could the bird understand what was being said? The Citadel's specially bred white ravens were said to understand human speech but that was just an owl! Apparently lady Belaerys thought so because she continued with the conversation. "No, it's not my imagination or a whim. I really need you to scout the road ahead for enemies, Featherball."
The bird hooted and ruffled its feathers, its head hiding under its wing as it curled up into a ball. Jorah could not say its name did not fit, yet there was something disquieting about a bird that not only understood human speech - and could apparently converse with the young sorceress somehow - but would also act up just like a girl-child of only half dozen namedays that wanted to avoid her chores. Jorah had five female cousins; he'd recognize that behavior anywhere.
"I'll give you a pound of smoked bacon," the sorceress offered and Jorah almost lost a step, scrambling to re-evaluate everything he thought he knew about birds as the unlikely specimen before him opened its eyes, flapped its wings lazily and then flew off. Good timing too; they were just coming up to the felled tree.
"The tree was chopped down all right," the young Valyrian woman said despite none of them having line of sight to the lower end of its trunk. For once, the disgraced knight was not surprised. He'd long since had that particular old wives' tale proven true during lady Belaerys' first inspection of the recruits. "There doesn't seem to be anyone around though, not unless they're hiding deeper into the thicket."
"Why not have your... bird scout the area?" he asked the young sorceress, curious of the capabilities of this scouting owl.
"Because I don't want to put Featherball at risk. In the open sky she can fly beyond the reach of weapons but in the relative confines of the woods if she is close enough to see people hiding then they'll be close enough to shoot at her."
Jorah was about to argue that it would be better to know about any threats regardless of such risks when the guard pulling the two-wheeled cart stepped over the fallen log, pulling his burden along. The wheels struck said log but incredibly, impossibly, the cart kept going, rolling over the obstacle as if it were a mere bump on the road. Its wheels and axle couldn't possibly be normal, especially as it slammed back down on the road afterwards with no damage. And the guard pulling it, why, he had to be as strong as the Mountain!
"People have been here very recently. Whoever felled the tree scared away any birds for quite a distance," lady Belaerys informed him. "Small animals too... but how could they have known we were coming?"
"They must have had a lookout on the hilltop we just passed, a man of theirs hidden in the bushes," Jorah said because wasn't it obvious? It is what he would have done. "But then, why leave or hide?"
"Maybe they saw our armored guards and thought it too much of a risk," she said but Jorah was not sure. Why put the effort into cutting down the tree, then? "But maybe it was not us that sent them away..."
"Oh?" he asked.
"Featherball just saw more travelers coming up the road," the sorceress explained. "Several dozen slaves on carts moving a load of foodstuffs. They have over a dozen armed horsemen along."
"That would scare off any bandits, all right," Jorah chuckled, relieved. Threat averted; they would not need to spring any traps because his young employer was almost as bull-headed as Jorah himself had been in his youth.
Soon they were past the turn of the road, within shouting distance of the other travelers. Twelve ox-carts full of produce, each with a driver and two workers riding on top. Said men were shirtless, with the lean muscle built only by hard work and scarring either from accidents or punishments if he had to make a guess while they were still too far away to examine in detail. The riders escorting them were armed not for war but with polearms and ropes for knocking down and capturing runaway slaves. It made sense if they were there to prevent those slaves from running but there was something about this whole image that did not quite feel right to the former knight.
"My lady, these are zorses," he said pointing at the striped black-and-white horse-things the guards rode. "They are-"
"Horse and zebra hybrids from the far east, I know," the silver-haired girl nodded. "What of them?"
"Why would some guards in Lys have exotic horse-things from half a world away?" he asked as he slowed and lady Belaerys' cart and guards slowed to match him. Now that he gave it more thought, another discrepancy came up. In all these months in Lys the Lovely, he had never seen a slave with scars. "My lady, maybe we should-"
Jorah Mormont never finished his suggestion on what they should do because three dozen apparent slaves reached under tarps or even in the piles of produce, pulled out crossbows already drawn and loaded and shot as one at their smaller group... Award Quote ReplyReport665Belial6664/7/2025Reader modeNewAdd bookmark Threadmarks Belial666Supervillain ParagonSubscriber4/7/2025Add bookmark#3,906A bit late, but the Jorah Mormont perspective chapter is finally here. He's doing a lot better than in the original timeline...
...except for being shot, that is. Or having to deal with the antics of a sorceress that is also his employer who is also training his wife in sorcery. And having to upend his entire worldview because of Featherball...
