"They mean to kill Lord Harlaw," said his mother. "Before the autumn storms."
She said it the way she said most things that mattered—quietly, without looking up, her attention apparently fixed on the embroidery in her lap. A golden lion, half finished, prowling across a field of crimson silk. Her needle went in and out, in and out, never missing a stitch.
Alyn set down the cup of wine she had poured him and waited.
"One of my servants keeps house for a wine merchant in Lannisport," Cersei went on. "The merchant does a good deal of trade with Lordsport—ironborn will drink anything, and pay for it in stolen silver. His captains talk when they're in their cups. And lately they've been talking about the regent." She drew the thread through and snipped it with her teeth. "Small lords, mostly. Captains who lost sons at Pyke, or ships, or both. They've been meeting in the dark at Pyke and Ten Towers. And the priests have been stirring them up—that half-drowned brother of Balon's, the one who wears seaweed in his hair. Preaching on the beaches that the Seastone Chair sits empty while the kraken's son is kept on a leash."
"And Euron?"
His mother's needle paused, just for a heartbeat. She looked up.
"How did you know that name?"
"I read, Mother. Balon had three brothers." Alyn kept his face still. "One commanded the Iron Fleet until Uncle Stannis sank it. One is a priest. And one was sent into exile years ago for something no one will speak of. If there's trouble brewing on the Iron Islands, he's the one I'd be watching."
Cersei looked at him a moment longer, with that faint, sharp, measuring look she sometimes gave him, as though she had glimpsed something at the back of his eyes and could not quite make out its shape. Then she went back to her lion.
"A black ship with red sails," she said. "Seen off Old Wyk three times in a moon, never putting in to harbour. No one will say her master's name. But the old men make signs against evil when she passes." She pulled the thread taut. "So yes. Euron, I should think."
"How long have you known?"
"The letter came last night." She smiled faintly. "I thought you would want to hear it first. Before your father. Before anyone."
Alyn nodded slowly. "Thank you, Mother."
He meant it. He also did not miss what she had not said. A servant in a wine merchant's house in Lannisport, who had heard it from a merchant, who had heard it from his captains, who had heard it in Lordsport. It was a long, soft, winding road for a rumour to travel, and it had travelled it remarkably fast, and arrived remarkably whole.
He thought of a plump, powdered figure on the stair a fortnight ago, bobbing its head and wishing him a good morning.
You wanted me to hear this, he thought. Didn't you? You wanted to see what I'd do with it.
Well. Let him watch.
"You'll tell your father?" said Cersei.
"Not yet."
She raised one golden eyebrow. "He'll want to know. He'll want to burn them. Gods know my father will want to burn them—he still hasn't forgiven them for Lannisport. Between the two of them they'll put every ironborn village to the torch and sow the ashes with salt."
"I know," said Alyn. "That's why I'm not telling him yet."
He went up to the battlements that evening, where he could think, and looked west across the city toward the sea.
The stranger's story had been very clear about the Iron Islands, as it was clear about very few things anymore. In that story, Theon Greyjoy had gone home after ten years at Winterfell, a green-cloaked, soft-spoken, southern-mannered boy who smelled of perfume and wore his hair long, and his father had looked at him and seen a stranger. His sister had mocked him. His people had laughed at him. He had spent the rest of his short, miserable life trying to prove that he was ironborn enough, and doing terrible things to prove it, and none of it had ever been enough.
Total rejection. That was the word for it. The Iron Islands had looked at Balon's last son and decided he was not one of them.
But that Theon had been nearly twenty, and raised by the Starks, among the old gods and the weirwoods, with a northern lord for a father and northern boys for brothers. He had gone home a man grown and a stranger.
This Theon was still a boy. Years from his majority. He had been on Dragonstone, under Stannis, for five years—hardly a warm and loving home, but hardly a soft one either. Stannis did not raise boys to wear perfume. And Dragonstone was an island, after all. A grim, grey rock in a grey sea, with salt in the wind and ships in the harbour. If anywhere in the Seven Kingdoms could keep a little of the ironborn in a kraken's son, it was Dragonstone.
He was a greenlander now, in the eyes of the islands. Of course he was. But he was young, and he was still the blood of Balon Greyjoy, and he was not lost. Not yet. Not entirely.
