Wind screamed across the ice field. The sea below was not water but a shattered mirror, each wave crest frozen in the act of breaking. Frost swirled between sky and sea until they were one pale blur. Out of that blur two figures moved.
Caranthir struck first. The air around him crackled with frost, the temperature dropping in an instant. He stepped sideways and the world followed; a teleport flare, a pulse of light, and he appeared behind the Witcher, staff already in motion. The blow missed by a finger's width – Geralt had read the shimmer and twisted aside, his sword cutting a white arc through the air.
"You are slow, Dh'oine," Caranthir hissed, voice cold and melodic. The words were half-formed in Elder Speech, half in the Common Tongue.
Geralt said nothing. He circled, shoulders low, eyes following the frost trails Caranthir left on the ground. Each teleport smeared the horizon, bending light under pressure. The Witcher rolled beneath a blast of ice and came up with a riposte that carved sparks off Caranthir's pauldron. The sound – steel on an enchanted plate – rang like a cracked bell.
Caranthir stepped back, breathing fast. There was a line of red now across the armor's pale-black surface, narrow but deep. He looked down at it and felt something close to disbelief. He had been bred for perfection and now that perfect body bled because of a peasant with a sword.
The air thickened. A few still working runes on his staff flared, and the ground erupted in a storm of shards. Geralt dove aside, rolled through the debris, and came up again, silver sword humming. The lake groaned under them, the ice flexing with every spell and counterstrike. The world narrowed to blue light, steel flashes, and the dull roar of the sea beneath.
A faint crack sounded – deep, long, like the breath of something enormous – and both men froze for a heartbeat. Beneath their feet, the ice began to fracture.
Caranthir smiled behind his skeletal mask. "Then drown with me."
He raised his staff again, but Geralt was already moving. The Witcher lunged inside the guard, his shoulder crashing into Caranthir's chest. The blow threw the elf off balance – just long enough. Geralt's blade swept wide, a brutal horizontal cut that tore through armor, through the ribs beneath. The force carried them both sideways, boots skidding on the slick ice.
Caranthir staggered, looking down. The cut was too clean, too real. He saw his own blood steam in the cold air and could not believe it. "Annichonadwy," he whispered.
Geralt didn't let him finish. He drove the sword straight through Caranthir's chest. The point burst from his back with a wet, metallic sound. For a moment, they were locked together – predator and prey, killer and killed – breath ghosting between them.
The Witcher pulled free. Caranthir dropped to his knees. His staff rolled away, clattering once before sliding into a crack and vanishing beneath the ice. He fell onto his back, gasping. Frost formed in his open mouth.
Geralt turned away, already searching for Eredin's trail. The wind screamed louder, carrying the smell of blood and ozone. Then something caught his leg.
Caranthir's gauntleted hand.
The elf's eyes snapped open, pupils blown wide, frost crawling from his lashes. His voice was gone; only a whisper of air escaped between broken teeth. In that final instant, he gathered what strengths remained in him and pulled.
The world imploded in a flash of green light and cold.
The sea took them. They appeared beneath the ice, two shadows twisting in black water. Caranthir's armor bled light. He clung to Geralt's leg with both hands, dragging him down. Geralt's sword tumbled away, vanishing into the dark. The cold drove nails through his lungs; bubbles exploded from his mouth.
Caranthir's eyes glowed faintly. He was dying – he knew it – but his mind still measured, calculated. Even here, even in ruin, he could shape one final act.
Geralt kicked. Once. Twice. The third time broke the grip. The Witcher spun upward, limbs heavy, lungs burning. He broke through the ice a moment later in a shower of white fragments, coughing out water and blood.
Below him, Caranthir drifted down. The light in his armor dimmed, flickered once, then vanished. His body rolled slowly, arms spreading as if in surrender. And then he was gone – swallowed by the depth, by the cold, by the silence.
He sank beneath the ice, cold forcing its way through his armor until it felt like his chest was full of broken glass. The Vatt'ghern's sword had cut cleanly; blood leaked from the wound in dark ribbons, swirling into the black water.
Killed by a mortal. Ysgarthiad! Fifty years of life. Two thousand years of breeding the finest lineages of the Aen Elle – the brightest mages and the most talented sorceresses – and it ends in a lake, in filth and frost.
Avallac'h had called him rash. That timid coward. The King's pet philosopher, always waiting for destiny to arrive. Traitor! He had whispered with humans, bartered with lesser races, and wrapped it in the language of peace. But not a fool. No – a living traitor, and that was worse.
Caranthir's hands stopped answering him. The cold had taken them. Fine. He didn't need hands. He still had his mind. He still had his blood.
He bit down hard, cutting through his own tongue. The pain steadied him. Blood filled his mouth – still hot, metallic – running down his throat. He closed his eyes and began the pattern, silent.
No incantations. No movements. The spell was geometry, not prayer: lines drawn in thought, ratios of will and blood, the hidden architecture that Navigators alone were taught. But he was about to do something he alone had knowledge of and he alone could manage. Folding distance into direction, time into coordinates. It was a skill kept from kings, a weapon disguised as art.
The warmth in his body was fading fast. That was good. The living flesh had to die for the rest to pass through. He could feel his heart stutter, each beat slower, heavier. He directed the rhythm outward, shaping the flow: blood for matter, pain for motion, will for aim.
The water thickened around him. Water bent. His lungs seized, filled, burst. He forced the last spark of himself into the pattern and cut the tether. Flesh fell away. His spirit escaped.
The void took him – silent, endless, stripped of color and weight. He had no body now, only thought, a narrow filament of power drawn tight against oblivion. Frost bit at him even here, the echo of his own element turning against him. He would need a host soon, or unravel completely.
He could not go home. Ge'els had betrayed them. Avallac'h would report his "failure." The bradwyr would forget him until it was convenient to remember. Let them. There were other worlds – one close, a place the scouts had marked. A sphere alive with men, soft and numerous, unguarded, ripe for the taking.
He turned toward it – a single spark against the dark. The thought steadied him.
I will find flesh. I will build anew. And the traitors will weep. Hope Zirael and Gwynbleidd will live long enough.
101 AC
King's Landing lay heavy beneath the rain, its air for once cleansed of the harbor's rot and the heat of dying summer. Inside the Red Keep, the corridors glowed dimly with torchlight. Banners hung limp, weighed down by damp and grief.
