By the end of the first morning, Alyn Baratheon had decided that he hated the sea.
By the end of the first day, he had decided that he hated it more than he had ever hated anything in either of his lives, including Petyr Baelish, porridge without honey, and Maester Pycelle's lectures on the lineages of House Hightower.
By the second morning, he had stopped deciding things altogether and was simply hanging over the rail of the King's Hammer with his eyes shut, waiting to die.
"You'll find your sea legs," said Ser Barristan, appearing beside him with the calm of a man who had sailed through storms, wars, and three kings' worth of royal progresses without so much as a queasy moment. "Most men do, by the third day."
"And the ones who don't?"
The old knight considered. "They generally find the bottom of a bucket."
Alyn groaned and put his head back down on his arms.
It was the rocking that was the worst of it. Alyn had never understood, before, how a thing could be so endless. The King's Hammer was the largest ship in the royal fleet, a great black-hulled war galley with three hundred oars and a ram shaped like a stag's head, and he had been told before they sailed that she rode the water like a castle. He had believed it. He had stood on her deck in Blackwater Bay with the fleet spread out around them and the city glittering behind, and felt the wood solid under his boots, and thought, this will be nothing.
Then they had cleared the mouth of the bay, and the Narrow Sea had taken hold of them, and the castle had turned out to be a cork.
Up. Down. Up. Down. Sideways, for variety, when the wind shifted. A long, slow, sickening roll, and then the sharp little lurch at the bottom of it that made his stomach climb into his throat and his teeth clench. Day and night. Waking and sleeping. It never stopped. Even when he lay down in the narrow box of a cabin they had given him—the best on the ship, Your Grace, after the king's—he could feel it through the planks, rocking him like some monstrous cradle, and he would lie there staring at the beam six inches above his face and think about how much he wanted to be on solid ground.
And the smell.
Three hundred oarsmen. Two hundred soldiers. Sixty crew. Packed into a wooden hull like herrings in a barrel, in the heat of late summer, with nowhere to wash but buckets of seawater and nowhere to relieve themselves but over the side or in a pot. Tar and salt and sweat and wet wool, stale wine and old fish and the sour, unmistakable stink of men who had not bathed in days and did not intend to start. It lived in the wood. It lived in the air. It soaked into his clothes and his hair and the back of his throat, and by the second day he could taste it in everything he ate—which, admittedly, was not much.
He had a headache that would not leave. It sat behind his eyes like a nail and throbbed in time with the swell.
I am the heir to the Iron Throne, he thought, around the middle of the second afternoon, with his forehead pressed against the cool wood of the rail. I have a bath in my chambers the size of a pond. I have a woman whose only job is to bring me hot water. I have a man who rubs the knots out of my shoulders after training. I have cooks. I have a whole library. I have a bed.
He had grown used to all of it. More used to it than he had ever let himself admit. Somewhere between the toast over the kitchen sink in another world and the silver plates of this one, he had become a man who expected the water to be hot when he stepped into it, and the bread to be warm when he broke it, and the sheets to be clean when he lay down. He had become, he realised with some disgust, rather soft.
And now there was nothing. Salt pork and hard bread and watered wine that tasted of the barrel. A bucket of seawater to wash his face. A cabin like a coffin. And outside it, in every direction, the same grey-green, heaving, endless, fucking ocean.
He had brought books. Of course he had. A history of the Iron Islands, and a treatise on naval warfare, and the Citadel's records of the last long winter. He had opened the first one on the first afternoon, sitting on a coil of rope in the shade of the mainsail, and read half a page before the letters started sliding about on the paper in time with the swell. He had closed it, very carefully, and set it down, and leaned over the rail, and been sick.
He had not tried again. He was fairly sure that if he did, he would vomit all over the history of the Iron Islands, and while there was a certain poetry in that, he did not think the maesters would appreciate it.
His father, naturally, was having the time of his life.
Robert Baratheon strode the deck of the King's Hammer as if he had been born on it, bellowing at the oarmasters, drinking with the soldiers, hauling on ropes he had no business hauling just because he liked the feel of it. He did not get sick. He did not get headaches. He ate salt pork with every appearance of enjoyment and drank sour wine straight from the cask and slept like a dead man in his cabin, and every time he passed Alyn at the rail, he clapped him on the back and roared with laughter.
"Seven hells, boy, you're green as a Tyrell!"
"Thank you, Father."
"Your grandfather Steffon was the same, you know. Couldn't keep down so much as a cup of water past Massey's Hook." A pause, and something passed over his father's face, there and gone. Then he grinned again. "Don't worry. You'll live. Probably."