...OK, he might not be doing that much better but at least he hasn't lost Lynesse yet?
Being outnumbered five to one was historically a terrible place to be in the open. The enemy being ranged troops and cavalry vs infantry would have been even worse... if the two sides had been anywhere close to equivalent quality. Two thirds of the crossbow bolts shattered or bounced against the heavy plate of my guards with clangs of metal on metal. Jorah's black plate was not even scraped, the Florian brothers' best work shrugging off the crossbow bolts with zero trouble. Faint echoes of memories of pain came from two of the wights where bolts found chinks in their less well-fitted plates, but wights lacked the frailty of living men. My magic might not have been at the point where they'd still move after being hacked to pieces, but a few piercing bolts were irrelevant.
As the only relatively vulnerable target, I'd jumped off my seat and put the bulk of the cart between me and the attackers at the first sign of the crossbows. I needn't have bothered; the rest of the bolts flew wide as they missed, none of them having been aimed in my direction at all. That along with the ropes and polearms of the riders meant intent to capture, not kill. Who wouldn't want a magical healer of their own, after all? The dozen pretend-guards in chain and leather formed a line and made to charge on their zebra-horse hybrids. Their plan was obvious; shatter the tiny defensive line of my guards with their charge, then mob and capture the valuable healer before either killing the witnesses or, if trouble arose, escape with the prize through superior mobility. Simple, quick... and highly insulting of both my troop's competence and my magic.
Pulling back from over a dozen spies and couriers across the island and beyond, my mind's shadow fell on the cavalry line that seemed to be moving at a crawl as if the air were molasses. The soldiers' minds were ignored entirely; far too much weight, discipline and complex thought to deal with in a fight except for brief distractions. Their rides however had no such protection, or so I thought. I'd never tried to warg horses; they were smelly, stupid animals that I would never ride and weren't nearly as efficient as other options where carts and carriages were concerned. The zorses' minds were not like that at all; they were angry, hungry, nasty things brimming with enjoyment for the hunt and the trampling of two-legs, the kind of ferocity one would expect of hyenas or maybe an adult Featherball that had grown unbound. The only reason they tolerated their current riders was a shared cruelty and enjoyment of war which they saw as an endless hunt and a showing of their might that could last a lifetime. There would be no quick bonding with these things, which only reaffirmed my contempt for horse-kind.
My mind's shadow gathered, pressing down on only the four zorses at the center of the line. That was no call for a bond, no offer of companionship. It was a great beast of the skies falling on halpess victims, fangs biting, talons rending. Four minds of mere animals, however ferocious, were no match for a human mind backed by powerful magic and faster than the telling would have taken they were torn apart, snuffed out. In the physical world time seemed to speed up, and the center of the enemy charge collapsed. One moment their four best riders were speeding towards us, the next it was a tangle of tumbling limbs and clash of flesh and metal and snapping bones like so many sticks of chalk as the zorses suffered lethal strokes. The remaining riders swerved aside to avoid being caught in the devastating pileup, breaking their charge then and there.
Seven wights launched themselves at the survivors, Jorah following them a second later. Heavy infantry against medium cavalry, Westerosi greatswords against billhooks and man-catchers. It was an odd match-up, for normally such polearms were used against knights to unhorse them and force them to the ground where they could be summarily dealt with. They were less effective against infantry from horseback though like any polearms they could still be devastating when stiking head-on with the weight of the rider and zorse behind them. Jorah was thinking the same, for he approached his foe warily. Slowed from the aborted charge and the change in direction he may be, the rider could still injure or even cripple him. So the former lord of Bear Island did not give him the chance; he dodged not away from the rider but towards him, shifting from one side of the zorse to the other before the rider could reposition his billhook or turn his beast. Then Jorah delivered a two-handed chop not at the armored rider but the zorse's closest unprotected leg. The zorse screamed and proved the vulnerability of such spindly-limbed animals by toppling. The rider frantically leaped off as they fell, saving himself from broken bones but not Jorah's follow-up swing from behind. Unlike the movies, the powerful blow didn't cut through the chain mail. The force of the blow still shattered the man's collarbone and dropped him to the ground, where a follow-up stab with all of Jorah's weight behind it pierced through chain links, padding, flesh and bone all the way through.