Aemma Arryn was resting again – another fever, another warning from the maesters to leave her womb untroubled. Viserys had stopped listening. He walked the halls like a man with his heart torn from his chest.
Daemon found him in the small council chamber, alone with his wine.
"You'll drown before morning," Daemon said lightly, stepping into the lamplight.
Viserys looked up. He had only just turned twenty-five, yet the lines around his eyes had already begun to show, and his hair was thinning – not by much, but enough for Daemon to notice.
"There's a feast below," Daemon continued. "The Lyseni brought their treasures – pearls, dancers, a daughter or two. The envoy insists you attend. They came for a celebration, or so they claim, but now wish to share in your grief."
Viserys's voice came quiet and frayed. "Aemma is sick."
"She sleeps," Daemon said. "You brood. The realm needs neither."
Viserys almost smiled – the sort of smile that hides exhaustion more than amusement. "You'd make a cruel maester."
"I'd make an honest one," Daemon replied. "Come, brother. For one night, stop burying yourself while you still breathe."
The journey was swift. The Lyseni envoy's hall blazed with colour. Carpets from Myr muffled the steps; the air was thick with incense and orange oil. Prince Raelano of Lys presided like a man who knew he was being watched – every gesture slow, deliberate. At his side stood his daughter, silent beneath a fall of silver-blue silk.
She was young – in her late teens – and eerily still. In a court of laughter and noise, her composure unsettled. Her eyes were a shade too pale, her voice – when she spoke – a shade too soft. The sound carried not loudly but clearly, as if the air itself wished to listen.
Viserys had seen beauty before. He was married to it. But this girl's beauty held no warmth; it was the beauty of cold water from a mountain spring – clear, pure, and utterly indifferent.
Daemon watched the exchange, wine untouched. He recognized the look on his brother's face: that quiet surrender, the hollow left where grief had made its home. He told himself he pitied him. He told himself he was helping.
Prince Raelano rose as the Targaryens approached. His garments were a spill of color – crimson shot through with silver thread – and when he bowed, the candlelight slid across the rings on his fingers like spilled red wine.
"Your Grace," he said, voice smooth as oiled silk. "My daughter, Serala. Forgive our intrusion upon your sorrow. We came to celebrate the new life that was to be, and now we share in mourning what was lost."
Viserys inclined his head, weary courtesy masking discomfort. "You are kind to speak of it."
Raelano's eyes softened. "I have no sons, Your Grace – only this one daughter. I take her with me wherever I sail. Lys is… not gentle with unguarded jewels. Too many suitors, too many flatterers. I would sooner keep her where I can see her." He glanced at Serala, and she lowered her gaze with practiced modesty.
Daemon's brow rose slightly. "A wise precaution. The Free Cities are full of wolves."
Raelano smiled. "Indeed. Hungry wolves they are, maybe even dogs." He clapped his hands, and servants entered bearing gifts. "There are, however, honest trades to be made between friends. From the edges of the world – crafts of Asshai, pearls from Leng, spices from Yi Ti. And–" He gestured reverently to a small casket, its hinges dark with age – "a numismatic coin of Valyrian steel, struck before the Doom. A relic of our shared blood."
Viserys leaned forward, intrigue evident in his eyes. The candlelight caught on the faint patterning of the metal, ripples like smoke beneath a mirror's surface. He touched it lightly. "Remarkable," he murmured. "Coins of that make are said to outlast empires."
"Then may this one outlast us all." Raelano smiled.
Daemon poured wine for them both. "You've brought the realm a small treasury, Prince. You mean to bankrupt us with gratitude?"
"I mean to remind your Highness that trade can enrich both sides," Raelano said smoothly. "Lord Velaryon has long been the crown's gate to the east. He is a fine merchant, but a merchant still. Middlemen grow rich, while kings and princes must count what is left. It would please me to see Lys and the Iron Throne deal as equals, without so many hands between."
"You ask much, and swiftly." Viserys's expression tightened. "The Old King still reigns, and such matters lie beyond my word. Trade with the Free Cities is not mine to grant."
Raelano inclined his head with a faint, knowing smile. "Of course. Yet His Grace is aged, and the realm already looks to its future. Perhaps influence may still find its way to his ear. It is known that the King's Hand, Ser Otto Hightower, is a close friend to our Crown Prince. And wise friends often help one another's causes."
Daemon's brow lifted. "You sail dangerous waters, Lyseni."
"Dangerous waters," Raelano said lightly, "carry the richest fish." He then spread his hands. "Only that you consider it. Fortunes are made when bold men find shorter roads."
"The Sea Snake would not thank us for shortening his road," Daemon replied, his smile thin as a knife's edge.
"Nor would I," Viserys said. "He has earned his due. Such matters require thought."
"Of course." Raelano bowed slightly. "A feast is no place for councils. Forgive my boldness, Your Highness."
Daemon waved it off. "Boldness suits merchants better than monks." He drank. "Still – perhaps your daughter might advise you on what gifts to bring next time. Her taste seems impeccable."
"Only what my father allows me, Prince." Serala's lips curved faintly.
Before another word could fall, a servant hurried to Raelano's side and whispered. The prince sighed, hands raised in apology. "Forgive me – an urgent matter from the docks. It seems even in grief the world conspires to demand my attention."
Daemon set his cup down. "Then I shall leave you to it too," he said, rising. "The Old King asked that I lend our good Hand some help with his endless ledgers and dull diplomacy." His eyes flicked to Raelano, a faint, sharp smile tugging at his mouth. "Perhaps I'll see how deep the waters truly are."
When the two men were gone, the chamber felt wider. Rain beat against the windows. Serala turned slightly toward the King, her movement unhurried, graceful as a cat's.
"My father speaks too freely," she said. "He forgets how little solace trade offers to those who grieve."
Viserys shook his head. "I envy him. Work keeps the mind from wandering."
"Does it?" Her gaze lingered on him. "I find men never stop wandering – only choose new maps. Your Grace is a student of history, I'm told. Of old Valyria."
At that word his face changed – something alive flickered behind the fatigue. "Yes. The glory and the ruin both. I keep its relics where I can find them."
"Then you understand why we Lyseni keep what fragments remain," she said softly. "Every coin, every shard. Each piece is a whisper of what was lost."
