The hold of the SilkenDaughter, for that was the name of the ship they were on, smelled of bilge water, sour wool, and old rot, so old it had stopped being rot and become something else entirely. Seasoning, almost. This strange smell was new to Edric, and he wasn't sure he welcomed it. It was of a ship that had been working these waters long before either of them was born and intended to keep doing so long after, that of permanence.
Edric sat with his back against the curved hull, knees drawn up as far as a man of his stature could reasonably manage in a space built for cargo and common men. Three inches of clearance above his head in still water. When the ship rolled, which it did often and without apology, those three inches became one, and sometimes even null. He'd learned this twice over already. The second time had been more instructive than the first, which was not how lessons were supposed to work.
Robert sat across from him. Forearms on his knees, jaw set, staring at nothing with the coiled stillness of a man whose body knew one speed and was being asked to forget it.
"Have an idea of how long it's been?" Robert inquired.
"Four hours. We sailed not long ago."
Robert's jaw shifted. His fingers drummed once on his knee and stopped. That was Robert exercising patience, but Edric could understand the man's restlessness. He longed for land himself, longed for the richness of wine, longed for the comfort of flesh and the bountiful breasts of women. He was growing attached to those earthly pleasures, too attached even.
Above them, the Silken Daughter went about its legitimate business. Wool from the Vale. Salted fish. Robert had witnessed the bragging of the captain about two casks of Tyroshi preserved pear "brandy" that had been quietly fermenting since sometime last month and had developed, over time, a smell that was conducting its own private war with the rest of the cargo. Captain Haran Vhael had built a manifest so clean it was almost boring, which was precisely the point. A clean manifest wasn't honesty. It was armour.
Robert had found him on the Gulltown docks that morning, while Edric was still saying his farewells to Jon Arryn. Vhael had been on his quarterdeck squinting at the harbour mouth where he imagined seven Velaryon dromonds sat in Line Abreast across the Gullet's throat, Robert recounted, heavy and patient as stones, spaced close enough that nothing of real draft could pass between them without stopping to be examined.
He'd stated the situation plainly. Two passengers. headed for Shipbreaker Bay. Money paid upfront and no questions asked or answered.
Vhael would have then looked at him, then at the cordon, then back, according to Robert's description.
---
Flashback
"They board every second vessel," he'd said. "Sometimes every first. With Arryn's revolt, it seems the Iron Throne is taking no chances, and the Royal fleet, led by that Velaryon master of ships, has been very careful since."
"Yes, yes."
"If they find you—"
Robert had set the purse on the rail between them then.
The lord had offered him a score (twenty)of gold.
Vael went still the way a man goes still when a number arrives that the body has to process before the face can catch up. Twenty dragons wasn't money in the ordinary sense of the word. It was some ten to five and ten horses. Decades of a skilled man's labour. Enough to settle a debt, buy decent property, raise cultivated and learned children, and feel the pleasant weight of having won in life. It certainly changed what the next decade would look like. It changed what decisions had to feel like.
Vael stared at the purse for a long time. When he looked up, something had shifted in his eyes. An ember of ambition, a glint in his eyes that showed greed, but most importantly, worry. After all, who else but a lord could pay this much? And for being smuggled no less.
"If they find you," he'd said, "I know nothing."
"You know nothing," Robert agreed, patting the man's back. "And you're considerably wealthier for it."
Vael had taken the purse with both hands, a sign that his greed had won over his self-preservation, his eyes conveying a sense finality.
---
The hours passed.
The hull groaned further against the swells, a sound like something large enduring without complaint, forced to serve. The bilge smell deepened. Edric listened to Robert breathe across from him and found, to his mild surprise, that the breathing was controlled and even. Slow. The man everyone called impulsive was, in the dark and the waiting, quite deliberate about it. He performed impulsiveness in daylight. Alone, he became something more careful.
But Edric knew Robert; this wasn't because of any fear the stag held, but anticipation. He meditated, and anticipated, waiting. A small knife was in his hand, borrowed from a sailor. He looked at his handsome reflection through it.
Edric didn't share the same calm and held nothing but restlessness in his heart.
"I'll be heading to the deck. I need to do something."
Robert let him go without speaking, no doubt needing some time alone.
*Creak*
He walked up the stairs.
*Creak*
Edric arrived with the sky grey, the rain descending, and the clouds gifting the mortals below a taste of their displeasure.
He called on to a passing crewmember.
"Need some help?"
---
The inspection came about in the second day, which felt earlier than it should have.