So, having no books and no bath and no appetite, and nothing to look at but the sea, Alyn did the only other thing there was to do on a ship.
He talked.
He did not mean to, at first. He was sitting on his coil of rope on the second evening, feeling marginally less wretched now that the sun had gone down and the wind had dropped, when one of the oarsmen came up from below to empty a bucket, and stopped, and stared at him.
"You're the prince," the man said. He was short and broad, with a brown face seamed like old leather and hands like spades.
"So they tell me."
"You look like shite, Your Grace."
Alyn laughed, despite himself. It hurt his head, but he laughed. "I feel like shite."
The oarsman grinned, showing three missing teeth. "First time out?"
"First time out."
"Ah." The man set down his bucket and squatted on his heels beside the rope, as if this were the most natural thing in the world—as if the heir to the Iron Throne were just another green lad on his first voyage. "It's the ginger you want. Maester's got some, if you ask him. Chew it, don't swallow. And keep your eyes on the horizon. Not the water. The water's what does you in."
His name was Ferret—or that was what everyone called him; Alyn never learned his real one—and he had been born in Flea Bottom and rowed in the royal fleet for twenty years. He had been at Fair Isle, under Stannis, when they broke the Iron Fleet. He had been at Pyke. He talked about both with the flat, unbothered matter-of-factness of a man describing a hard day's work, and when Alyn asked him questions, he answered them, and when Alyn asked more, he answered those too.
He told Alyn what an ironborn longship looked like from the bottom of a galley, coming at you out of the mist with her oars beating like the legs of a water-strider. He told him how the ironborn fought, boarding with axes and throwing-knives, going for the oarsmen first because a ship that could not row could not run. He told him what it smelled like when a ship burned with men still chained to her oars. He told him what bread cost in Flea Bottom these days, and how many children his sister had, and which of the king's taxes the smallfolk cursed and which they did not mind.
Alyn listened to all of it. And when Ferret finally went back below with his bucket, Alyn sat there in the dark for a long while, thinking.
He went and found the maester the next morning, and chewed his ginger, and kept his eyes on the horizon. It helped. Not much. But it helped.
And after that, he kept talking.
He talked to everyone.
He talked to the soldiers, who were stormlanders and crownlanders mostly, big rough men who had joined the king's household for the pay and the glory and stayed for the pay. At first they were stiff with him, all Your Grace and bowed heads. But Alyn was fourteen and six foot one and had put forty squires in the mud a moon ago, and every one of them had heard about it, and by the third time he sat down with them at their dice they had forgotten to be stiff. They taught him their games and took his coin and told him their stories, and he learned which lords paid their men on time and which did not, which knights were brave and which were only loud, which of the king's captains the men would follow into fire and which they would quietly let walk into it alone.
He talked to the crew. The sailmaker, an old Myrish man with no teeth and fingers so twisted by the work he could barely hold a cup, who told him about the Free Cities—the Titan of Braavos, the hanging gardens of Lys, the long bridge of Volantis where you could buy anything in the world if you had the coin. The sailmaker had sailed east once, as a boy, past the ruins of Old Valyria, where the sea still steamed and boiled in places and sailors who went too close never came back. He spoke of the red priests, too, the followers of R'hllor, who were growing in number in the Free Cities—more of them every year, he said, preaching in the squares, burning their fires night and day. Strange times, the old man said, and made a sign against evil, and Alyn felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind.
He talked to a Dornish archer from the Prince's Pass, lean and dark and sardonic, who had joined the royal fleet because, he said, there was nothing in the Prince's Pass but rocks and goats and sand, and he had tried all three and found them wanting. The Dornishman did not bow to him. He looked Alyn up and down with frank, cool curiosity and said, So you're the Usurper's son. Bigger than I expected. And then he told him, unasked, that there was not a man in Dorne who had forgotten what was done to Princess Elia and her children in the sack of King's Landing, and that the Martells had long memories, and that Alyn would do well to remember it, if he ever wanted Dorne to kneel to him for anything more than show.
Alyn remembered it. He thanked the man for his honesty, and the Dornishman looked faintly surprised.
He talked to a young northman from White Harbor, a sailor who had signed on to the royal fleet to see the south and was finding it, he said, much too hot. The northman talked about the Wall, which his uncle had seen, and the Night's Watch, which his cousin had joined—how few they were now, how thin they were spread, how many of the old castles along the Wall stood empty and crumbling with no one to man them. He talked about the wildlings, who raided across the Wall more every year. And when Alyn asked—carefully, casually, as though it were nothing—what the old people in the North said about the lands beyond, the northman laughed and said his grandmother used to frighten him to sleep with stories of the Others. Pale things in the snow, with eyes like blue stars, who came in the long night and could not be killed by steel. Just tales, he said, and shrugged.