They talked then – of the Freehold, of dragonlords and their cities, of coins and kingdoms, of fire that built and fire that destroyed. Wine blurred the edges between words. Her laughter came rarely but precisely, a bell struck at just the right moment. When he spoke of dragons, her eyes gleamed as if she could see one in the dark.
When their cups were empty, she poured more. When the hall had emptied, neither noticed. The conversation slipped to whispers, then to silence, and the silence to touch.
Serala knew where the night was leading, and did not resist. Viserys thought it comfort, and did not understand.
Daemon never went to see the Hand. The lie had slipped from his mouth as easily as breath. He walked instead through the torch-lit corridors of Maegor's Holdfast, each echo of his boots swallowed by the thick stone. Somewhere above, rain murmured against the roofs.
Raelano was nowhere to be found. Despite being Lyseni, still he is a man, and no man wants to hear his daughter being fucked – Daemon thought – by an almost King, no less, but still fucked.
The hall of the Lyseni envoy was quiet now. Through the half-open door, candlelight spilled in gold ribbons across the floor. Daemon paused there, expression unreadable, listening to the muffled rhythm within. He smirked once, then the smile faded. Of course it's him, he thought. The firstborn gets the crown, the throne, the woman – and still probably doesn't know what to do with any of them. The thought stung, so he waved it off with a breath and moved on.
For a heartbeat, a darker thought flickered – some crude, competitive instinct – but he pushed it away with a shake of the head. Such things were beneath him, or so he told himself.
When silence fully settled inside, he turned from the door and found the woman stepping out. Her hair was loose, her breath uneven. She startled at the sight of him.
"Your father's gone," Daemon said, voice low. "The docks, or so he claims. I'd almost think he left you here on purpose."
"He trusts me," she answered, too quickly.
"Then he's a fool," Daemon murmured, a hint of laughter under the words. "No man leaves a beauty unattended in a castle full of dragons."
She tried to pass him, but he moved to block the way, not touching her, only closing the distance enough for her to feel the warmth of him. "You play your part well, Lady Serala. Gentle, grieving, dutiful." His eyes searched hers. "But you're not so simple, are you?"
"You're drunk." Her gaze faltered.
"Not enough to forget what I see." He leaned closer, voice dropping to a whisper. "You think you're the only one who knows how to survive such courts? We all wear masks here. Yours only fits better."
The corner of her mouth twitched – not a smile, but not refusal either. For a moment they stood like conspirators, the air between them heavy with what both already understood.
"Go back inside, Prince," she said finally. "Some ghosts are better left sleeping."
He watched her turn, his face unreadable again, then followed inside without another word.
Far away – beyond stars – something reached.
A spirit had found the spark it needed. The joining of blood and envy, of love and betrayal, flared like a pharos. The signal was brief, but bright enough to complete the ritual.
Through that fissure, a presence slipped.
The woman gasped once, no louder than a caught breath. Her heart stuttered; the chamber tilted around her. Inside her, life kindled – small, fragile, mortal – and around that life, something vast folded itself. The two rhythms, human and other, began to beat as one.
Outside, the Red Keep slept beneath the rain.
By dawn, Prince Raelano's ships waited in the bay, their banners drooping with mist. The envoy moved among his servants briskly, face unreadable, a man who knew that grief and opportunity often shared a table. He spoke polite words of farewell to the watchmen at the gate and looked only once toward the royal windows high above. His satisfaction, if it existed, lay buried beneath layers of courtesy and calculation.
In those same windows, the Crown Prince stirred from uneasy sleep. The taste of wine and perfume clung to him like guilt. Memory came in pieces – the laughter, the touch, the silence after. For a moment he thought himself lighter, freed of sorrow. Then the shame arrived, slow and complete. Aemma would have wept if she had seen me. He sat alone until the light rose, whispering that this night, this one folly, would be the death of him yet.
Daemon was gone before the sun reached the courtyard. He left no word, no explanation, only a wine-stained cup overturned on the table. The guards saw him ride out through the Dragon Gate with his hood drawn low, his expression carved from stone.
And in a quiet chamber deep within the main ship, Serala of Lys awoke with a faint cry. The world seemed louder, sharper. Every sound carried weight, every shadow seemed to hum. She pressed a hand to her belly, not knowing why, only that something within her pulsed with heat not her own. She whispered a prayer to the Weeping Lady, then to all the other gods whose temples adorn the soil of her homeland, and felt neither answer.
Far below her heartbeat, the spirit listened. It gathered, coiled, and dreamed – of flame without end, of wings that blotted out the sun. He had found its seed, and through that spark, the world would burn anew.
101 AC
Lys rose from the sea like a painting done in light. Even from miles out, Raelano could pick the colors he had known since boyhood: the roofs glazed a soft blue that matched the shallows, the pale marble of temples bleached almost white by sun, the green of lemon groves sinking toward the coves, and everywhere the slow glitter of canals threading through the low city like strands of glass. On clear mornings the whole island seemed to breathe perfume – orange blossom, crushed mint under sandals, the salt-sweet reek of drying fish laid out on wicker mats. Pleasure barges drifted under arched bridges where gulls perched like lazy magistrates. Courtyards hid behind pierced stone screens, and from each came the same notes: lute, laughter, the hiss of water poured from a height into a shaded pool.
People elsewhere said Lys was nothing but beds and silk. They were lazy listeners who liked a single story. Raelano knew the other stories because his family had written parts of them – and erased parts, too.
The harbor bustled without rest. Dyers' sheds along the east quay stained the tide a faint bruise-blue. Chandlers boiled ambergris until the whole quarter smelled of candles and the open sea at once. Sailmakers sang while they pushed bone needles through the new canvas. In the arcades, coin-changers weighed tall stacks of silver on balances as carefully as trained physicians tending to a warrior's wound. The slave pens sat where the sea breeze was strongest – some said to spare the city the smell, others said to keep the merchandise from fainting. There was truth in both.
Lys sold what people wanted most and would not admit: youth, skill, silence, and the right to forget. It also sold lace finer than cobwebs, saffron the color of a king's robe, blue dyes that did not fade, lenses ground through weeks of patient labor, little glass eyes that could make a ship's captain read the coastline a league farther than his rivals, perfumes distilled from flowers that bloomed only one night a year, and a sweet, pale wine that made poets write brave lies. The ledgers added all of it up and turned it into houses and gardens, into votes in the council, into names carved on tablets in the Hall of Magisters, each name written as if the hand that wrote it would never tremble.