At the same time, the wights made short work of their own opponents. Billhooks slammed against breastplates with both rider and zorse behind them, only for the riders to be sent flying off their rides when their targets proved heavily armed enough, strong enough and braced well enough to tank the hits. Man-catchers locked around armored necks, only for the wights to reach up and either snap the two-inch-thick hafts as if they were sticks, or bend the metal heads of the man-catchers into uselessness. Then it was downed or disarmed soldiers that had never expected more than typical guards facing greatswords swung by wielders almost as strong as the Mountain. Shields shattered. Annoyingly aggressive zorses were hacked into bloody pieces. Chain links failed and limbs were sent flying, trailing blood.
Fifteen seconds. That's how long it took to demolish a cavalry force of superior numbers with not a single casualty of our own, with half that time spent reaching the enemy before the disassembly could begin. In the meantime, the three dozen crossbowmen on the carts proved they were either randos recruited off the streets for a quick operation, or sell-swords with absolutely terrible discipline. They did that by sitting fat, dumb and happy on those carts of produce, most of them not bothering to start reloading their crossbows until after the melee charge went pear-shaped for them. The eight people that showed some professional-level training shot their reloaded crossbows at the trail end of the melee slaughter, catching their targets from behind.
Three more partial penetrations on the wights caused me to frown. The supposed heavy plate for my guards had not been forged and custom-fitted by the Florians' smithy but bought and adjusted to save time. The back-plates failing meant someone, somewhere had cut corners either in the amount or the quality of the metal when I'd specifically asked for all-round protection. The wights didn't really mind, but refund with interest and a well-deserved lesson just got added to my next visit to those armorers; cheating would not be tolerated. Jorah's armor had fared much better again, deflecting both bolts without a scratch.
The rest of the crossbowmen were reloading frantically now that the true scope of the threat had been revealed. We couldn't have that; armor was expensive and reputation even more so. I came out of cover, the mental shadow I'd crushed the zorses with retracting and my magic condensing and forming an orb of fire in the palm of my hand. With an effort of will, I launched it across the distance to the fake caravan. Humans were hard to affect directly with magic without some sort of connection. At a distance of fifty yards I could maybe give them cirarette burns or, given a few seconds, set their hair on fire. Hurling a melon-sized orb of solid flame was far more effective; it struck the target like a rock then burst into almost liquid flame. Had the guy been wearing even light armor and a helmer the equivalent of rolling across a campfire wouldn't have done much but the shirtless would-be slaver? He screamed and dropped to the ground with burns all over his chest and his hair turning into a small blaze. One down, thirty-five more to go.
The second guy just stood there and got a fireball to the face. In fact, everyone was standing and gaping in my direction except for the wights who had finished all the riders except for one guy that was fleeing at a dead run. So I shrugged and took down two more shocked crossbowmen before anyone could react. That got everyone screaming, searching for cover or getting back to reloading, not necessarily in that order. The fifth target ran the moment he saw me aiming in his direction. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't outrun a magical construct almost as fast as a crossbow bolt in a straight line; not only did the fireball hit him in the ass, it also set his pants on fire. Targets six and seven were smarter, the first hopping left and right as he fled, the second hunkering down behind a boulder. One fireball missed number six, then another, but the third nailed him in the back and he fell to the ground with a cry. Having been further away the burn was not lethal, but he was probably down for the count. Number seven thought he was safe, but with Featherball watching from above and me seeing through her eyes it was not very hard to curve a shot over the boulder. It was only half the power of the other shots to leave magic for mobility, but it was still like a lit torch slammed to his head and set his hair alight. Then everyone that had kept loading their crossbows fired everything they had at me.
"NOPE!" I taunted, a tower-shield-sized construct of solid flames blocking hit after hit. Even if most crossbow bolts partially penetrated they were still stopped, and the last two that finally shattered the barrier had too little momentum left to do anything but bounce off my brigandine. Not only I readied another orb of fire, but the wights had already reached the enemy lines and there was nothing those guys could do to stop them. Jorah did not join them; he saw no need to expose himself to more crossbow fire for a foregone conclusion. The remaining enemies dropped their weapons and tried to flee in all directions or screamed for mercy. I set the wights to hunt the runners who had made the mistake of fleeing into the woods. The undergrowth slowed their terrified dash by more than half while the wights were strong enough to trample through the weeds and armored enough to ignore thorny plants or dangers underfoot. Those who surrendered would be spared, but those that thought they could get away after trying to slay my guards and take me for a slave had another thing coming.
