“For your own sake, my lord, I would not bring him here.” Jorah’s face had gone sour with the saying of it.
“Why?” “The prisoner works magic.” The voice was hoarse.
It shook on the last word, as if the thing it named were still in the room.
Domeric watched his castellan.
The fear sat too plain to be a lie.
Magic.
In the life before this one, witches had been theater: odd clothes, a pot, a claim that the future could be read in smoke.
Colored fire.
A trick of the workbench dressed up as a god.
Westeros was not that country.
Here the realm believed in magic, and the belief was not empty.
The rarity was the other half of it.
True workings were so few that half the world had learned to doubt them.
The Citadel taught that the art had died with Valyria.
After the Doom, the maesters said, no spell in Westeros had ever been cleanly proved again.
Lately the talk had changed.
Glass candles at the Citadel had taken a strange light.
Old gifts, the kind men filed under miracle and left there, were being named in sober rooms.
The stars would bleed soon.
When they did, the old powers would stand up with them.
He knew the rest of that road from the tale.
Warlocks in Qarth had meant to bathe Samwell Tarly in aurochs blood to put a spine in him.
Mirri Maz Duur had opened Khal Drogo’s horse to wake the man, and when the khal died Daenerys Targaryen had burned the maegi on his pyre and taken dragons out of the ash.
The Alchemists’ Guild in King’s Landing had begun to say their wildfire words were biting again.
In the House of the Undying the warlocks of Qarth still claimed a great power.
Along the Jade Sea, in Asshai-by-the-Shadow, warlocks and witches and shadowbinders and petty readers of smoke had never stopped their work.
He had not thought to meet the thing this soon.
Magic was a terror that did not take a bridle.
“Ser Jorah.
You are sure.” “I am.” “What manner of it?” “Fire.
It looks like any other flame until it touches a man.
Then he goes the way a candle goes.
Head and most of the chest spread on the stone.
You would not want that picture, my lord.” Jorah’s body remembered it and tried to leave without him.
Fire.
Wildfire came first to mind.
Wildfire burned green.
It was a misery to brew and it did not do this.
At worst it was a fiercer pitch, a burning oil with a crueler appetite.
It did not unmake a man in a breath and leave him flat as wax.
So the other thing, then.
A true working.
He made the choice while the thought was still settling.
“If bringing him is the danger, we will go to him.” “He has magic in his hands, my lord.
You are certain?” “What else is there?
Sitting here guessing at a name.
I want to know why he hit my mines.” He kept his face still.
Jorah took the stillness for what a hall needed and stopped arguing.
“Then we take precautions.” They put a cloak on Domeric that had been cut from some animal he did not ask after, thick, daubed with a wash that stank as if it had died twice.
The claim was that fire would not love it.
Lonehill kept one dungeon.
It had been cut for mine brawls and men who forgot their place at the face, and it was not large.
Jorah went down with him.
So did Ser Wendel, and a weight of guards in steel.
The place was a hole in the hill with doors set in it.
The walls were granite and did not care who sat behind them.
Domeric had walked worse.
The passage narrowed as they went.
The cells grew fewer and each one grew larger.
Those were for the men you did not mean to see again.
The prisoner was at the end of it.
Lime thickened in the air with every turning.
“This is too much risk, my lord.” Wendel had not stopped since the yard.
Lord Wyman’s second son had heard there would be a dangerous judgment and had come at a run to say so all the way down the stair.
“Chained or not, no one can swear when the working comes.” “I am not throwing the life away.
I still mean to spend it on your niece.
Wynafryd will want a living man.” “You mean that?” Wendel’s face opened.
The talk of Lady Catelyn and Sansa had sat in him like a stone.
His road was Lonehill.
A Manderly girl in a Bolton bed was the brace that kept his place from sliding.
Against Sansa of Winterfell, Wynafryd suddenly looked like the horse his lord preferred.
He was already writing the letter in his head.
Lord Wyman would have it before the Starks could pry the match loose.
The last cell was wider than the rest.
Pillars stood some thirteen feet, a beam laid across them, chain enough on the beam to hold a bull.
The prisoner was wrapped in it.
Hands bound at the back.
The gown had been good work once.
It looked like a rag now.
A gown.
Domeric saw it late.
The thing that had burned his mines and put a fear in Jorah Mormont was a girl.
White cloth, filthy, and still cut close enough to tell the rest.
The body under it had been made to be looked at.
A gilt headdress, heavy with work.
A stone at the throat that did not belong in a mine-hole.
That was not a smallfolk pretence.
That was a house that had money and wanted the room to know it.
She watched them with a look that had no guilt in it at all.
Domeric put a hand over his eyes for a moment.
“This is your fire-mage.” “It is, my lord.” Jorah did not move back, but his voice wanted to.
“Do not take the face for the truth.
I saw the working.” “All right.” They went in behind shields and the stinking cloaks, a step at a time.
“What are you called?” She looked at them as if they were a new kind of animal.
In the clear of her eyes Domeric saw himself, bound hand and foot.