Raelano stood at the prow and let the warm spray prick his face. Behind his shoulder the deck creaked softly as the sailors shortened sail; beneath him, the ship's shadow slid across shallow water bright enough to show the ripples of sand and the darting silver of fish. He could have closed his eyes and walked the streets from here by memory: the steps up from the fish market to the arcade where his aunt used to buy him sugared lemons, the turn into the lane of jewelers, the cool hall of the archive where light fell like gold dust in slanting bars and his brother had whispered that their family's luck would last forever if they kept their mouths shut and their books closed.
His brother – First Magister now, chosen in a vote that had looked clean from the public gallery and had stunk of old favors and new debts in the private rooms. The city called his brother prudent, and when Lys called a man prudent, it meant he had not yet been caught out.
Their family had never been dragonlords. The Rhaelys name had no skulls to mount in a great hall, no songs about a forefather who had bound flame with a look. They had, however, owned ships. Their great-grandfather's great-grandfathers had discovered early that Old Valyria liked its mines manned and its foundries humming and did not care much about the price that made such humming possible. So the Rhaelys supplied bodies where the Fourteen Flames needed hands: hardened men from the Shadow Coast who did not flinch at heat, women whose fingers could sort ore by the sound it made when dropped on stone, boys who learned to carry water without spilling. They bought licenses, bribed custom inspectors, married into countinghouses, and blessed warehouses after gods they did not believe in. With each generation they bought another block of houses closer to the cool quarter and planted another row of cypress to hide what had paid for the marble.
And because men with full purses always want crowns to match, they had dreamed, as all the old merchant dynasties dreamed, of patronage. Valyria had its own politics – patron houses and client houses bound by favors and marriages, old as the Freehold and twice as stubborn. A dragonlord could not be made overnight, but a client family could rise, one rung at a time, into the outer rooms of power. First a loan forgiven, then a daughter promised, then an egg entrusted – never to be claimed, only to be guarded, warmed, watched for luck. The dragonlord house of Sar Nyrad had been their patron: small among the great Forty, but close enough to the bright heat that the Rhaelys learned to speak in the old tongue without tripping and learned to keep their eyes on the floor when a dragon's shadow crossed a courtyard. The agreement had been the kind that bound the blood and the book both. Sar Nyrad offered protection and access; the Rhaelys offered ships, warehouses, steady hands, and silence.
The egg had come late, and the Doom had come earlier than anyone believed it could. When fire that was not wind tore Old Valyria open and turned certainty to red glass, the Rhaelys were on the water with one egg cooling under spiced sand, wrapped in wool and prayer. They kept it warm for years while the new world decided what to become. No dragon ever cracked that shell. The wool went to moths. The prayers went to seed.
"Not many now remember," his brother had said once, standing with him in the archive among powders and parchments. "Not the Targaryens certainly. They live on a rock in the Narrow Sea and pretend it is a throne room. But we remember." It had been said with his brother's usual soft satisfaction, the tone that meant: memory is a currency, and ours is not spent.
The scrolls kept their secrets. Some were copies done by hired hands with bleary eyes and cramping fingers; some were originals, letters in the old Valyrian square hand asking for ore quotas to be raised or sailcloth to be delivered by a certain moon. A few were stranger: instructions in a scholar's careful script on how to temper steel in dragonflame without letting the carbon flee, and gods only know what that carbon even means; a fragment of a poem to a lover who had worn a collar because that was what love looked like in that century; a list of slave weights and the loss accepted by the overseer when one in five did not live out the season. The Rhaelys kept it all. Knowledge, like scented oils, grew only stronger in the dark.
Raelano had learned from those shelves the only lesson a man of Lys truly needed: blood makes laws, but coin writes them down. If their family could not be dragonlords, they could keep the ledgers of dragonlords. If they could not fly, they could own the ground where the dragons landed. And if fate ever tilted back toward them, they would make sure a Rhaelys hand was ready beneath.
The ship eased past the outer marker stones and into the long curve of the harbor. Rain had washed the air clean; the sun came out as a pale coin and laid light along the water. Raelano felt the familiar lift of his spirit that came when sails furled and ropes were thrown and the city's noises climbed the rigging: hawkers, gulls, an old woman singing a rude song to a sailor who laughed with his whole stunned heart.
He should have been only satisfied this morning. The meeting at court had gone as planned. The King To Be had been exactly what grief makes of young men: open. The Hand's eyes had been counting, but even counting men miss things when the wine is good and the conversation is a smooth road laid through places they like. Daemon Targaryen had smiled with the specific malice of a man who knows he can spoil a feast by standing in the doorway. Serala had done as she had been taught – modesty like light through silk, knowledge sparing and precise, laughter only when the listener had earned it. The gifts had been good. The coin – he had seen the Crown Prince's face when he touched it. A man who collected histories could not resist a future packaged as a past.
The plan had never been a throne. Thrones were for men who needed a table high enough to keep their feet from touching earth. Raelano needed something heavier and closer to bone. Dragon blood. Not all of it, not even enough to claim anything loud, only enough to sink into the family line like dye in water, turning everything it touched a shade that could not be washed out. Once, the Rhaelys had warmed an egg for a patron; that shell had stayed closed. It was time to start another road.
His brother had approved in the way prudent men approve of sins that work. "If there is a child," he had said quietly in the archive, between shelves ranked with the lives of other men, "and if absolutely necessary, we keep the name off our ledgers and the child on our ships. We do not teach the city a song it can sing against us." Raelano had nodded. They had argued only over how to be sure.
There were teas in Lys that ended a child before the child was old enough to be more than a whisper. There were others – rarer, dearer – that made conception almost a certainty: seed-quickening draughts that old pillow-mistresses swore by and physicians scoffed at in public while sending their servants to buy in private. The recipe the Rhaelys had used came from a scroll too old for its leather binding – an infusion of saffron and bitter apple, powdered pearl and a pinch of ash scraped from a brazier that had burned cedar at a certain hour of night. Superstition, perhaps, but superstition had built most of the profitable parts of Lys.
