The bath was lukewarm.
Not cold, Alyn told himself, sinking into it. Not cold. That was something. It was drawn in a great tub of black stone, carved in the likeness of a coiled dragon, so old and so strange that it might have been made for one of the Targaryen kings themselves. The water came up to his chest and lay there, tepid and faintly grey, smelling of salt and of the sulphur that seemed to seep up out of every crack in Dragonstone's walls. Steam rose off it, a little. Not much. Enough to be called steam if one was generous.
Alyn was feeling very generous.
The maid who brought the water was a stout, grey-haired woman of fifty or more, with arms like a blacksmith's and a face like a disapproving potato. She looked at the heir to the Iron Throne lying in her lord's bathtub with exactly the same expression she would have given a muddy dog, and then rolled up her sleeves and went at him with a scrubbing brush and a cake of hard yellow soap as though he were a pot that had been left to burn.
"Salt," she said disapprovingly, holding up his arm and examining it. "Salt everywhere. Doesn't anyone wash on those ships?"
"Not really, no."
"Hmph." She scrubbed harder. "Head forward."
He put his head forward. She dumped a bucket over it. He came up spluttering, and for one dizzy, homesick moment he could have sworn he was back in the Red Keep with Celia standing over him, scolding him about his fingernails.
The food, when it came, was fish stew. It was thick and plain and peppered and a little too salty, with chunks of white fish and onion and turnip floating in it, and a loaf of brown bread to sop it up, and a single cup of thin, sour red wine. There was no honey. There were no lemon cakes. There was no second helping, until he asked for one, and then the stout woman brought it with a look that suggested she would be telling Lord Stannis about it in the morning.
It was, without question, the finest meal Alyn had ever eaten in his life.
And the bed—
The bed was narrow and hard, a straw mattress on a frame of black oak, with a single woollen blanket and a bolster stuffed with something that crackled when he moved. The room was cold, and the window let in a draught that smelled of the sea and the smoke from the mountain. The walls were bare stone, carved here and there into the shapes of small, snarling dragons that seemed to watch him from the corners.
None of it mattered. The bed did not rock. The floor did not roll. The walls did not creak and groan and sway. Alyn lay down on the hard straw mattress, and pulled the scratchy blanket up to his chin, and felt the whole vast, solid, motionless weight of the island beneath him.
He was asleep before he could finish the thought.
His uncle Stannis was waiting for him in the morning, in the Chamber of the Painted Table.
Alyn had heard of it all his life and never seen it. It sat at the top of the Stone Drum, the great central keep of Dragonstone, a round room with four tall windows facing the four quarters of the world. And in the centre of it, filling nearly the whole floor, stood a table—fifty feet long, carved from a single slab of wood and painted with the whole of Westeros as it had been in the days of Aegon the Conqueror. Every mountain and river and castle, every forest and bay, every city and road and border, laid out in faded colour beneath a sheen of old varnish. Aegon had planned his conquest at this table. He had stood where Alyn now stood and looked down at the Seven Kingdoms and decided to take them.
Stannis Baratheon stood at the far end of it, looking down at the Iron Islands with his hands clasped behind his back.
He was thinner than Alyn remembered, if that were possible. A tall, lean, hard man, all bone and sinew, with the Baratheon black hair already thinning and receding from his temples and a close-cropped beard that did nothing to soften the hard line of his jaw. He wore plain dark wool, unadorned, without so much as a brooch. When Alyn came in, he looked up, and his jaw tightened, and Alyn heard—actually heard—the faint grinding of his teeth.
"Nephew," said Stannis.
"Uncle." Alyn bowed. "Thank you for your hospitality."
"There was little enough of it." Stannis's eyes moved over him—up, mostly, since Alyn was now a good four inches taller than him. "You slept?"
"Like the dead."
"Good. You will need it." He looked back down at the table. "Your father is still abed. He drank until the small hours with my castellan, and my castellan is now useless. I would have the two of us speak before he wakes."
They spoke for two hours.