Alyn could work with that.
The ironborn did not want Theon. That was the first thing to understand. They wanted a king of their own, a strong one, who would lead them back to the old way—reaving and raiding, paying the iron price. Euron would give them that. Euron would promise them the world. And if they rose for Euron, the Iron Throne would have to answer, and that meant another war—his father's hammer, his grandfather's fire, a hundred burning villages, another head on another spike.
And in the end, the ironborn would only hate the Iron Throne a little more, and wait a little longer, and rise a little harder the next time.
Unless.
Unless they never rose together at all.
The ironborn had laws. Strange, salt-soaked, bloody laws, but laws nonetheless. And chief among them was the kingsmoot. When the Seastone Chair stood empty, the captains of the Iron Islands could gather on Old Wyk, beneath the bones of the great sea dragon Nagga, and choose their king by acclaim. Any man could stand. Any man could be chosen.
But the Seastone Chair was not empty. Not in the eyes of the Iron Throne, and not, if Alyn read his histories rightly, in the eyes of many ironborn either. Balon Greyjoy had a living, trueborn heir. The heir was simply not yet of age. And a kingsmoot called to set aside a living heir, before he had even come into his inheritance—before he could so much as stand before the captains and speak for himself—was not the old way. It was a theft. A coward's grab.
That was the knife Alyn meant to slip into the islands.
He would send Theon home.
Not as a hostage released in defeat. Not as a weak boy dumped on a rock to be murdered. He would send him home as the recognised heir of the Seastone Chair, Lord of the Iron Islands in waiting, with the full weight of the Iron Throne standing behind him. Lord Harlaw would remain as regent until Theon came of age. And the crown would make it very clear—very, very clear—what would happen to anyone who tried to change that before he did.
It would look like a gift. Like weakness, perhaps, to some. The Usurper's son, giving back the kraken's boy.
But it would split the islands down the middle.
There would be those who stood with Theon. Not because they loved him—they did not know him—but because he was Balon's blood, and the law was on his side, and the crown's ships were on his side, and because some men always preferred the side that would still be standing at the end. Harlaw's people, for a start. The lords who had knelt after Pyke and found the king's peace profitable. The ones who were tired of burying their sons.
And there would be those who stood with Euron. The hungry ones. The angry ones. The ones who had drunk on their grief for five years and wanted to drink blood instead.
And every day that Theon lived and Euron did not move, the first faction would grow a little stronger. Every day that passed, Theon would grow a little older, a little closer to his majority, a little more real.
And if Euron moved anyway?
If the Crow's Eye decided he could not wait—if he had the boy murdered, or tried to—then he would be a kinslayer. A man who had slain his own brother's son, a child, in his own hall. The gods and men of every faith in Westeros held kinslaying to be the foulest of crimes, and the ironborn, for all their hardness, were no different. And worse: he would be a coward, who had not dared to wait until the boy was grown and could face him at a kingsmoot like a man. The ironborn respected strength. They did not respect fear. A great many captains who might have followed Euron Greyjoy to war would think twice about following a man who murdered children because he was afraid of them.
Of course, the ironborn might simply wait. Let Theon grow. Let him come of age. Then call their kingsmoot, and set him aside, or put a knife in him in the dark.
But that would take years. Years in which Theon could learn to be ironborn again, and win men to his side. Years in which the faction that stood with him could harden into something real. Years in which Euron might lose patience, or make enemies, or die.
Years in which Alyn could prepare.
He had perhaps a few winters before the long one came. He did not intend to spend them fighting the ironborn.
His father was in the yard when Alyn found him, stripped to the waist in the late afternoon sun, laying into a straw dummy with a practice hammer as though it had insulted his mother. Robert had been doing more of that lately. Since Tywin's arrival, mostly. His grandfather and his father had a way of putting each other in moods.
"Ha! There he is!" Robert lowered the hammer, breathing hard, his chest slick with sweat. "Come for a bout? I'll go easy on you."
"You never go easy on me."
"I'll go easier than Barristan." He tossed the hammer to a squire and grabbed a towel. "What's that face? You look like Stannis at a feast."
"I need to talk to you, Father. Alone."