Serala had not balked. She had listened to the plan in the green shade of the inner court where the lemons cooled on stone, and when he had said, "It must be certain," she had said, "It will be." He had thought her brave then. Later, watching the rain streak down the shutters of the guest chamber in the Red Keep, he had thought her only dutiful. Only afterward, on the deck as dawn lifted the masts out of night, did he admit the third truth: she had been ambitious, too, and ambition was the only virtue the gods of Lys rewarded without reserve.
He did not know – could not know – that the certainty he had purchased with coin and caution had been rewritten by something completely different than both. He did not believe in magic. He believed in arrangements.
He watched her now as the ship eased into its berth. She had slept little and badly. The color had drained from her face, leaving the bones too clear beneath the skin. When she rose there had been a small sound – a woman's little gasp when the belly cramps before the moon's tide – but this had not been the moon's doing. He had asked if she needed a physician; she had shaken her head with a quickness that told him she feared questions more than pain.
"Rest," he said instead, and she inclined her head. "We will go ashore when the heat breaks."
Below them, porters shouted; a crane swung a pallet of bales toward the quay. On the far side of the harbor, the low, white dome of the Weeping Lady's temple caught the light and held it like milk in a bowl. There were always prayers there – women praying to conceive, women praying not to, men praying for sons, sailors praying for a wind or against a storm, slavers praying for prices, priests praying that the gods would stop being what they were and become something a little more like them. Lys was piety laid over appetite like a lace shawl over bare shoulders. It did not cover much and was not meant to.
Raelano's mind moved forward, stacking the next days in order. He would send word to his brother before nightfall. The First Magister would say little in reply – he had learned long ago the safety of silence – but the next morning the household steward would hire more guards for the garden gate and the cellar doors would be checked twice and the archive hall would be opened for him without question. They would keep the city guessing with a smile and pretend ignorance when men cleverer than they should be made guesses too near the mark.
He tried, then, to picture the child. A boy would be cleaner for the city's tongue – Lys believed boys did as they were told – yet a girl brought fewer daggers wrapped in compliments. Either way, blood was blood. If a drop of the dragon went in, his grandchildren would not need the city to remember that the Rhaelys had once warmed an egg in a ship's hold. Their bones would remember.
He looked again at Serala. She had turned her face toward the sun as if the light might write an answer on her skin. There was a stillness about her he could not quite name; it was not the stillness he had trained into her for court, not the polite composure that sold well in rooms where men wore rings. It was as if she were listening for something under the noise of the harbor – the clink of chain, the hawkers' calls, the creak of rope – as if she heard a sound he could not.
He told himself it was only the night's fatigue catching up with her. He did not like mysteries when they wore his name.
"Come," he said. "Home first. Then the physician."
She nodded and stood with care, one hand straying for a moment to her belly. He saw the gesture and pretended not to. A wise man in Lys did not notice things until it was profitable to notice them.
They went ashore together into a city that hid its sins behind orange trees and white plaster, a city that had taught him that every virtue can be bought if you are patient and every fate sold if you know the right door. Above them, gulls traced slow, lazy arcs. In the lanes, the dye vats steamed. On the far horizon, where the sea met the sky, the light trembled as if the world was about to speak.
Raelano did not hear it. He had cargo to unload, a brother to brief, ledgers to close, and a future to write. The rest could wait.
101 AC
The study had no windows. It had been built that way: a vault more than a room, lined with thick cedar planks and layered mortar to stifle sound. The lamps burned low, each flame trapped inside a glass throat that turned the light to amber. Behind the desk sat Maerano Rhaelys, First Magister of Lys, the elder by five years and the colder by temperament. His robe was plain white silk, his hair bound neatly with a loop of silver wire.
He was not writing nor reading when Raelano entered. He was waiting – and holding one of the three Valyrian blades their family possessed. The sword's edge drew the lamplight into itself until it disappeared.
"There are no crevices here," Maerano said without looking up. "No listening holes, no soft walls. Speak freely."
"You've grown paranoid." Raelano smiled faintly.
"I've grown older," Maerano replied. "Paranoia keeps a man's years from being counted by the faceless men." He laid the sword on the table, flat as a mirror. "You've been to the Red Keep."
"I have."
"And?"
"The Crown Prince grieves. The Hand counts coins. His brother burns with envy. The court eats its own tail." Raelano paused. "The Lyseni envoy was welcomed. More than welcomed."
Maerano's fingers tapped once on the hilt. "So it is done?"
"It is done."
For a moment, neither spoke. The sea wind pressed faintly through the cracks in the iron door, carrying the tang of salt and citrus oil.
Then Maerano stood and crossed to the weapon rack behind him. Two other blades hung there. Each was a memory in steel.
The one his brother held in his hands was Seren – the first blade, and the oldest.
The weapon was unadorned – a plain, two-handed longsword of Valyrian steel, its surface dark as dragon glass but alive with faint, liquid ripples that shifted when the torchlight moved. Its hilt was simple leather, blackened smooth by generations of hands.
Seren had no legend of being forged for kings or heroes. It had been bought.
Long before the Doom, when the Rhaelys still supplied slaves to the volcanic mines of the Freehold, one of their forefathers – Maedron the Ledgered – acquired the sword not as a prize but as payment. A dragonlord of House Vaedar owed a debt for two hundred miners lost to the fumes of the Fourth Flame. Instead of coin, he sent a weapon.
"Every Lyseni house keeps a relic," Maedron had written in his record. "We keep this one, to remind us that debts are better friends than favors."
It became the family's first heirloom. They carried it to councils, to weddings, even to funerals. Its very plainness was a statement – a blade for those who built fortunes quietly, not for those who announced them. In time, Lys grew decadent, and even the lesser noble houses encrusted their hilts with jewels. The Rhaelys did not. Seren was already enough.
Of the hanging ones, the first and the newest blade was Vaelith, and it was beautiful enough to shame any that came before.
The blade was a whirlwind of color – deep steel veined with violet and blue, as if the forge itself had captured the reflection of a twilight sky. The fuller was carved in a spiral, twisting along its length like a dragon's tail. Near the guard, minute engravings ran in circles – Valyrian glyphs of blessing and pride: For my son, for his strength, for the sky that shall open before him.