Speaking of which, one of those shirtless, unarmed idiots was running towards Jorah and me instead of away. Maybe he was too terrified of the wights? Personally, I'd fear being burned alive more than being hacked apart but what did I know? The exiled knight shook his head and raised his sword in preparation to cut the approaching man down. The soon to be ex-slaver must have realized there was no point to his mad dash because he slowed down and raised his arms in our direction...
Thwick!
I staggered and gasped, a line of agony searing through my chest about an inch from my heart. Jorah jolted and looked around, his eyes widening in horror behind that visor of his. I looked down, trying to see what had horrified him so... and found the tail end of a crossbow bolt barely peeking out of my armor. That... made no sense. Brigandine was supposed to stop crossbow bolts, especially small ones. It was way stronger than chain against piercing attacks, only barely weaker than middling plate. But the slowly growing trickle of crimson and the pain did not lie. Or did they? Why was there blood? There was not supposed to be blood.
I staggered a few steps more. This was not a bigger bolt going in an inch or two through sheer force. This was not a partial penetration from hitting a seam. The whole bolt was buried into my chest as if I had not worn armor at all. Jorah was shouting something but I didn't listen. I hurled the fireball that was already in my hand at that bastard standing there, not fifteen yards away. It splashed against his chest with a nice woosh of flame... and did nothing. Well, it didn't burn the guy... but it did burn away the image of the shirtless, terrified slaver to reveal a much taller man covered in black leather from head to toe, leather that did not even notice my fireball. He was holding a small crossbow in one arm, its one bolt already well spent. Jorah was up into the guy's face swinging that sword of his and the man dodged and danced around strikes until finally Jorah landed a sweeping two-handed strike... that bounced off the man's leather armored chest and gave him the opportunity to trip Jorah to the ground with a move more reminiscent of modern martial arts from Earth than anything from this world.
The assassin - because what else could he be? - took one step in my direction but by then the wights were back and making a beeline for him as quickly as their superhuman strength could move them. He sighed - I actually heard him do so as if seven undying heavy infantry were just a bother - then retrieved a small clay jug from his belt and threw it in their direction barely even looking. The projectile shattered on impact and burst in a conflagration of bright green like burning boron compounds. It was not; the moment the flames touched the wights I felt my mental link to them beginning to burn, the wildfire trying to consume the magic as it did everything else. Maybe if I had not had a crossbow bolt shoved into my chest I would have contested the effect but now all I could do was withdraw and drop into one knee.
Jorah sprang up with incredible speed for a mortal man his size, wielding his sword not like a sword by swinging it from the blade, the heavy metal hilt clipping the assassin in the head. Half-swording; a technique to deal with men in plate the sword could not cut through. It was not supposed to be used against guys in leather because you could normally cut those down, but it worked. From how the assassin recoiled and stumbled it worked quite well; leather didn't protect from blunt force as well as plate even when impenetrable. The bastard gave me one last look then fled, moving faster than Jorah could have in his plate armor, his form already wavering and blurring under glamour.
"Lady Belaerys!" the former knight shouted frantically, suddenly being there before me. He stared at the crossbow bolt, not knowing what to do. Well, he wasn't the one with the magic, healing or otherwise, that was me. The bolt had not pierced my heart or anything immediately lethal, so it wasn't so bad. I'd healed worse injuries before. Hells, I'd had worse injuries just from that lizard-lion so long ago. So I reached for the bolt, my magic feeling slightly sluggish. That was when I was reminded that my wound was bleeding. Why was it bleeding? Stopping bleeding was the most basic application of blood magic ever.
Maybe... maybe getting out of this wouldn't be so easy after all...
Jorah picked me up with a grunt and carried me over to the rickshaw. His arms shook from the effort of putting me down on the seat as gently as he could to avoid making my injury any worse. Moving someone with a crossbow bolt through their chest was... probably bad but... we couldn't stay there, could we? Not with the assassin still in the area... Ugh, this whole trying not to die thing made thinking hard. Not the pain, blocking the worst of it was the first thing I'd done... it was probably shock. Or maybe something about my injury was off beyond just the bleeding.
"Box..." I muttered or gasped. I couldn't be quite sure.
"My lady, save your strength," Jorah urged me. "We will-"
"Small metal box," I talked over him. "Under the seat... Hurry."
He did. The sound of a very large sword applied to the thin wood of the rickshaw followed as Jorah decided to cut his way through instead of moving me again. It took a minute, maybe two, of me listening to the hurried chops, Jorah's curses, and a couple of the not quite dead kidnappers nearby chocking in their own blood while I pulled my own blood back from the injury and prodded at the wounded flesh and the bolt within. It was a narrow, spindly thing, thinner than normal crossbow bolts and made of metal, except from a little black spot at the very tip that made every magical prod fizzle and abruptly die.
