The Black Walls of Volantis had stood for five thousand years.
They rose two hundred feet above the eastern bank of the Rhoyne in a great mass of fused black dragonstone, older than every other structure in the city by a margin. Behind those walls, in the district that only the Old Blood were permitted to enter, the palaces of the ancient families rose.
The largest palace in the district had once belonged to the Maegyr family.
Though it did not belong to them anymore.
The courtyard at the centre of the palace complex was a broad expanse of marble that had been designed for garden parties and diplomatic receptions and the kind of entertainment that the Old Blood of Volantis had enjoyed for millennia.
Not anymore.
The fountains that had once played along its edges had been torn out and replaced with sand pits. The ornamental trees had been cut down. The mosaic floor, which had depicted scenes from the founding of the city in tiny coloured tiles that master artisans had spent years laying, was cracked and stained and in several places actively broken where heavy impacts had shattered the stonework beneath.
The courtyard was a fighting pit now.
Daemon Blackfyre, the eldest son of Maelys the Monstrous, stood at the edge of the sand with his arms folded across a chest that was nearly as wide as the doorway behind him.
He was twenty-eight years old and he stood six and a half feet tall, with shoulders broad enough to block out the sun and arms that were roped with the kind of muscle that came not from vanity but from a lifetime of fighting.
His hair was silver-gold in the Valyrian fashion, worn long and tied back with a leather cord, and his face would have been handsome if it were not for the scar that ran from his left temple to the corner of his mouth, a souvenir from a sparring match with his father at the age of fourteen that had nearly taken his eye.
His two sister-wives sat behind him on a stone bench in the shade of a colonnade, both of them silver-haired and violet-eyed and watching the fighting with disinterested gazes.
In the sand before him, two of his brothers were killing each other.
Aegor, the third-born, was the larger of the two. Though not as tall as their father he had taken their father's build to an extreme that bordered on the grotesque, standing nearly seven feet tall with hands the size of dinner plates and a neck so thick that it blended into his shoulders without any visible transition.
He fought with a two-handed greatsword that most men would have needed both arms simply to lift, and he swung it in great horizontal arcs that cut the air with an audible hum and sent sprays of sand flying in wide fans each time the blade passed through the downstroke.
Maekar, the fifth-born, was faster and much leaner. He had the wiry build of a duelist rather than a brute, and he moved around his larger brother's swings with a dancer's footwork, his own shorter blade flicking out in quick probing thrusts that tested Aegor's guard and withdrew before the greatsword could answer. He was good. Better than most of the sellswords and pit fighters that Daemon had watched die in this courtyard over the years.
He was not good enough.
Aegor caught the shorter blade on the flat of the greatsword and turned it aside with a twist of his massive wrists, and the opening that the parry created lasted for perhaps half a second. Aegor stepped into it and the greatsword came around in a short vicious backhand that caught Maekar across the ribs and the sound it made was the sound of steel meeting bone through flesh.
Maekar's feet left the sand and he flew sideways for a good six feet before he hit the ground and rolled twice and came to rest face-down with his arms splayed out and a dark pool beginning to spread beneath his torso.
He did not get up.
Aegor stood over the body for a moment, breathing hard, and then he spat into the sand beside his brother's head and turned to walk back toward the edge of the pit.
Daemon laughed. "You have killed our brother, Aegor."
Aegor shrugged the massive shoulders and drove his greatsword point-first into the sand beside the bench where his own wife sat, a silver-haired girl of perhaps sixteen who did not look up from the piece of fruit she was eating. "He should not have been so weak. Father sired him on a kitchen slave in Lys and the blood showed. It always does with the ones from the low stock."
"Father will be displeased. He liked Maekar. Said the boy had good instincts."
"The boy was weak. Instincts are worth nothing if you can barely lift a sword." Aegor took a skin of water from a slave who appeared at his elbow and drank deeply, the water running down his chin and into the matted silver hair on his chest. "Send someone to clean that up."
Daemon waved a hand and two slaves hurried forward with a canvas sheet to drag the body away.
Further down the courtyard, near the far wall where the old fountain bases still jutted up from the broken mosaic, three more of Maelys's children were engaged in a different kind of exercise.
Haegon, the second-born, fought three Unsullied at once.
He was nearly as large as Daemon but built differently, wider through the hips and heavier through the legs, with a low centre of gravity that made him exceptionally difficult to move once he had planted his feet.
He fought with a sword in each hand, a longsword in the right and a shorter chopping blade in the left, and he used them together in a style that was neither elegant nor particularly skilled but was devastatingly effective when combined with his strength. The Unsullied circled him in their lock-step formation with their spears levelled and their shields overlapping, meanwhile Haegon watched them and waited for one of them to commit.
One did.
The spear came in at his thigh and Haegon turned it aside with the short blade and stepped inside the reach and brought the longsword down on the junction between the Unsullied's helm and his neck guard.