Its pommel was shaped like a dragon's eye, a smooth oval of polished jet ringed with silver. The guard itself curved upward in twin flares of pale gold, each line etched with lightning filigree so fine that no craftsman of the present age could have reproduced it.
The weapon was forged in Qohor – one of the last before the firestorms came – by the hands of Master Qhaedar, who was working from that city at the time, and was said to quench his work not in water or oil but in dragon's blood mixed with salt from tears.
Vaelith had not been meant for the Rhaelys.
It was a gift – a symbol of father's love.
The commission had been ordered by Lord Voryn Maedrix, a proud scion of House Maedrix, dragonriders of the central plains of Valyria. The sword was intended for his son, Aenvar, a boy of four-and-ten who had just been named Quaestyr of the Western Reaches – the youngest in Valyria's bureaucracy to hold the position. The Quaestyr's post was an honor – a first office for promising noblemen, where they learned to balance loyalty and ambition under the watchful eye of the council.
Aenvar's father planned a surprise. The sword was to arrive aboard a Rhaelys ship, a week before the appointment. A letter had accompanied it – its wax seal still intact when Maerano found it generations later:
"To my son, who shall rise as the dawn rises – fierce, swift, and certain. May this blade remind you that even fire must serve before it rules."
The ship never reached him.
The Silver Fortune was at sea when the Doom came – a storm of molten sky devouring horizon after horizon. The sailors saw the clouds burning behind them and prayed to every god they knew. They arrived in Lys half-dead and shaking, bearing a cargo whose intended owner was dust and sorrow.
The sword and the letter stayed with the Rhaelys.
The last blade mayhaps had no proper match left on earth. If some other old house from one of Valyria's Daughters didn't hide it in their vaults.
Its name was Aerhath, meaning Sky-Thread in the oldest dialect of High Valyrian. As long as the height of two men and impossibly narrow – more like a spear of dark glass than a sword. Its edge gleamed silver-white, so thin it could cut parchment by weight alone. The hilt was wrapped in a weave of blue-gray leather, almost serpent-smooth, and the balance of it was absolutely wrong for fighting on foot. Its design was meant for something else entirely.
Their grandfather had told the story often.
"On dragonback," he said, sitting between the boys as they stared at the relic in its glass frame, "a knight's sword is a toy. You can't swing broad in the wind. The true blades of riders are long and narrow – for reach, for precision, for killing the other fool in the sky before he reaches you. That's what this was for."
Aerhath had been a gift – the last ever given – from their patrons. When they sent the blade, it came with a note written in fire-ink that still shimmered faintly when held to light: When your blood is called, may it answer.
The Rhaelys took it as a promise.
Their grandfather believed it a sign – that the family's ascension was near. "Perhaps," he would say to the brothers when they were boys, "if the Doom had waited for just one more generation, you might have been born with eggs of your own. Your dragons would have waited for you by the hot springs, singing in their shells."
He laughed when he said it, but sometimes his eyes gleamed with the faith of a child.
Maerano rested his hand on its hilt. "We were a breath away, once."
"Dreams burn easily," Raelano said softly.
"Dreams," Maerano murmured, "are only dangerous when they forget patience."
He turned back to the desk. "So – there will be a child."
"There will."
"A boy?"
"It's too soon to tell."
Maerano's gaze sharpened. "It matters. A son will draw suspicion, but with it more potential. A daughter buys sympathy, but also brings mockery. Either can serve."
Raelano nodded. "We'll present the birth as coincidence, perhaps providence – the Throne's grief turned into a miracle. The child will carry his name. And ours will remain politely invisible."
"Until it no longer serves to be invisible."
They shared a small, identical smile.
Maerano paced slowly, his hands clasped behind him. "The court will expect ambition. Let them see it. Let them whisper that Lys wishes to grab their Iron Chair. It is a comfortable lie, and they will never look deeper while they can sneer at the foreigner reaching too high."
"Corlys Velaryon won't like it."
"The Puddle Worm is a sailor who pretends to be a merchant," Maerano sneered. "He will be a useful actor."
Maerano came back to his desk, the First Magister's seal-ring gleaming faintly beside a cluster of opened ledgers.
Between them, the map of the Narrow Sea stretched across the table – Lys, Myr, and Tyrosh inked in green, the Stepstones in ochre, and Westeros a looming gray bulk to the west. Tiny wooden ships stood on the water lanes, each one carved with deliberate care.
"Corlys Velaryon," Maerano said, moving one of the ships with the tip of his finger, "believes he is the sea. But he is only the foam."
"Foam still drowns men who mistake it for air." Raelano smiled.
"True," Maerano allowed. "But drowning men flail. And flailing men are easy to predict." He poured two cups of sweet Myrish wine and slid one across. "We will give him the illusion of a struggle. A tug of war, as the Westerosi call it. He will pull with all his strength; we will yield with elegance. And every courtier watching will swear we are the ones fighting hardest."
Raelano circled the map, studying the lines. "He'll rage at the idea of Lys dealing directly with the Crown. He'll claim trade imbalance, manipulation, threats to his monopoly. It will make us seem dangerous, which is precisely what we need."
"Dangerous but manageable," Maerano corrected. "The Crown will never permit an equal, at least the Hand and the Rogue Prince won't. But it will gladly play arbiter. Corlys' protestations will sound like greed; ours will sound like ambition dressed in courtesy. It is a beautiful arrangement – everyone will see what they expect."
Raelano took a sip, then set the cup down. "And when the child is born?"
Maerano leaned back. "We present ourselves as loyal fools. Grieving Lyseni nobles who overstepped, but whose blood now ties them to the Iron Throne. The Future King will remember the night, and guilt will do what persuasion cannot. The realm will gossip that we aimed at the throne."
"The greatest illusions," Raelano said, "are those that make truth unnecessary."
He rose and approached the wall where now three swords hung. His fingers brushed the hilt of Seren – old, steady, the family's spine – then Aerhath, thin and cruel as a spear of moonlight, then finally Vaelith, beautiful and unsullied.
"Our ancestors sold bodies to dig gold from flame," Maerano said. "They built palaces from chains. Now we sell appearances – a far cleaner trade. Corlys will despise us. The Westerosi will call us foreign usurpers. And the Free Cities will whisper that we've lost our place. In that noise, we will hide."
Raelano came back to the table and traced his hand along the edge of the map, where the Stepstones glittered with pins. "And the Triarchy?"