Alyn had always found his uncle Stannis hard to read. Most of the court thought him cold and dull and humourless—a man without warmth, without wit, without any of the easy charm that made men love his brothers. He ground his teeth. He frowned. He did not drink, did not gamble, did not whore, did not laugh. His wife was plain and pious, and his only child, a little girl named Shireen, had survived the greyscale as a babe and been left with half her face stiffened and cracked like old stone.
The court pitied Shireen and mocked Stannis. Alyn had done neither. He had read the stranger's story, and he knew what this man would become in it.
A king. A claimant. A man who had believed himself the rightful heir to the Iron Throne the moment he learned his brother's children were bastards, and had pursued that claim with a terrible, grinding, iron-hard certainty through war and fire and sorcery—even to the burning of his own daughter. He had become a man who would do anything, sacrifice anything, because the law said the throne was his and the law did not bend.
And the thing that had made it possible—the thing that had turned that dour, dutiful man into something darker—had been a woman. A red woman, with a ruby at her throat and a god of fire whispering in her ear. A priestess of R'hllor, who had come to Dragonstone and found a man with a claim and a grievance and no other way to reach his crown, and offered him one.
Will she still come?
Alyn had been watching for it since they made port. There was a sept in the castle, small and cold, with the Seven carved in old stone. His aunt Selyse had been praying there when they arrived—to the Mother, by the look of it, with her plain face pressed against her clasped hands. No braziers. No red. No woman with a ruby at her throat. He had asked, casually, at the stew last night, whether there were any foreign priests on Dragonstone, and the stout maid had looked at him as though he were mad and said they had a septon and he was quite enough, thank you.
He did not think the red woman would find what she needed here. Not now. Not in this world.
The Stannis of the stranger's story had been a man with a claim. This Stannis had none. His brother was alive, strong, and on the throne. His brother's heir was trueborn and standing in front of him, and there were three more behind that one, every one of them black-haired as a crow. There was no secret to uncover, no bastardy to expose, no hole in the succession for a desperate man to crawl through. Stannis Baratheon was fifth in line for the Iron Throne, and would only fall further as Alyn's siblings grew and wed and had children of their own.
And Stannis did not care. Or if he did, he did not show it. He was the king's brother, and the king's admiral, and the master of ships on the small council, and the lord of Dragonstone, and he was loyal to all of it the way a stone is loyal to the hill it sits on. He did not love his brother. Alyn did not think he even liked him much. But Robert was the king, and the king was the law, and Stannis Baratheon did not break the law.
A man like that did not need a red god. He had one already. It was called duty.
Still, Alyn thought, remembering the Myrish sailmaker and his talk of red priests multiplying in the Free Cities. Still. I'll keep an eye open.
They talked about the Iron Islands. Stannis knew them better than any man in the realm save the ironborn themselves—he had broken their fleet at Fair Isle and blockaded their harbours for half a year. He bent over the painted table and showed Alyn where the great lords held their seats, and where the reefs and the currents lay, and which harbours could take a war galley and which would tear her hull open on the rocks. He told him which captains had fought at Pyke and which had knelt early. He named a dozen men who might stand with Theon and two dozen who would not.
Then Alyn told him the plan.
He had expected disapproval. Stannis disapproved of most things. He had expected, at the very least, the grinding of teeth. But his uncle listened in silence, his eyes on the painted islands, his jaw working slowly, and when Alyn had finished he was quiet a long while.
"It is just," Stannis said at last.
Alyn blinked. "Uncle?"
"The boy is Balon's heir. By law. By the law of the Iron Throne and the custom of the islands both. He was not attainted with his father; the king saw to that. He has done no wrong. He is entitled to his seat, when he comes of age." Stannis's jaw tightened. "Your father would have burned the islands to the waterline. I would have advised against it, and he would not have listened. He never listens. This is lawful. This is right." He looked at Alyn, and there was something in his face that Alyn had never seen there before—something that, in any other man, might almost have been approval. "It is also clever. I did not expect clever. Robert has never once in his life been clever."