The man dropped without a sound. The other two closed immediately, spears stabbing in from both sides, Haegon took one of them through the meat of his forearm and did not flinch, simply clamped the shaft against his body with his elbow and yanked the spearman forward off balance and drove the short blade through the man's eye. The third Unsullied managed a single thrust that skidded off Haegon's breastplate before the longsword came around and opened him from shoulder to hip.
Three dead men lay in the sand and Haegon stood among them with a spear still embedded in his forearm and blood running freely down his hand, but his expression had not changed once during the entire exchange.
His wife, a tall hard-faced woman who wore riding leathers instead of a gown and kept a curved Dothraki arakh at her hip, watched from the colonnade with her arms crossed and something that might have been approval in her eyes. She was not one of Maelys's daughters. She was a sellsword captain's child from Myr who had beaten Haegon in a knife fight the first time they met and had been dragged to his bed that same night.
Afterwards she stayed. Whether this was by choice or by force was a question that no one in the palace asked.
Beside Haegon's fighting area, the twins sparred with each other.
Visenya and Baela Blackfyre were seventeen years old and identical in every physical respect, silver-haired and violet-eyed and lean and quick, and they moved through their sword forms in a way that made it look as though one of them was fighting her own reflection.
They were the only daughters that Maelys had ever trained with weapons, and the reason for this was simple. They were better than most of their brothers. They fought with paired short swords in a style they had developed together that relied on the fact that each of them could predict exactly what the other was about to do at any given moment, and when they fought side by side they covered each other's openings so completely that the result was less like two fighters and more like a single organism with four arms and four blades and no blind spots whatsoever.
Neither of them was married. Maelys had tried to assign them husbands twice. Both times the prospective grooms had been found the following morning with injuries that were technically survivable.
Daemon watched his siblings train and fight and bleed and occasionally die in the courtyard of the palace that their father had taken from the Maegyrs.
A horn sounded at the palace gate.
Daemon turned his head.
The great bronze doors at the eastern end of the courtyard swung open, and through them came a procession that made every fighting man in the sand stop what they were doing and look.
Red priests.
A column of them, perhaps twenty in total, walking in pairs through the open doors with their crimson robes trailing on the broken mosaic behind them.
They wore the flame-shaped pendants of R'hllor at their throats and they carried no weapons, though several of them had their hands folded inside their sleeves suggesting they kept something there.
At the head of the column walked a man who was not like the others.
He was very tall. Taller even than Daemon, who was accustomed to looking down at most men he encountered. His robes were the same crimson as the others but they hung differently on his frame because the frame beneath them was not the frame of a priest. It was the frame of a warrior, broad across the shoulders and thick through the arms and chest, the fabric stretched across the muscles of his upper body in a way that made the garment look like it was struggling to contain what was inside it.
His head was bald, the scalp smooth and pale and hairless in a way that went beyond mere shaving and into the territory of a man who had simply never possessed hair and never would. His skin was white. Not pale in the Valyrian fashion, but pure white.
The colour of bone.
The colour of snow.
He looked up and revealed he was smiling.
The smile sat on his face like a permanent feature, spread across the lower half of that great pale head in a way that did not reach his eyes.
It was not a kind smile, nor was it genuine in anyway. Yet it was always there and in the whole time daemon had known the man it had never left.
Daemon straightened.
He did not bow. Blackfyres did not bow to priests. But he inclined his head in a gesture of respect that was deeper than the one he gave to most men, because whatever Daemon Blackfyre thought of gods and flames and prophecy, he was not fool enough to disrespect the man who walked at the head of this column.
"High Priest. You honour us with your presence. My father has been expecting you."
The tall pale man stopped before Daemon and the smile widened a fraction.
"The Lord of Light blesses this house and all who dwell within it," he said and his voice strangely enough did not match his body, he spoke like a maester of all things. Daemon did not know much about the high priest but from their brief conversations he knew the man was educated.
"The flames have spoken to us of the great work that lies ahead, and we come to bear witness to its beginning. Will you lead us to your lord father, young Daemon. There is much to discuss and the hour grows late."
"This way, High Priest."
Daemon turned and led the column of red priests through the colonnade and into the interior of the palace.
The palace of the Maegyrs had been grand once. It had been designed in the old Volantene style, all soaring arches and open galleries and rooms that flowed into one another through curtained doorways rather than closed doors.
Maelys had not changed the architecture.
The silk hangings that had decorated the corridors had been replaced with war banners, the black three-headed dragon of House Blackfyre repeated in every size and variation along every wall. The display cases that had once held Maegyr heirlooms and delicate glasswork now held weapons, swords and axes and maces and flails arranged in rows.
The throne room was at the heart of the palace.
It had been the Maegyr audience hall in its previous life, a vast rectangular chamber with a high ceiling supported by columns of marble and a floor of polished black stone. At the far end, on a platform that had been built from blocks of the same fused dragonstone that formed the Black Walls themselves, sat a chair that was not quite a throne but was close enough.
The man in the chair was the largest human being in the entire palace, perhaps even the city.