"Ah." Maerano's smile was narrow. "That will be our chorus."
He pulled another parchment closer – a sealed dispatch marked with three sigils: the naked goddess of Lys, the snake of Myr, and the rapier of Tyrosh. "The Stepstones will be cleansed soon. The pirates have grown too bold, and the Three Daughters are already sharpening their knives. Corlys will not like it. Within a few years the war will begin in earnest, if their councils move as swiftly as I think. The Westerosi will be slow, as they always are. That gives us years of calm before the tide reaches us."
He paused, gaze sliding to the lamplight caught in Vaelith's violet edge. "When it breaks, I will no longer be First Magister. The term ends in five years. When the sea burns, my seat will pass to another – and that is when the child must still be forgotten, even here."
Raelano frowned. "You mean to send me away?"
"I mean for you to live," Maerano said. His tone stayed calm, but the warmth in it was real. "The game has begun, brother. Once it moves, I cannot promise we will stand together again. If the other houses scent deceit, if I fall, Lys will devour its own. The House must endure, even if I do not. You must endure."
Raelano hesitated. "Where would I go? Pentos?"
"Not Pentos." Maerano's answer was instant. "Too close to the Iron Throne, too visible. Every raven flying west will perch there first. If the child is whispered of, and it will be, Pentos will make the perfect road for suspicion to follow. We must choose another path."
"Then where?"
"Volantis."
Raelano frowned. "Volantis? We fought them five years ago."
"Which is precisely why," Maerano said. "Old enemies make the best curtains. You'll go as an envoy, merchant, peace-weaver – whatever name suits the story. You'll speak of friendship, of keeping Volantis out of Triarchy quarrels, of trade restored after ruin. Let them believe Lys wishes for calm. If Corlys strikes from one shore and Volantis from the other, we are strangled. You must keep one hand open while I draw the sword."
"And you think they'll believe it?"
"They'll believe what profits them," Maerano said simply. "You'll have the means to persuade. Half our gold goes with you, the rest stays to keep the mask in place. These promissory notes from the Iron Bank will speak louder than oaths. Take Vaelith and Aerhath as well. Seren remains – the world knows it, and I want it that way. The egg too; a dead dragon is still a dragon. Keep it with you."
Raelano stared at him. "You're arming me for exile."
"For survival," Maerano replied. "If I fall, you must carry our name through another generation. I don't know if we'll meet again – years, decades, perhaps never. But the House must have a pulse somewhere in the world."
He reached for another scroll, this one a trade manifest filled with silks, perfumes, and small trinkets. "The gold will travel beneath these. Gifts for the Tigers and the Elephants. Pirates from the Summer Isles haunt those waters – vicious men. Their presence will make the voyage look honest. You'll have ships enough to fight or flee, as need demands."
Raelano's voice dropped. "And when I reach Volantis?"
Maerano's gaze lifted, sharp and steady. "You'll be met. An old friend owes us her life. She remembers what debts mean."
They stood in silence then – two brothers divided already by the seas on their map, the light glimmering on the violet veins of Vaelith and the ghost-pale thread of Aerhath. The air smelled of wax, salt, and something older: the scent of farewell.
"Memory is a currency," Maerano whispered. "And ours, brother, is not spent."
102 AC
Volantis rose like a bruise on the horizon – purple and gold under the morning haze. From the height of the hathay, Raelano could see the whole city spread across the mouth of the Rhoyne, where the river bled into the sea. The air smelled of silt, incense, and salt; the tide licked the stone piers with the patience of an old accountant. Behind him, elephants stirred and bellowed in the heat, their tusks gilded and painted with curling Valyrian sigils.
The road climbed slowly, lined with palms and shrines. He had grown used to traveling this way – swaying above the crowd, high enough to see roofs and riverlight, low enough to catch the murmur of trade. Beneath, slaves trudged in ordered columns: bare backs marked with ink that told their lives in lines and symbols. One bore the wings of a hawk – a messenger's mark. Another, three linked circles – a housemaid's. Some were tattooed with whole prayers, curling down their arms like chains of letters. In Lys, they would have been perfumed, veiled, adorned. Here they were counted, catalogued, and owned.
He found it strange still, this open arithmetic of flesh. In Lys, sin hid itself behind silk; here, it wore banners.
The hathay lumbered onto the causeway leading to the eastern half of the city. The Black Walls were already visible ahead – an immense oval of fused dragonstone, dark as a drowned mirror. No stone in the world looked quite like it: glassy, alive, drinking sunlight rather than reflecting it. The first time he had seen it, he'd thought of Maerano's words: Dreams are only dangerous when they forget patience. The Valyrians who built this place had forgotten nothing.
Each year, the Volantenes raced chariots along the walls to celebrate the city's founding. Raelano had watched it once from a terrace – six teams abreast, screaming wheels and horses biting at the wind. Even in celebration, the sound was war.
Inside the Black Walls, the streets narrowed into courtyards, cloisters, and covered bridges – a labyrinth of wealth and bloodlines. It was a different air here: cooler, older, tinged with the scent of cedar and myrrh. The old gods of Valyria still had their temples within, marble guardians carved into serpents and winged bulls, their eyes inset with amethyst. The slaves who tended them murmured prayers in tongues no one had spoken freely since the Doom.
Beyond those walls, the red priests burned their fires for R'hllor. Raelano had gone once to see the great temple: a structure vast enough to swallow the Temple of Trade three times over, its doors black iron and its braziers burning day and night. The air there shimmered with heat and devotion. To the people of Volantis, fire was salvation; to Raelano, it was a proof – the constant reminder of how many things the world was willing to burn to keep its gods warm.
The hathay turned toward the Long Bridge, the spine of the city. A gateway of black stone carved with dragons, manticores, and sphinxes marked the entrance, the arch high enough for ships to pass beneath when the tide receded. The bridge itself was a world in motion – traders, carts, priests, beggars, and perfumed courtesans passing each other shoulder to shoulder. Buildings rose on both sides of the roadway, their balconies draped with banners. You could buy anything there: obsidian daggers, Myrish glass, ghosts bottled in smoke. In the center, as always, the heads of thieves and pirates hung like ripe fruit, swinging gently over the Rhoyne.
Raelano passed beneath them in silence.