"Thank you, Uncle."
"I did not say it to please you." Stannis turned back to the table. "You should meet him. Before your father wakes and makes a noise about it. He is in the yard."
Theon Greyjoy was in the yard, and he was drilling.
He was alone, in the cold grey light of the morning, with the sea wind whipping in off the water and the mountain smoking overhead. He wore a plain grey tunic and breeches and a leather jerkin, and he had a longsword in his hands—a real one, not a practice blade—and he was going through a sequence of cuts and guards and parries with the slow, precise, relentless repetition of a man who had done it ten thousand times and intended to do it ten thousand more.
He was fourteen, Alyn knew. Of an age with him. He looked older.
He was lean and dark, with the narrow Greyjoy face and the black Greyjoy hair—cut short, cropped close to the skull like a soldier's, without a trace of the long perfumed locks the stranger's Theon had worn. He had a hard, straight mouth that looked as though it had never once in its life been arranged into a smirk. His eyes were dark and cold and focused, and they did not leave the point of his sword.
He did not look up when they came into the yard. He finished the sequence. He held the final guard for a count of three. Then he lowered the sword, and turned, and bowed to Stannis—a short, sharp, correct bow, exactly the right depth.
"My lord."
"Theon. This is Prince Alyn. The king's heir."
The dark eyes moved to Alyn. They took him in—all six foot one of him, the size and the shoulders and the Baratheon hair—without any visible reaction at all. Then Theon Greyjoy bowed again, exactly as deeply as he had bowed to Stannis, and not a hair deeper.
"Your Grace."
"Lord Theon," said Alyn. "I've come to take you home."
"So I am told." Theon straightened. "Lord Stannis showed me your letter."
"And?"
"It was imprecise."
Alyn stared at him.
"The final paragraph," Theon said. "The threat. Ships may be lost. Villages may suffer mysterious accidents. You meant it as a warning, I suppose. A jest. The ironborn will not read it as a jest. They will read it as weakness." His mouth tightened, very slightly. "If you mean to burn their villages should I die, Your Grace, you should say so. Plainly. In those words. Ironborn do not understand courtly hints. They understand iron."
Behind him, Alyn heard a sound he had never heard before in his life. It took him a moment to place it. It was Stannis Baratheon, making a short, harsh noise through his nose that might—in the right light, by a very generous observer—have been mistaken for a laugh.
"I have told him," said Stannis, "that he should not speak to princes so."
"And I have told you, my lord, that I will not lie to the men who mean to keep me alive." Theon turned back to Alyn. "Do you mean to burn their villages, Your Grace?"
Alyn looked at him. At the hard young face, and the cold dark eyes, and the sword held perfectly level at his side.
"If they murder you," he said, "yes."
Theon nodded once. "Good. Then say that."
They talked for an hour, walking the battlements in the wind, while Stannis went to see whether his brother had woken. And with every word, Alyn found himself more astonished.
Stannis had made him. There was no other way to say it. Five years on Dragonstone, under that grim grey man and his grim grey rules, and Theon Greyjoy had become a smaller, younger, sharper copy of his guardian. He did not drink. He did not gamble. He rose before dawn and trained until he could not lift his arms, and studied his letters and his histories and his law until the candles burned out. He was honest to the point of insult and dutiful to the point of madness. He did not seem to know what a jest was, and when Alyn tried one on him, he looked at him with the faint, patient puzzlement of a man waiting for the punchline to make sense.
I thought I'd never meet a harder man than my uncle, Alyn thought. And here's one who's still growing.
But it was not only Stannis. That was the other thing. That was the thing that gave him hope.
Stannis was a sailor. The finest admiral in the realm. And he had not, it seemed, kept that from his ward. Theon could sail. He had been out on the Narrow Sea in every kind of boat since he was nine years old—fishing smacks, cogs, war galleys. He had stood a watch on Stannis's flagship through a winter gale. He could read the stars and the currents and the colour of the water, could tie every knot and name every line, could take a small boat out alone from Dragonstone's harbour and bring her back through the rocks in the dark. Stannis had let him, and let him, and let him again. And every morning, before he drilled, he went down to the shingle below the castle and swam in the sea—in summer and in winter, in fair weather and foul, out past the breakers and back.