If that had been the worst of it it wouldn't be so bad, but there was something on the bolt that echoed oddly to my magic. It was like poison - several poisons in fact - but they had been somehow... thickened, both physically and not. Their effects were actually slower than they should be; what I was pretty sure had to be manticore poison didn't kill in seconds but slowly dissolved any tissues, including blood clots. But while this thickening made the effects hundreds of times slower, it also made them much more potent... and it wasn't the only altered poison in that mix.
"Here you go, lady Belaerys." Jorah put the small box in my arms as I looked up, my vision swimming and darkness gnawing at its edges. Fumbling with the cool steel of the lid, I almost dropped it as I tried to get the damn thing open. Jorah couldn't do it for me, because the thing was entirely seamless, no latches or locks. To open it you needed to heat the lid without heating the rest of the box until it thermally expanded enough to pull off, something quite hard given the needed temperature difference and how the two parts fit together. A clever locking system... unless you needed to get it open in an emergency and for some reason you couldn't easily use magic. The lid finally fell off two minutes later and the only reason the rest of the box didn't follow it to the ground was Jorah grabbing it when he saw it slip.
"Rings..." I gasped. "Help me... wear..."
He did. The first ring sent a barely noticeable trickle of healing up my left arm, almost entirely useless in this situation. Then the second ring added to it, and the third and the fourth... by the time Jorah was helping me put on the twentieth little band of metal, two churning currents of uncontrolled healing were rushing up my arms and bursting into my torso. This would almost certainly lead to issues that would need fixing down the line, but there wouldn't be a need to smooth over minor mutations in the following months if I bled out within the hour.
The extra healing barely made a dent against the wound itself, but the rush of energy brought much-needed clarity of thought and banished both the uncontrolled shivers and the weakness in my limbs. The difference was enough for me to immediately notice several details I'd previously missed, the most important of which was that my dimming vision was neither due to blood loss nor the physical shortness of breath caused by the crossbow bolt through my chest. No, that was due to yet another altered poison, which along with the basilisk blood and manticore poison made at least three. The unusual thickening - which I was almost certain had been done through alchemy - made them partially work through my immunity to most poisons, but my immunity to basilisk blood had also been earned through prior exposure to far greater quantities than the coating on the bolt.
The lack of berzerker rage against everyone and everything let me work on countering the blinding poison, which wasn't actually affecting my eyes. No, it was doing far more dangerous things to the occipital lobe in the back of the brain, trying to kill my ability to interpret any sort of visual feedback. Fortunately, now that I was able to think more clearly, I could use the power of the several kills I'd made only minutes before. Backed by the life of two men burned to fuel it to far beyond what I could normally do and the constant stream of support from the rings, the assault to my senses was stopped cold, followed by working to restore just enough of the damage my knight in matte black armor was no longer a misshapen blob.
"Jorah, stop," I ordered when I saw him huffing and puffing as he pulled the rickshaw as fast as he could.
"We need to get as far from the assassin as possible," he immediately argued instead of slowing. "He is still out there."
"Yes, and at this rate you'll collapse from exhaustion in maybe half a mile." I did not add that trying to flee an assassin that could outrun him even when he wasn't pulling the cart with both me and a couple hundred pounds of supplies was never going to work; that would be just bitching, not solving the issue we were both aware of.
"But I can't do nothing!" he immediately protested but at least he slowed to marching speed. "Not after I failed you!"
"On the contrary, you saved my life at least twice." And didn't that grate, to be saved by one of the least honorable knights in the Seven Kingdoms? Oh well, stones and glass houses. "Now pull off your gauntlets and put on some of these rings. Only two per hand, mind you, and they have to be touching skin."
"What do they do?" he asked, but he'd already slowed us to a stop and was already doing as he'd been told. I said nothing and concentrated on prodding my injury with magic. When he finally wore a ring, Jorah got his answer from how he immediately stood up straighter. The feeling of slowly renewed energy as if the wearer were resting on a bed on top of whatever else they might be doing had to be a new experience for him. He quickly wore three more and his panting breaths evened out, his slumping posture straightened completely and every other sign of fatigue was rapidly ground away. "Oh, I see." He swallowed. "Lady Belaerys, why don't we wear such magic all the time?"