He had arrived a year ago, on a morning like this. The docks had smelled of tar and rain, and he had expected suspicion, perhaps even chains. Instead, he had been greeted by a procession – lanterns, music, and a woman he had not seen in nearly a decade.
Saera Targaryen.
He could still recall her as she was when they met first in Lys – a girl with eyes too proud for her circumstances, sitting in a place built to sell surrender. That had been in 84 AC, when whispers of her flight from Westeros were still fresh. Lys had not been kind to her. Beauty there was as common as glass and twice as breakable. But Maerano had seen her, recognized the sharpness beneath the softness. It was not hard to spot a princess pretending to be a courtesan.
He had brought her to the estate. His late wife – heavy with child then – had liked her at once, and when their daughter was born weeks later, she named her Serala. It had been Saera's laughter she wanted to remember, she said.
They had given the fallen dragon a new start: money, counsel, introductions. Within a year she had opened her first house in Lys, and within two more, three more followed. By 96 AC, she had gone east to Volantis – she called it a bigger market. Raelano had not seen her since.
When she appeared at the harbor last year, draped in black and silver, surrounded by attendants marked with the tiger's stripe, he had understood what "bigger market" meant. The dragons of Valyria might have died, but their shadows still bought favors. Her blood opened doors beyond the Black Wall where even gold faltered. Through her, he had entered Volantis not as a petitioner but as kin – Valyrian to Valyrian, exile to exile.
Now he owned a villa there: three terraces of white marble overlooking the Rhoyne, with columns of black basalt and a garden where orange trees grew in salt air. When he stood on the balcony at dusk, he could see the river flare red with lanterns and torches, and beyond it, the western bank choked with sound and commerce – Fishermonger's Square and the endless cry of the markets.
Volantis was a city of two hearts beating out of time. The eastern half remembered Valyria; the western one pretended it had never existed. Between them ran the bridge, heavy with trade and memory.
The hathay crossed the midpoint now. A line of chained men dragged carts of fish; the smell of the catch mixed with incense from the fire-temples and the acrid smoke of tar-pits upriver. Overhead, the sun climbed, its reflection splitting on the black waters.
Beyond the murmur of the city, memory stirred — and for a moment, the scent of blood drowned the smell of oranges.
It began four months after their arrival. Serala had fallen ill, or so the physicians said — fevers, convulsions, strange chills that left her lips pale as snow. Then, one night, the candles guttered, and her eyes turned a color no living thing should wear: frost-blue with black around the edges, like ice swallowing flame. When she spoke, it was not her voice that came.
It was voices — many, layered and shifting, male and female, young and ancient, whispering through her throat at once. The sound filled the chamber like wind inside a tomb.
"The vessel weakens," they said through her. "The messenger cannot survive as she is. Flesh must be remade."
Only Raelano and the mute slaves had been there that night. No one else ever saw what she became. The doors stayed barred, the windows shuttered, and the household was told she slept. Even her handmaidens were dismissed weeks before, their silence bought in gold and fear. From that moment, the room belonged to whispers and to him alone. He would have called for an exorcist or a maester, but none of that existed here. The thing inside her knew their names and laughed at them.
From that night on, the rituals began.
They built the baths as the voice demanded: stone basins deep enough to drown a man, lined with hammered bronze. Into them went water first, then wine, then milk, then blood. The ingredients changed each week. One day, crushed bezoar stones from the bellies of mountain goats; another, a chicken egg taken from a snake's nest – the kind that the old sailors whispered bred basilisks in the dark.
The voice named them all.
Sometimes it was gentle, almost coaxing; sometimes it screamed until the glass cracked. Serala, when herself, remembered nothing. When the voice spoke through her, her skin glowed faintly, veins lighting under her flesh like threads of blue fire.
The first bath stank of iron and incense. She lay in it, trembling, whispering words Raelano did not know. By the third, the blood no longer cooled – it stayed warm for hours, pulsing faintly as if alive. By the fifth, the slaves refused to look at her.
Then, in the final month, the voice spoke again.
"I feel it," it said through her. "The heart that was never born. Bring it to me."
Raelano knew what it meant before he allowed himself to understand. The dragon egg. The relic their house had carried since Valyria burned.
He brought it in silence. The egg was stone-heavy, dull, and cold to the touch.
"Lay it in the bath," the voice said. "Blood of the untouched. Blood that remembers the womb."
He understood then: virgins. He ordered the slaves accordingly – those without tongues, chosen for secrecy. Their blood filled the basin until it steamed.
The egg was lowered into it.
At once the chamber filled with a hiss like oil on fire. The blood began to boil, turning black at the edges. Serala screamed, her body arching; the air smelled of iron and roses and rot. The egg shuddered once – a sound like cracking stone – and then it melted. The blood swallowed it whole.
What happened next Raelano could never name.
The bath began to sink. The blood rose up, not spilling but climbing, seeping into Serala's skin through her pores, her eyes, her mouth. She howled once – a sound that was not human – and then went silent. When the basin emptied, nothing remained but her naked body and the faint scent of ash.
The egg was gone.
She lived. Against sense, against mercy, she lived.
Weeks later, the child came – silent, perfect, her skin unblemished, her hair already pale silver. Her eyes opened the moment she drew breath: amethyst, bright and still.
Serala wept when she saw her.
Raelano remembered thinking that the gods – whichever kind had spoken through her – were cruel but not careless. The child's beauty was beyond question. Even the wet nurse made a little prayer before touching her.
When Saera Targaryen came, she said nothing at first. She only looked down at the infant, her expression unreadable. Raelano and Serala told her the truth – that the child was of the Crown Prince's blood, conceived in the Red Keep and carried across half the world.
"She is her father's daughter," she said at last. "And my kin."
Saera listened, and when Serala asked for a name, she smiled faintly.
"Viserra," she said. "For my sister. May this one live longer than the last."
Raelano had not known then whether it was blessing or curse.
Now, as the hathay lumbered toward the gates of his villa, he looked up and saw the pale walls gleaming above the palms, bright even in the shadow of the Black Wall. Somewhere inside, Serala was waiting, and the child – his granddaughter – slept in a cradle carved from Valyrian marble, her breath as quiet as falling snow.
He closed his eyes and wondered, not for the first time, whether they had been cursed… or chosen.