"Why?" Alyn asked.
Theon looked out over the grey water for a long moment.
"Because I am ironborn," he said. "Lord Stannis has taught me the law, and the sword, and the sea. He has made me a man. I am grateful. But he has not made me a Baratheon, and I would not have let him if he'd tried." His jaw set. "My father's people will look at me and see a greenlander. I know that. They will call me a hostage and a stag's pet and worse. Let them. I can sail better than half of them and fight better than most, and I know the law better than any priest on the islands. And I am Balon's son. By blood. By right." He turned and looked at Alyn, and his eyes were very hard. "They will try to kill me."
"Yes."
"Good," said Theon Greyjoy. "Then I will know who they are."
And Alyn, looking at him, felt something unclench in his chest that had been clenched for weeks.
He might win, he thought. He might actually win.
He had been afraid—more afraid than he had admitted to anyone—that he was sending a boy home to die. That his clever plan to split the ironborn would end with a child's body washed up on a beach at Pyke, and the islands in flames anyway, and the blood of Balon's last son on his own hands. He had told himself it was worth it. He had told himself it would buy time.
But this boy would not die easily. And if he lived to his majority—if he spent four years on the Iron Islands sailing and fighting and swimming in their cold sea and quoting their law back at their priests—then when the captains gathered on Old Wyk to choose their king, they might look at Balon's son, and not see a greenlander at all.
They might see a kraken.
They stayed one day on Dragonstone, and it was not enough.
Alyn spent most of it in a happy daze of stillness. He ate two more bowls of fish stew. He took another lukewarm bath. He met his cousin Shireen in a corridor—a shy, plain little girl of ten who flinched when he came round the corner, and turned the grey, stony side of her face away from him, and tried to curtsey and fled. He called after her that he liked her doll, which was true; it was a knight in black armour, very well carved. She stopped at the end of the corridor and looked back at him in astonishment. Later, at supper, he caught his uncle Stannis watching him across the table with that strange, unreadable expression again.
His father woke at noon, bellowing for wine, and discovered that his brother's castle held exactly four casks of it. He spent the afternoon roaring about this to anyone who would listen. Stannis ground his teeth so hard Alyn feared for his jaw.
And all the while, below them in the harbour, the fleet took on water and supplies. Salt pork. Hard bread. Barrels of pickled fish. Casks of watered wine. Ginger, at Alyn's very particular request, in a quantity that made the quartermaster raise his eyebrows.
The Iron Islands lay on the far side of the realm. There was no short way there. They would sail south from Dragonstone down the Narrow Sea, past the Stepstones and their pirates, around the long, sun-scorched coast of Dorne, past Oldtown and the Arbor and the mouth of the Mander, and up the whole of the western coast of Westeros to Pyke. Three weeks, the captains said, if the winds were kind. Four if they were not.
Four weeks.
Four weeks of rocking. Four weeks of stench. Four weeks of salt pork and hard bread and that same grey, heaving, endless ocean, and a cabin like a coffin, and a headache like a nail behind his eyes.
He stood on the battlements on the last evening and looked down at the fleet riding at anchor in the harbour, hundreds of ships, their lanterns glowing in the dusk like a floating city. Somewhere down there, Theon Greyjoy was already aboard, checking the lashings on his sea chest, no doubt, with grim, dutiful precision.
His father came up beside him with a cup—his last cup, he had announced, until they could buy more in Oldtown—and followed his gaze.
"You look like a man going to his own execution," said Robert.
"I'd rather be."
"Ha! It's only a month."
"It's only a month," Alyn said, and closed his eyes. "Father, I swear by all the Seven, I would rather fight a dragon."
His father laughed so hard he spilled the last of his wine over the battlements, and then looked down at the empty cup in horror, and then laughed even harder.
Below, in the harbour, the tide was turning.