My name is Oswin Stone, and I am a bastard.
I grew up in the shadow of Runestone, where the bronze kings once ruled and the Royces still strut in their rune-scarred armour. None of that ever mattered to me. I was born in a crofter's hut with a thatch roof that leaked when the wind came down off the mountains, and the only lord who ever noticed me was the one who took half our barley.
I always knew I was a Stone. The village boys never let me forget it. "Whoreson!" they'd shout when I passed, and I'd pretend the stones they threw missed on purpose.
Then one night, when I was eight, my uncle got deep in his cups and told me the truth: my mother worked the docks in Gulltown, on her back for sailors with salt-crusted coin. Big brother Dan (tall even then, already sprouting like a weed) confirmed it the next morning. I remember standing in the yard, the chickens scratching around my bare feet, feeling the world tilt under me. A whore's bastard. Lower than low. The kind of blood that would never be allowed a sword, a horse, or even a proper name.
After that I drifted. Farm work from dawn to dusk, head down, mouth shut. Dan was the strong one, the one who laughed at the jeers and grew broader every season. I just tried not to cry where anyone could see.
Then one spring evening Dan sat me down on the chopping block behind the hut.
"I'm leaving tomorrow," he said.
I broke. I bawled like a weaned calf, clinging to his shirt, begging him not to go. He let me cry it out, then pushed me back by the shoulders.
"Listen, little brother. Things are changing." His eyes were shining in a way I had never seen. "Lord Edric Arryn himself is calling for men (any men) to come to his new city below the Eyrie. Not levies. Not serfs with pitchforks. Real soldiers. Paid. Fed. Armed."
I sniffed, snot and tears mixing. "The Falcon would never take the bastard sons of whores."
Dan laughed, the big barking laugh that always made the dogs run. "That's the whole point, Oswin. He doesn't care whose cunt we crawled out of."
He told me what he had seen in the new city (how a man in a sky-blue cloak had climbed onto a cart in the square and read a decree in a voice that rolled like summer thunder):
Sons of the Mountains! Children of the First Men and of the Andals who conquered with sword and fire! For too long you have knelt beneath names that never earned the right of your loyalty… yours is not the blood of serfs. yours is the blood of giants. Rise, men of the Vale. Take the future that already belongs to you. The age of kneeling is over. The age of the Falcon has begun.
Dan said when the man finished, half the crowd was crying and the other half roaring like they could tear the mountains down with their bare hands. Dan had shoved his way forward on the spot and signed his mark. Two days later he marched off with a hundred other lads, some barefoot, some in rags, all grinning like fools.
I didn't see him again for a whole year.
He came back on a crisp autumn afternoon when I was nine, almost ten. I was splitting firewood and looked up to see a stranger in a sky-blue cloak striding up the lane (broad-shouldered, thick-necked, moving like a man who owned the ground he walked on). His curly black hair was shaved on the sides and slicked back on top, strange and foreign and proud. Then he grinned, and I knew him.
"Dan?" I dropped the axe and ran. He caught me one-armed and lifted me clean off the dirt like I weighed nothing.
"Seven hells, look at you," I gasped, mouth hanging open. "What have they been feeding you?"
"Meat every day, little brother. Beef, pork, mutton. Fruit when it's in season. And the hair's regulation for the Steel Falcons." He ruffled my head with a hand that felt like oak. "I'm a squad leader now. Ten men answer to me. All because I showed up and kept showing up."
He stayed a week. Helped Uncle mend the barn roof, ploughed two fields in a single day, told stories that made my ears burn: how the mountain clans were broken for good, how every soldier (peasant or lord's son) wore real mail and carried castle-forged steel, how he was learning his letters by torchlight after drill.
I kept shaking my head. It sounded like a mummer's tale.
On the last night he pressed a cloth-wrapped bundle into my hands.
"For when you're ready," he said.
Inside was a book (real vellum pages, blue leather cover stamped with a silver falcon). My mouth went dry. Books cost more than our entire farm.
"Lord Edric's presses turn them out by the thousand now," Dan said. "Not just for maesters anymore. When the teachers come (and they will come, by his own decree), you practice every night. You hear me? You practice harder than anyone. Because the next time I see you, Oswin Stone, I want to see a Steel Falcon staring back at me."
He left at dawn. I stood in the yard clutching that book to my chest until he vanished round the bend.
Three moons later the teacher arrived: a thin man in a plain grey robe with a sky-blue falcon sewn over the heart. He gathered every child in the village between six and fourteen (thirty-two of us) under the heart tree and began.
Letters first. Then numbers. Then how to stand in a line and push a pike without tripping over your own feet.
For the first time in my life I felt something hotter than shame burning in my belly.
Hope.
My name is Oswin Stone, and I am a bastard.
But the Falcon says the blood of giants runs in my veins.
And I mean to prove him right.
The Red Keep
Petyr Baelish found Varys in the covered bridge that linked the Tower of the Hand to Maegor's Holdfast. The Spider stood motionless beneath a flickering torch, silk robes the colour of fresh cream, hands tucked into wide sleeves like a child hiding stolen sweets.
"Well," Littlefinger said, voice light as a dagger sliding from its sheath, "if it isn't the Spider himself."
Varys turned with that soft, sexless smile. "Lord Baelish. I live to serve the realm. And you, Master of Coin—what brings you crawling through the rafters tonight?"
The two men measured each other the way duelists measure reach. Neither mask slipped, not even for a heartbeat.
"I thought we might trade," Littlefinger said, stepping close enough that the torchlight painted mocking shadows across his pointed beard. "A bird for a bird, as it were."
Varys tittered, high and tinkling. "So direct. I had assumed you would know more of the Vale than I, my lord. It is, after all, where your own lands lie… is it not?"
Littlefinger's smile thinned. "Things have grown quiet of late. Unnaturally quiet. My letters go unanswered. My friends stop writing altogether. One might almost think someone was plucking birds from the sky."
"Dear me," Varys sighed, pressing powdered fingers to his heart. "How unfortunate that the old falcon died so mysteriously. And now the fledgling has the entire nest to himself." He tilted his bald head. "Such a fierce little bird, our young Lord Arryn. The king dotes on him—calls him 'my falcon' when the wine is flowing. And with dear Lord Eddard Stark as the new Hand… well. I cannot imagine His Grace forcing the boy to do anything at all. Can you?"
A muscle twitched in Littlefinger's cheek (gone almost before it appeared).
"My little birds have grown strangely silent in the Vale," Varys continued, voice soft as falling ash. "Fewer songs every moon. Some nests are simply… empty now. One hears whispers of black-clad men asking questions in the night. Men who wear no sigil anyone recognizes. Men who leave no bodies, only vacancies."
Littlefinger's eyes glittered. "And yet the Vale grows richer every day. Grain ships sail south loaded to the waterline. Iron comes down from the mountains in wagon trains. Gulltown's harbour is choked with new hulls flying sky-blue sails." He spread his hands, mock-helpless. "Almost as though someone has found a way to make the mountains themselves pay taxes."
Varys gave a delicate shrug. "Children play their games, my lord. Some children simply play them better than others."
For a moment the only sound was the wind whining through the arrow-slits.
Littlefinger's smile returned, sharp as new steel. "Keep your ears open, Lord Varys. If any of your remaining birds hear a song worth singing, I pay well for pretty tunes."
"And I," Varys murmured, already drifting backward into the shadows, "always serve the realm."
By the time his slippers whispered out of the torchlight, Petyr Baelish was alone again.
He stood very still, staring at the place where the Spider had been.
Then, so quietly that even the stones might not have heard:
"The fledgling has teeth."