Something in his voice must have carried, because Robert's grin faded. He waved the squires away and walked with Alyn into the shade of the colonnade, and stood there with the towel around his neck, and listened.
Alyn told him. All of it. The captains gathering in the dark. The priests on the beaches. The knife meant for Lord Harlaw before the autumn storms. And the black ship with the red sails, prowling off Old Wyk.
By the time he finished, his father's face had gone a dark and dangerous red, and the towel was twisted in his fists like a garrotte.
"Again," Robert said. His voice was very low. "Five years. Five bloody years since I put Balon's head on a spike, and they want to do it again?" He turned on his heel and took two strides back toward the yard, as though he meant to go and find his warhammer that very moment. "Right. That's it. I'll call the banners. Stannis can have the fleet ready in a fortnight. We'll go up there and burn every longship on every beach from Lordsport to Old Wyk, and this time when I'm done there won't be enough ironborn left to crew a rebellion—"
"Father."
"—and if that bastard Euron's out there on his black ship, I'll hang him from his own mast—"
"Father."
Robert stopped.
"Don't," said Alyn.
His father turned around slowly and stared at him.
"Don't," Alyn said again. "Please. Not yet. Hear me out first."
And he told him the rest.
He told him about Theon, and the Seastone Chair, and the kingsmoot. He told him about the two factions, and how the one would grow while the other waited. He told him what would happen to Euron's support if he murdered a child, and what would happen to his support if he did not. He told him about the years it would buy. He did not tell him what he needed the years for. But he told him everything else.
"You burned them once," Alyn said. "And it worked. They knelt. But it didn't make them love the Iron Throne, and it didn't make them forget. If you burn them again, you'll make Euron a hero. Every ironborn who's ever lost a son will rally to him. You'll win—of course you'll win—but you'll win the same war we won five years ago, and we'll fight it again in another five, and another five after that." He took a breath. "I don't want to fight the ironborn every five years for the rest of my life, Father. I want them to fight each other."
Robert Baratheon said nothing.
He stood there in the shade of the colonnade with the towel around his neck and stared at his son. He stared for a very long time. Alyn made himself stand still under it, and meet his father's eyes, and wait.
Then, slowly, something began to happen to the king's face.
It started at the corners of his mouth. It worked its way up into his beard, and into his cheeks, and into the creases around his eyes. And then Robert Baratheon threw back his head and laughed—a great, booming, helpless laugh that rang off the stones of the colonnade and sent a flock of pigeons bursting out of the eaves.
"Seven hells," he wheezed, when he could breathe. "Seven bloody hells. Listen to you!" He wiped his eyes with the towel. "I don't want to fight the ironborn every five years. You sound like Jon. You sound like Jon and your grandfather and that old Tyrell crone all rolled into one." He laughed again, and clapped Alyn on the shoulder so hard it rocked him. "What is it you want, then? Want to play at being king, do you?"
"I want to try something, Father. That's all."
Robert looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded, once, and something in his eyes had changed—not the laughter, exactly, but something under it. Something that looked almost like respect.
"Very well," he said. "Let's see what this boy of mine can do."
There were conditions, of course. There were always conditions with his father.
"We'll do it your way," Robert said, as they walked back across the yard. "Send the Greyjoy whelp home, put the fear of the gods into the rest of them, set them squabbling like gulls over a fish head. Fine. Good. But we're not sending the boy home in a rowboat with a letter pinned to his chest."
"No, Father."
"We're sending him with a fleet. My fleet. Every ship Stannis can float, and every ship your grandfather can spare from Lannisport—gods know he'll want to come, he's been spoiling for an ironborn to hang since they burned his harbour. And the Redwynes. Paxter Redwyne's got two hundred ships sitting at the Arbor doing nothing but carrying wine." He grinned suddenly. "And Paxter's that Tyrell crone's nephew, isn't he? Ha! Let her see what she's buying into."
Alyn had not thought of that. He thought of it now, and found himself smiling too.
"And I'm coming," Robert added. "Don't argue. I'm not missing this. If your clever plan goes sideways, I want my hammer close to hand."
"I wasn't going to argue."
"Good. And so are you, of course." His father clapped him on the back again. "You're the one who's going to stand up in front of the ironborn and tell them how things are going to be. You thought of it, you say it. That's how it works." His grin turned wicked. "I'll be standing right behind you, mind. Looking terrifying."