Maelys Blackfyre, called the Monstrous, sat with one leg stretched out in front of him and the other drawn up against the arm of the chair, his body occupying the seat the way a boulder occupied a riverbed.
He was enormous in every dimension. Not merely tall, though he was that, well over seven feet from the soles of his bare feet to the crown of his silver head. Not merely broad, though his shoulders spanned the width of the chair and his arms were thick enough that most men could not have wrapped both hands around the biceps.
His face was not a pretty sight. The features were Valyrian beneath the various scars, but years of fighting and drinking and violence had turned them into something that looked like a statue that had been left to decay.
And then there was the head.
It grew from his right shoulder.
A second head, smaller than the first, roughly the size of a large fist, protruding from the muscle between his neck and his shoulder blade. It had features, a nose and a mouth and the closed slits of eyes that never opened.
It did not move.
It did not speak.
It simply sat there on his shoulder like a tumour.
Women surrounded him. Half a dozen of them, draped across the arms of the chair and curled at his feet and leaning against the base of the platform, all of them young and all of them beautiful. They wore very little and they said nothing though their eyes were empty.
Across his lap, resting on his thighs like a sleeping pet, lay a sword.
Blackfyre.
The ancestral blade of House Targaryen, stolen by Daemon Blackfyre a century ago and carried by every head who had taken his name since.
Maelys saw the red priests enter.
His violet eyes, which had been half-closed in the drowsy satisfaction of a man being attended to, snapped fully open. The amusement on his face hardened into something else and he reached down with one enormous hand and shoved the nearest woman away from him with enough force that she stumbled and fell down the stairs, making the others scatter immediately.
He sat forward in his chair.
"High Priest I am pleased to see you. But I find myself wondering whether you have brought something of value this time, because the last thing you brought me was a promise of victory that turned into a rout and a lost wyvern."
The tall pale priest stopped at the foot of the platform.
The smile on his face had not changed.
"You told me," Maelys continued, "that the attack on King's Landing would shatter the Targaryen defences. That the city would fall before the old king could muster a response. That my men would hold the harbour and the gates and the walls, and that by the time the sun rose on the following day I would be able to land my main force unopposed and claim the throne that is mine by right. That is what you told me, High Priest. That is what the flames showed you."
He lifted Blackfyre off his lap and set the point against the stone floor beside his chair, the blade standing upright.
"Instead my men were routed. The wyvern that you assured me would break their will was killed. My fleet was scattered. My staging point on Dragonstone has been under blockade for two years while my soldiers sit inside those walls eating through supplies that were meant to sustain them for a campaign, not a siege. I had one hundred thousand men ready to cross the Narrow Sea, High Priest. One hundred thousand. The largest army any Blackfyre has assembled since my grandfather's day. And you told me to wait. The fires say wait, you said. The fires say the time is not yet right. So I waited. And I waited. And my men grow restless on Dragonstone and my allies in the Triarchy grow impatient and my sons even kill each other in the training yard because they have nothing better to do."
Maelys leaned forward and the chair creaked beneath his weight.
"So I will ask you one time, High Priest Holden, and I would counsel you to choose your answer with some care, because my patience has reached a boundary that even you would be unwise to test. Have you brought me good news."
The tall pale man reached up with both hands and drew back the deep crimson hood of his robe.
"The attack on King's Landing was indeed unfortunate, your grace," High Priest Holden said. "Victory would have been assured had it not been for a rogue element that neither the flames nor I could have foreseen. A man of unusual gifts who was not supposed to be on that beach and who did things that no man of his station should have been capable of doing."
Maelys's eyes narrowed.
"But the two years have not been wasted, my lord. Far from it. Your forces on Dragonstone have held the fortress against everything the Targaryens could bring to bear, and in the time that the blockade has occupied their fleet and their attention, your armies here in Essos have grown. The Golden Company stands at forty thousand now, reinforced by sellswords from Myr and Tyrosh and the slave soldiers that the Triarchy has provided. They are ready."
"They have been ready for a year," Maelys growled.
"And now the moment has arrived for them to be used." Holden stepped forward, one foot on the bottom step of the platform. "The Targaryen king has committed his fleet to the assault on Dragonstone. Every warship they possess, every transport, every supply vessel. They have sailed from Brightwater Isle with the king himself aboard the flagship, and they are heading east as we speak."
Holden's smile widened.
"Which means they are vulnerable."
Maelys went very still.
"While they are sieging Dragonstone they will not expect an attack to come from the sea. We can destroy their armies all at once and even kill the pretender king."
Maelys's hand tightened around the hilt of Blackfyre.
"If I commit my main force now," he said slowly, working through the arithmetic, "and we lose then I will lose a considerable amount of my navy, maybe enough that I won't be able to launch another invasion for years to come."
"Ah." Holden's smile widened. "But you have something that they do not, my lord."
Maelys smiled.
**ROAAAAAAARRRRR**
(AN: So we finally get a look at Holden, did any of you expect him to be the high priest of rhllor. I think it makes sense for his character. He's that type of guy. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)
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