Alyn said nothing. But that night he lay awake in his coffin of a cabin, rocking and rocking, and thought about blue stars in the snow for a very long time.
He talked to a crossbowman from Lannisport, a red-faced man with a scar across his jaw, who had lost his brother when the ironborn burned the Lannister fleet at its moorings. The man did not say much about it. He did not need to. When Alyn told him—as he was telling everyone, now, because there was no point keeping it secret—that they were not going to the Iron Islands to burn anything, but to bring the Greyjoy heir home, the crossbowman looked at him for a long, flat moment, and spat over the rail, and walked away.
Alyn let him go. He understood. He wondered how many men in this fleet felt the same, and resolved to find out.
It was strange, he thought, on the third afternoon, sitting on his coil of rope with a piece of ginger in his cheek and his eyes fixed on the horizon as Ferret had told him.
He had lived in the Red Keep his whole life. He had grown up among lords and knights and septons and maesters, among the great houses and their great quarrels. He had learned the name of every banner in the realm and the lineage of every house that bore one. He had thought he knew Westeros.
He had known nothing. Or rather, he had known the Westeros that the lords knew: a board of castles and houses and claims, to be moved about and fought over. He had not known the Westeros that rowed the galleys, and carried the spears, and paid the taxes, and died in the wars. He had not known what bread cost in Flea Bottom, or how many castles on the Wall stood empty, or how long a Dornishman's memory was, or how a Lannisport crossbowman felt about the ironborn. He had not known that the red priests were growing in the Free Cities, or that grandmothers in White Harbor still told stories about blue eyes in the snow.
He knew a little of it now. Three days, and a headache, and he knew a little.
Father knew this, he thought. That's why they love him. He's been one of them. He drank with them at the Trident and bled with them at Pyke. He knows what they think, because he's sat with them and listened.
I should do more of this.
Not on a ship, gods help me. But more of this.
"Land!"
The cry came from the masthead, high and thin against the wind, a little before sunset on the third day. Alyn's head came up so fast he nearly cracked it on the rail.
There. Off the starboard bow, low on the horizon, a dark shape rising out of the grey water. At first it was only a smudge, a darker line against the darkening sky. Then, as the King's Hammer came round and the sun caught it, it sharpened into something more: a jagged black island, crowned by a great mountain, with a thin plume of smoke trailing from its peak into the evening sky like a banner. And at the foot of the mountain, on the seaward side, a castle—huge and dark and strange, all towers and curves, built in shapes no mason in Westeros had ever made.
Dragonstone.
Alyn stared at it, and felt something in his chest unclench for the first time in three days.
Land. Solid land. Land that did not rock. And on it, a castle, and in the castle, surely—surely—a bath. A great deep tub of steaming water, hot enough to scald the salt and the stink out of his skin. And then a meal, a real one, hot from a kitchen, with meat that had not been pickled in brine and bread that did not need to be soaked before it could be chewed, brought to him by a smiling maid with clean hands. And then a bed. A real bed, wide and soft and warm, with clean linen and a feather mattress and a canopy above it, standing perfectly, gloriously, blessedly still.
He could see it all. He could almost smell the bathwater.
And then, slowly, as the island grew larger and the black walls of the castle rose out of the dusk, another thought crept in behind the first one, and settled there, and refused to leave.
He knew whose castle it was.
He thought of his uncle Stannis, lean and grim and humourless, grinding his teeth at the high table. Stannis, who was said to keep a household so spare and so dutiful that his own steward had once fainted from hunger. Stannis, who thought feasts were a waste of good coin and music a waste of good time, and who had, in all the years Alyn had known him, never once been seen to smile.
Somewhere under that smoking mountain, Alyn remembered, there was a fortune in dragonglass waiting to be dug out of the stone. He would have to think about that. He would have to think about it very carefully, and soon.
But not tonight. Tonight, he only wanted a bath.
He very much doubted the water would be hot.
Beside him at the rail, his father had appeared, cup in hand, grinning at the black island as it rose out of the sea. He followed Alyn's gaze, and seemed to read his thoughts with uncanny precision, and laughed.
"Don't get your hopes up, boy," said Robert Baratheon. "My brother's idea of a feast is boiled mutton and a sermon on thrift."
Alyn closed his eyes.
"Seven hells," he said.