"That's rather the point, Father."
Robert roared with laughter all the way back to the yard.
The letter went out a week later, under the king's seal, to every lord and captain on the Iron Islands, and to the priests of the Drowned God, and to Lord Harlaw at Pyke. Alyn had written it himself. His father had read it over his shoulder, laughing so hard he spilled his wine on the draft and they had to start again.
It was very simple.
The Iron Throne recognised Theon Greyjoy, son of Balon, as the sole and rightful heir to the Seastone Chair and Lord of the Iron Islands. Until Lord Theon came of age, Lord Rodrik Harlaw would continue to govern the islands as regent, in the king's name and in Lord Theon's. Lord Theon would be returned to his father's seat at Pyke, to be raised among his own people according to their own customs, as befitted the heir of House Greyjoy.
Any kingsmoot called before Lord Theon's majority would be considered an act of rebellion against the Iron Throne.
Any harm that came to Lord Harlaw or to Lord Theon before that day would be considered an act of rebellion against the Iron Throne.
And the king would respond to rebellion as he had responded to it five years ago—only more so.
And then, at the bottom, the last lines. The ones Alyn had laboured over longest, and his father had laughed at hardest:
His Grace wishes the ironborn to know that the seas around the Iron Islands are treacherous, and that he would be most grieved if any misfortune were to befall Lord Theon on the voyage home, or after. Should Lord Theon ever be lost at sea, or meet with some mysterious accident, His Grace fears the waters of the Iron Islands may become very dangerous indeed. Ships may be lost. Whole fleets. And it is a sad truth of the world that villages, too, sometimes suffer mysterious accidents, and are never seen again.
His Grace trusts that no such sorrow will come to pass.
The fleet gathered in Blackwater Bay over the next three weeks, and it was a sight that made the whole city come out to the walls to watch.
The royal fleet came first, from its moorings below the Red Keep—sleek black war galleys with the crowned stag on their sails, and Stannis's ships up from Dragonstone, grim and grey and bristling with scorpions. Then the Lannister ships came round from the west, crimson and gold, a hundred of them, newly built from the timber of the Westerlands to replace the fleet the ironborn had burned. His grandfather had not come in person; Tywin Lannister did not sail. But he had sent his ships, and his own captains to command them, and a letter to Alyn that said only: Good. See it done.
And then, a fortnight later, the Redwyne fleet sailed up from the Arbor—great wine-dark galleys flying the purple grapes of House Redwyne, two hundred strong, so many that they filled the mouth of the bay from shore to shore. On the deck of the flagship, beside Lord Paxter Redwyne, Alyn saw a small, sharp figure in black and green, standing very straight, with a cane in one hand.
He had not been told she was coming. He suspected that was the point.
"Gods be good," said his father, beside him on the battlements, staring out at the forest of masts. "That's more ships than I took to Pyke. And we're not even going to fight."
"We might," said Alyn.
"Aye. We might." Robert glanced at him sidelong. "You're not afraid?"
Alyn thought about it honestly.
He thought about Euron Greyjoy on his black ship, out there somewhere on the grey sea, with his smiling eye. He thought about the priests on the beaches, and the captains in the dark, and the knife waiting for Lord Harlaw. He thought about a boy on Dragonstone he had never met, who was about to be handed a chair and a people and a death sentence, all at once, and told to make the best of it. He thought about Varys, and wondered whether he was watching from some window of the Red Keep right now. He was sure he was.
He thought about how many things could go wrong.
"A little," he said.
His father laughed and put an arm around his shoulders. "Good. Only fools aren't afraid. Fools and Lannisters." He squeezed. "We sail for Dragonstone in three days, to fetch your Greyjoy. Then the Iron Islands." He looked out over the bay, at the hundreds of ships riding at anchor, their sails furled, their lanterns beginning to glow in the dusk like a second city floating on the water. "Gods, I hope they fight."
"Father."
"What? A man can hope."
Alyn shook his head, and smiled, and looked out at the fleet too.
Somewhere to the west, beyond the rim of the world, the Iron Islands were waiting. And somewhere on the grey water between here and there, a black ship with red sails was waiting too.
He wondered which of them would blink first.