After Gavin was born, he and his mother Elisse lived inside the castle.
She worked at the laundry, scrubbing clothes for the household.
Gavin learned everything he could about the place and his own place in it by listening to the servants gossip.
They never bothered to lower their voices around a small child.
His father, Morton Cotoin, had been the lord’s eldest son.
He died of sickness on the ship bringing him home from Essos, leaving Elisse pregnant and alone.
In this world, a marriage meant nothing without a septon to witness it and a maester to record it.
The children born of such unions were bastards.
From the talk he overheard, Gavin also gathered that his mother was a foreigner from across the Narrow Sea.
They had lived in the castle for three years.
His grandfather, Lord Horton Cotoin, never once came to see them.
Instead, the old man tried several times to have them thrown out.
Only his uncle, Ser Emond Cotoin, stood in the way.
Emond took beatings and punishments from his father for it.
Every so often the knight would visit anyway, bringing toys a boy Gavin’s age had no use for.
Gavin had started to think they might stay forever.
Then the Usurper’s War broke out.
House Cotoin answered the call of their liege lords, the Tyrells.
Ser Emond, named heir in his father’s place, rode to Highgarden and led the men of Three Towers south into the Stormlands.
Not long after Emond left, Gavin and his mother were driven from the castle.
Emond must have seen it coming.
He had already arranged a small place for them in the town below the walls and found Elisse work washing clothes for the army camp.
Now and then someone from the castle still sent a few coins or a bundle of goods to help.
Grief for the man she loved, the toll of childbirth, and years of hard labor had worn Elisse down.
The beauty that once turned heads was gone.
Her skin had grown rough, her eyes sunken, her face hollow with exhaustion.
She was often too sick to leave her bed.
Money was always tight.
When she could work, the pay from laundry was barely enough to keep them fed.
Without the occasional help from the castle, they would have gone hungry more nights than not.
The pressure finally pushed Gavin to keep making and selling his refined salt, even though every batch felt like a gamble.
He knew the knowledge he carried was dangerous.
A child walking through a marketplace with a handful of gold would draw every cutpurse and desperate man for miles.
If anyone discovered how he turned seawater into clean white crystals, trouble would follow fast.
He had spent weeks turning the idea over in his head.
Maybe it was time to give the technique away in exchange for real protection.
He came around the last thorny hill and the town finally appeared below Three Towers.
Sweat ran down his face.
Gavin wiped it away with his sleeve and let out a quiet, childish grumble about his still-small body.
Even this short walk left him tired.
Three Towers sat on the cliffs above the southern shore of Whispering Bay, where the bay met the Redwyne Straits.
It was only three days’ ride from Oldtown.
The castle looked like a stone giant planted on the edge of the world, three tall towers stabbing straight into the sky like swords.
By day they served as watchtowers against raiders from the sea.
At night their lights guided ships safely past the rocks.
That was how the place had earned its name.
It was a pure military stronghold.
Because the inner ward was small, people had built outward over the centuries until a proper town grew at the foot of the cliffs.
Three Towers was the seat of House Cotoin.
Together with the two small towns and the dozens of villages that answered to it, the whole made up the lands of Three Towers.
The family was old, tracing its blood back to the First Men.
It had been stronger once.
More than a hundred years ago, during the Dance of the Dragons, Lord Owen Cotoin had fought for the Blacks.
He and most of his kin died at the Battle of the Honeywine, cut down by Jon Roxton’s sword.
The Hightowers seized the castle while the war still raged.
After the Dance ended, Three Towers was returned to the family, but only a boy remained to inherit.
For the next century the Hightowers kept the Cotoins under their thumb, squeezing them whenever they could.
Now the house was weak.
Only three landed knights remained, and perhaps a hundred professional soldiers.
Even if every able man in the domain was called up, they would struggle to field a thousand spears.
They could barely protect the fishing villages from ironborn raids.
Without the Redwyne fleet regularly patrolling the straits, those coastal hamlets would have been burned and looted long ago.
Inside a nameless tavern in the town, six-year-old Gavin handed a small cloth pouch of salt across the counter to Laman, the tavern keeper’s wife.
She took one look at him and smiled, reaching out to pinch his soft cheek.
“Back again already?” she said, weighing the pouch in her hand.
She counted out five copper stars and slid them over.
Then she patted the top of his silver head.
“We milked the ewes early this morning.
Plenty left.
I’ll bring you some.” She disappeared into the back while Gavin murmured his thanks.
Laman had become his steadiest customer these past months.
She was blunt and honest, especially kind to children, and she almost always slipped him extra food when he came by.
At six, Gavin looked like a living porcelain doll.
His silver hair framed a face as smooth and pale as warm jade, touched with a faint healthy flush.
His large, liquid purple eyes shone like bright stars against a night sky.
He leaned against the counter and listened to the talk around him.
The tavern was one of the best places to hear what was happening beyond the town.
These days every conversation circled back to the Usurper’s War.
The people of the Reach wanted their side to win.
Most of all they wanted Ser Emond to come home victorious and covered in glory.
Whenever word arrived of a big victory, the domain held feasts and celebrations.
Plenty of the smallfolk were already looking forward to the next one.