The war galleys of the Royal fleet were spotted by him when they were still miles away, and he took the precious hours that this information gave to him and Robert to hide well, even if that entailed being cramped; he had little choice in the end.
A dozen men by the sound of it, working methodically from bow to stern. The hatch lifted. A thin bar of grey light fell across the hold at an angle. Cold air came with it, and the smell of open water invaded the large chamber.
Robert's hand found his knife.
Edric looked at him, his heart beating heavily, and shook his head.
The probing rod descended into the wool bales first, working through the cargo in a grid. Patient, unhurried. This man had done this before and saw no reason to rush it. He moved aft, checking depth and density, ticking off the manifest in his head.
Then the rod found their false partition.
Vhael's crew had built it in the time between the docks and the Gullet. A wall of stacked casks and lashed cargo that looked, from above, like the natural settling of a full hold. The rod struck it solidly, found wood, and stopped.
A pause.
Two distinct breaths above, brief and low. Then the rod withdrew.
Edric breathed through his nose and did not let any of the relief reach his face.
The inspection finished. Footsteps moved forward, the hatch closed, and the boarding party went back to their galley with the brisk efficiency of men who had found nothing, expected nothing, and been right on both counts. Routine. They were back aboard their own ship before the sloop's captain above had stopped holding his breath.
Robert let out the breath he'd been sitting on. Slow, through his teeth. Then he looked at Edric across the dark hold.
"You knew they'd miss it."
"I wished they would. Vhael was the mastermind; he was worth every coin. We should reward him as such."
"The twenty dragons I gave aren't to be taken lightly. He did the bare minimum."
Edric conceded. He'd forgotten the value of coin it seemed, too much gold dulled the senses.
Robert looked at him for a long moment. The knife hand had settled back on his knee, and he didn't reach for it again. Something had changed in his face during the inspection, some small internal revision, but Edric couldn't name it precisely and didn't try.
---
They transferred to a sloop at dusk on the seventh day.
The Silken Daughter hove to between the Gullet's southern mouth and the outer rocks, and the sloop came alongside in the failing light without lanterns. Lean, low-drafted, built for inshore work and not remotely built for confidence. Six crew members who moved quietly and didn't make conversation. Edric went last, because Edric… Well, there was no real reason in truth.
The sloop settled a good two inches when he stepped aboard. The nearest crewman watched the waterline doing arithmetic he didn't look happy about.
"She'll hold," the captain said, not looking up from his charts.
Edric looked at the waterline. "She'd better hold indeed," he said back, making it a question.
The small boat captain looked up and met his eyes. "She'll hold, no worry needed."
Before they cast off, Edric found Vhael at the Silken Daughter's rail. The Braavosi looked like a man who had just completed the most profitable and the most alarming afternoon of his career and hadn't yet decided which of those feelings was going to win.
Edric offered his hand. Vael took it without hesitating.
"Safe water," Edric said.
"Dry land to you." He held the grip a beat past courtesy, then let go and turned back to his ship.
Shipbreaker Bay was not a place that rewarded overconfidence; it let no hubris pass with impunity.
The sloop's captain treated it accordingly, picking his way between the outer rocks with small, constant corrections that looked like nothing from a distance and were, Edric suspected, the difference between passage and wreckage that only a lifetime of experience could tell apart. The swells broke against the rocks in confused patterns that had no rhythm to lean against. The current ran in directions the surface didn't advertise.
Edric stood at the bow and watched the water and thought about the cordon they'd left behind. It had been well-placed. Line Abreast across the deep channel, many dromonds covering the full frontage, eliminating choice for anything of meaningful draft. Correct doctrine for the objective. It controlled the door completely. "Good for them and merde for us," he uttered.
"Hmm?" Robert shot him a raised brow.
"I said break a leg, because saying good luck brings bad luck."
A Velaryon galley appeared from the north, oars beating steady time along the inner coastline. It was inside the rocks, which he hadn't accounted for, three hundred and fifty fathoms out and closing at a patrol pace, its prow lantern throwing a narrow cone of light ahead of it.
Robert barely held his laughter
"Didn't work very well, did it, Aye." He jabbed.
The sloop's captain had seen it as well and didn't share in the levity. His hand was whiter than snow on the tiller.
Edric watched the ship. The direction it pursued wasn't changing, nor had the oar rhythm shifted. The crew was most definitely running a set course, with its men doing routine work, patrolling, not hunting.
"Oars in," Robert had sobered up and gave an order.
The captain looked at the young lord.
"The ship hasn't noticed our presence it seems. Watch it carefully. If it starts turning toward us, or changes pace suddenly, we row hard and take our chances on the rocks. Until it does, we continue in silence."
