Lord Monford Velaryon stepped from his ship onto the harbor of Dragonstone with far too many thoughts in his mind.
A letter had arrived only the day before, summoning him to Dragonstone the next day.
Driftmark and Dragonstone were close, aye, but even so, it pushed the limits of courtesy.
A lord did not summon another lord with barely a day’s warning unless the matter was urgent.
Or threatening.
Monford had spent the entire crossing trying to decide what it meant.
The Crown, he told himself.
It must be about the Crown.
That was the sensible thought.
Jon Arryn had stripped many ships out of Dragonstone’s harbor while its lord was away, and the young man had returned to find his harbor half-empty.
Of course he was angry.
Of course he was summoning his vassals.
Monford had written to him precisely about that.
He had put Driftmark’s support in writing, in fact.
It had seemed a very shrewd letter at the time.
Now he was no longer certain.
He had expected Dragonstone’s harbor to be nearly empty.
It was not.
The harbor itself had been extended, and it was full.
Merchant cogs took on cargo.
Other ships sat under repair, their hulls scraped clean while men swarmed over them like ants over a carcass.
Coils of fresh rope lay stacked near the docks.
New timber rested beneath oiled canvas.
And boys.
Or young men, rather.
That was the part that made Monford’s eyes narrow.
They were everywhere—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen—not underfoot like ordinary harbor brats, but working.
One boy read a cargo manifest aloud to a warehouse clerk.
Two more spliced a line with the competence of seasoned sailors.
Others hauled crates, counted supplies, and shouted orders between the docks.
So that part is true as well, Monford thought.
Cressen waited at the end of the pier, alone save for two guardsmen in black and gold.
For a brief moment, Monford felt something in his chest ease.
Cressen was a known quantity—old, cautious, endlessly reasonable, a man who had spent forty years talking Baratheons down from ledges with modest success.
If Cressen had come alone to meet him, the day could not be so bad.
Or at least that was what he thought.
Then he came close enough to see the old man’s face, and the ease left him again.
“Lord Monford.” Cressen inclined his head.
“Welcome to Dragonstone.”
“Maester,” Monford said quietly, once the guardsmen had fallen back a little.
“Is there some matter? Lord Alric summoned me with great urgency.”
“I will tell you one thing, my lord,” Cressen said at last, “and only because I would rather you enter that hall thinking clearly. His lordship read your letter.”
Monford was silent.
“Ah,” Lord Monford Velaryon said.
“My lord,” the old maester said, lowering his voice, “let us go. We should not keep Lord Alric waiting.”
Lord Monford nodded and followed Cressen.
They climbed the distance in silence.
The Hall of Dragonstone
The great hall of Dragonstone had been built to make men feel small, and three centuries had not dulled it in the least.
It was cavernous, cut from the same volcanic black stone as the rest of the fortress.
The seat at the far end was not a chair so much as an event: a stone dragon rising from the floor, wings spread wide against the wall behind it, its open jaws swallowing the seat between them.
Whoever sat there seemed to sit within the mouth of the beast.
Lord Monford noticed the knights at once.
Eight of them stood along the walls.
It took him little time to understand that these were not household ornaments chosen for display.
These were men who had proven their worth in real battles.
Their gear was well kept but utterly unmatched.
One had lost most of his left ear.
Two bore the shiny, puckered scars of men who had been aboard burning ships and had not escaped quickly enough.
Now came the time to meet his liege lord: Alric Baratheon.
Monford had heard much about the young man.
He had heard of the young lord who could not bear to remain in his own hall.
A lord who spent his life among sailors, cursed like the worst of them, and called the ironborn squids even in open court.
A crude, hot-blooded boy who had answered an ironborn raid by personally caving in a reaver’s skull with a warhammer.
A boy playing at captain because he did not wish to be a lord.
Monford had crossed the water expecting to meet that young man.
The young man sitting in that hall did not resemble him in any particular.
Alric sat upon the Throne of Dragonstone with a stillness that made the hall feel smaller.
There was something regal about him, something tense and authoritative that Monford had not expected.
Black hair.
The heavy Baratheon jaw only beginning to come into itself.
Blue eyes in the cold light from the sea, fixed upon Monford from the moment he crossed the doors.
He wore black and gold, simply dressed, without a single ornament.
Except for the sword.
It lay across the arms of the seat, and Lord Monford Velaryon’s step nearly faltered.
It was not steel.
The blade drank the light instead of throwing it back—black, glossy, rippling faintly along a thousand tiny fracture-planes where the edge had been worked.
It seemed less forged than grown.
The crossguard was gold, shaped in the form of dragon wings.
The pommel was a single polished sphere of the same black glass.
Dragonglass.
As a weapon, it was absurd.
Obsidian could take an edge no steel could match, but it would explode into gravel the first time it struck a shield boss or a mailed arm.
No man alive would carry such a sword into battle.
No man would carry it at all.