"Because I only just made them the day before yesterday," I explained with an annoyed grunt. The tip of the crossbow bolt still made all my probes fizzle. That kind of magic resistance was familiar from my attempts to explore the barrows of the First Men. Stronger magic or the right spells would probably resolve the issue, but I could not afford the former and did not know the latter. This annoyed me further, so I expanded my explanation to Jorah. "Also because wearing more than one can eventually kill you."
"What?" he demanded with a horrified cry, his stare shifting quickly from his hands to my own.
"Relax. It's more like a medicine that turns to poison if too much is used, not an immediate curse," I only partially lied. "Damage only happens slowly, can be fixed and in the meantime? You are effectively tireless for now."
He sighed in relief, gave me one last worried look, then grabbed the rickshaw's handles and pulled for all he was worth. Thanks to its steel axle and revolutionary for this world ball bearings, the modified cart was far easier to pull for the same weight than any other cart in the world, and Jorah managed a ridiculous running pace no normal man could maintain for long. It was a simple enough way to leave the threat of the assassin behind; top human speed was about twice that of long-distance running speed. Jorah was not even close to the former, but he was doing a good fifteen miles an hour, a few miles per hour faster than marathon runners or even horses could manage long-term while he could keep this up until he keeled over dead in a day or two. No enemies were going to catch up before we reached the rest of the company on anything less than a dragon.
That left the bolt in my chest, which was still a problem. The bleeding was not that bad so... probably a bodkin point? The damn corrossive poison was still slow to burn through; were I any less resistant it would have caused extensive necrosis and generally made a huge mess. The affected tissues would have needed surgical excision and regrowth. As it was, as more of the coating over the bolt dissolved in my blood, more poison was added that had to be neutralized. The bleeding-prevention spell was not working because it did not work on dead blood... but other spells would and the excision had given me an idea.
Burning through the stockpile of vitality as well as my own stamina, I started reshaping the still-living tissue around the injury, loosening and retracting it millimeter by millimeter. At the same time I was applying the bleeding prevention in said tissues rather than the heavily poisoned, ragged edges of the wound itself. On the latter I retracted my protective magic entirely and further pushed the poison to grow stronger rather than weaker. Almost immediately, sizzling sounds and quite a bit of foul-smelling smoke came out of the wound, as if I'd been injected with a pint of strong acid straight into it. The poison did as it was supposed to and started melting my flesh... for a few millimeters around the bolt.
Except those layers were so damaged it would have taken almost as much magic to heal them as to rebuild them so why not get rid of them to loosen the bolt? At the same time, the poison was being used up on bits that already were slated for discard, essentially neutralizing it without having to directly fight its effects. I closed my eyes and deadened my nose to the stench of rot, a shudder going through me at what would have happened if I hadn't been largely immune to poisons to begin with, if I hadn't been exposed to basilisk blood before, if I didn't know how to turn off my own pain, if I didn't have modern medical knowledge about the vision centers on the brain and kept magically fumbling at my eyes, wondering why the blindness was not going away. To that add the way the bolt had punched through my armor and its tip was definitely a magical, magic-disrupting material, and the vast majority of targets would have already been dead, magic or not. The effort needed to do all of the above burned through my stockpile at an absurd rate until the blood in my veins felt like fire, my bones hurt, and my vision swam for reasons entirely unrelated to the blindness. After well over an hour, with a final gasp I pulled the bolt out and set it aside for future examination.
"My lady?" Jorah shouted and somewhat slowed down. "Are you all right?"
"Just fine, Jorah," I lied, the wound only sluggishly responding to my waning magic now. "The bolt is out. I just need to heal the injury." Which would probably take the rest of the day. More healing was coming through the rings than my rapidly tiring active magic.
"Do you want me to stop?" he asked.
"No. Keep going until just before we reach the camp." We could stay there for me to recover, close enough to support if needed but I was not going into a group of men I did not entirely trust in my condition, not unless absolutely necessary. "And Jorah?"
"Yes, my lady?"
"Remind me which mercenary companies make use of zorses?" Because while what had probably been a Faceless Man seemed to be working solo and taking advantage of an existing situation, that whole situation had happened due to a serious kidnapping attempt. Random slavers did not work on Lys itself; the authorities were very explicit about that. Someone with power, wealth or both had gone to considerable lengths to set all of this up and the first step to finding them was interrogating their deniable pawns.
I might not be able to move against the Faceless Men yet, but some random mercenary company and the local nobility behind them? Those sounded like some very acceptable targets for much-needed stress relief.