"If the current takes us—"
"If the current takes us, then we simply weren't meant to survive this day." He held the man's gaze. "We'll take our chances."
Everyone reacted quickly, the captain pulled the oars, and Robert and Edric equipped themselves to help in the effort.
The sloop went silent and let the water take it in part, the six men coordinating to fight with the waves occasionally for control, to avoid crashing the boat. The galley continued north, steady as a metronome. It passed two hundred fathoms to the east of them and kept going. The oar rhythm never broke, not once, thankfully.
It rounded the headland and disappeared.
The experienced sailor exhaled through his teeth. He looked at Robert with respect, all while Edric smiled, finally seeing the leadership prowess of his friend.
Robert appeared at Edric's shoulder.
A pause. Robert looked at the dark water where the galley had been, then at Edric with an expression that had nothing theatrical in it. No grin, no tournament brightness. Something quieter, more settled. "We made it."
"Let's not celebrate too early."
"What could possibly happen now?" *Rock*
The boat had bumped into an obstacle. Nothing too big, simply a smooth stone.
Edric looked at him. "You said?"
Robert simply grinned.
---
The hidden cove appeared twenty minutes later as a darkening in the cliff face, barely visible until you were almost past it, accessible to shallow draft at high tide and to nothing else at any other time. The sloop threaded between two submerged rocks Edric suspected only the captain could see, and then the Bay's roar became muffled stone and echoes, and the air shifted to cold rock and old wood and the distant smell of torches burning somewhere above.
A rope ladder dropped from a ledge eight feet up. Two men waited with lanterns held low. Baratheon colours.
Robert went up first. Edric went last, but only after paying the other man with ten gold coins, earning his gratitude. He was relieved to have survived this "small" adventure, and he climbed steadily, ready to rest, the ladder making its objections known through every tug.
The tunnel beyond had been cut through the cliff in another age, pre-Andal perhaps, running upward through two hundred feet of stone before opening into a torchlit passage that smelled of cold and iron and a castle that had been waiting, sealed and patient, for its lord to come home.
One of the Baratheon men — young, broad, carrying the expression of someone who had spent six hours in a tunnel and had thoughts about it — looked at Robert and said simply: "My lord. Welcome home."
Robert looked at him. Said nothing for a moment. Then clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to make him take a step back, hugging the man and dragging the others in for a hug as well. "I thought the day would never come when it would be good to be back, but here I am."
He released the poor men and looked back at Edric.
"Come, it's time we rest and relax." Once again facing the others, he told them. "Fetch me my Maester, and summon my brother."
---
They came out into the inner ward as the eastern sky was beginning to consider the possibility of dawn.
Storm's End rose around them. The great drum tower impossibly thick, the stone worn smooth by centuries of wind, radiating the kind of self-assurance that comes not from strength but from endurance. It had been told by every storm the Bay ever sent that it ought not stand. It had declined the advice every time conceding nothing but the words try again next time.
Robert stopped in the middle of the ward and looked up at it.
Edric waited. There are things a man needs to do alone when he comes home after the kind of months Robert had just lived, and witnessing them too closely is its own intrusion. He looked at the walls instead. At the torches burning in their brackets, throwing light across stone that had absorbed the light of ten thousand torches before these and would absorb ten thousand more. He felt an unnaturalness from them. Beyond strength, he could feel… something-
"Edric!"
Robert turned, after a while. The grin was gone. What looked back at Edric was simpler — the face of a man who had arrived somewhere and understood that arriving meant the next thing had already started.
"I summoned the Maester, as you've heard. Ravens will go ahead," he said. "Lords will be riding." He looked at Edric, and what came next wasn't a suggestion or an appointment. It was a challenge thrown at every lord who was going on the road. "You will sit with me. At the table with an equal voice. After all, you are Ser Edric of house Moreaux (Because Edric had indeed decided on a house name). If any man has a problem with that—" he gestured at the castle, at the war beyond its walls, at the whole vast machinery of what was coming — "he can bring it to me directly."
"I'll be in the council chamber."
"Good." Something lit up in Robert's eyes, familiar and combative and entirely him. "I'd hate for it to be too dull."
Edric looked at the drum tower one more time. At the stone that had outlasted everything the Bay had tried to do to it.
"I'll be with you," he said.
Robert nodded, already turning toward the keep, as if it had never been in doubt, and walked inside.
Edric followed him into Storm's End as the first pale light crept over the eastern cliffs, and whatever the war had been before this moment, it was something different now.