Except to say something.
And gods, what it said.
Black glass and gold against black stone, in the hands of a Baratheon of Dragonstone.
It did not look like a weapon.
It looked like a crown.
It was a ceremonial sword, clearly.
Yet it seemed far more fitting for a king than for a lord.
So that is true, then, Monford thought.
Then something purely mercantile inside him woke and began doing sums, entirely against his will, in the middle of the worst morning he had endured in years.
Monford knew precisely what he was looking at and precisely what it was worth.
Dragonstone had always had dragonglass.
That was the joke of it.
For three hundred years, every lord of the island had looked at it and seen exactly what it seemed to be: worthless volcanic rubbish.
It could not be worked into mail or plate.
It shattered under pressure, made poor tools, and even worse weapons.
Targaryen kings had walked past mountains of it for centuries and seen only ugly black rock.
Then a boy had looked at the same mountains and seen jewelry, luxury and beauty.
The word had reached Driftmark, but Monford had never understood the true value of it until now.
He could see how much Essos would pay for this.
Braavos, Pentos, Myr, Lys, Volantis—cities famous for wealth, luxury, and merchants who would pay dearly for something rare.
Now Monford understood why there were rumors about Dragonstone’s ceremonial blades among the nobles and merchants of Essos.
Rings.
Pendants.
Cloak clasps.
Hair ornaments for Lysene courtesans and Tyroshi wives.
And then the blades.
Daggers.
Shortswords.
Great gaudy parade-pieces of black glass and gold—useless in any fight, but magnificent upon a wall.
The magisters of Essos had gone half-mad for them.
Alric had built a real trade around it, nearly a monopoly.
Dragonglass could be found elsewhere, perhaps, but not Dragonstone dragonglass, and not cut by skilled workers trained from childhood to shape it into objects of wealth and prestige.
We thought he was merely playing captain, Monford thought.
But he has been building something.
No herald had spoken.
No one had announced Monford’s name or titles.
The Lord of Dragonstone had not stirred or offered a single word since he had entered.
Monford knelt anyway.
That was what unsettled him most afterward.
He noticed himself doing it—noticed his knee finding the black stone and his head lowering before he had consciously chosen to bow.
The atmosphere of the hall made resistance feel unnatural.
He could feel the authority coming from Alric Baratheon.
Gods be good, Monford thought, kneeling on the black stone.
“My lord,” he said.
“Driftmark answers your summons.”
“Rise, Lord Velaryon,” Alric Baratheon said.
His voice was cold and level, the voice of a lord accustomed to being obeyed.
Monford rose.
For a while, nobody spoke.
Alric studied him from the throne with the frank, unembarrassed attention of a man examining cargo upon a pier.
“You sent me a letter, Lord Monford,” Alric said at last.
“I did, my lord.”
“You wrote that the Crown wronged me. That taking ships from Dragonstone was an insult. That Driftmark stands with me.”
He tilted his head slightly.
“Do you hold to it?”
“I do, my lord.”
Monford put some real conviction into the words.
He could sense something wrong in the atmosphere of the hall, but he had not yet seen the trap.
“Good,” Alric said.
Then he smiled, and every hair on Monford’s arms rose.
The smile went nowhere near his eyes.
“But that is a genuinely funny thing to say to me, my lord.”
Something changed in the hall.
Not silence—there could be no true silence with wind at the windows, the fire burning in the great hearth, and a gull screaming somewhere far below.
But the nature of the room changed.
Monford became abruptly aware of the knights along the walls and the fact that their eyes were now upon him.
“Because you have done the very same thing to me,” Alric said.
“Have you not?”
“My lord—”
“You took my ships. You took my gold.”
Alric’s voice did not rise.
Its refusal to rise was worse than shouting.
“You sat in a room with Guncer Sunglass and the other lords. You had all sworn oaths to serve this house, yet you divided what belonged to it between yourselves.”
Alric’s hand rested upon the black blade.
“War reparations, was it? Or debts owed from the Greyjoy Rebellion?”
“My lord, if you would permit me—” Lord Monford began, suddenly nervous.
“And then you had the audacity to write to me about the Crown,” Alric continued.
“About the insults they threw at Dragonstone.”
Lord Monford Velaryon opened his mouth, and for the first time in perhaps twenty years, nothing came out.
Then Alric rose.
He did it without haste.
His right hand closed around the grip of the dragonglass sword and brought it up with him—not into any guard, simply carrying it with the black blade pointed toward the floor, as a man might carry a walking stick he had no need of.
Still, Monford’s eyes went to the edge.
Obsidian took an edge no steel could match, and a blade that would shatter against mail could still open a throat perfectly well before it broke.
Alric came down the steps.
One.
Two.
Three.
He stopped far closer than Monford would have preferred.
“Your color has gone, my lord,” Alric observed.
A cold smile touched his lips.
“What happened, Lord Monford?”