Alyn Baratheon had spent twenty-six days at sea, and he had decided to think of it as a spiritual journey.
He had suffered, as the septons said all men must suffer. He had been stripped of every comfort and every vanity, every bath and every soft bed and every hot meal. He had been brought low—very low, frequently, over the rail. He had faced the void, which in this case was grey and wet and went on forever in every direction, and he had looked into it, and it had looked back, and then it had made him sick again.
He liked to think he had come out the other side of it enlightened. A wiser man. A humbler one. A prince who would never again take for granted a hot bath, or a steady floor, or bread that did not need to be soaked in wine before it would yield to his teeth.
He was full of shit, of course. He knew it. The moment he got home, he was going to sit in his bath until he pruned.
The truth was simpler. The truth was that it had been the most miserable month of his life, and the high points of it—the absolute peak of human joy aboard the King's Hammer—had been fishing off the stern with Ferret and two bored crossbowmen, and watching his father get drunk.
The fishing had been surprisingly good. Alyn had caught a tuna off the coast of Dorne nearly as long as he was tall, and the whole crew had cheered, and they had eaten it that night grilled on the deck with salt and the last of the lemons, and for one evening he had been almost happy.
His father had been entertainment of a different kind. Robert had stretched his last cask of Dragonstone wine as far as Starfall, which for Robert was an act of heroic restraint. Then they had put in at Oldtown to take on water, and the king had personally descended on the wine merchants of the Honeywine like a conquering army, and come back to the ship with eleven casks of Arbor gold and a Dornish red so strong it could strip paint. After that, the voyage had become considerably louder. Robert sang. Robert told stories. Robert challenged the ship's cook to a wrestling match and lost, and then challenged him again, and won, and declared him a knight of the realm on the spot, and then could not remember having done so in the morning. The cook was still insisting on being called ser. No one had the heart to tell him.
It had been funny, the first few times. By the third week, Alyn had begun to understand why his mother looked the way she did at feasts.
And now, at last, they were here.
He stood at the rail of the King's Hammer in the grey morning, with a fresh piece of ginger in his cheek out of sheer habit, and looked at the Iron Islands for the first time, and found that he had half a mind to just attack them. Not for any reason of state. Not for any plan. Just for the sheer, grinding misery of the voyage it had taken to reach them.
Twenty-six days, he thought, looking at the black rocks and the grey sea and the ugly little towers perched on top of them. Twenty-six days, for this?
Then he took a breath, and spat out the ginger, and reminded himself why he had come.
Pyke was uglier than he had imagined, and stranger, and grander all at once.
The castle did not so much sit on its island as cling to it. It had been built on a headland of black rock that thrust out into the sea, and over the centuries the sea had eaten through the headland and broken it into pieces, so that what remained was a scattering of stone stacks rising sheer out of the foam, each one crowned with a keep or a tower. Rope bridges swung between them in the wind, swaying and creaking, exactly as his father had described. The curtain wall across the neck of the headland still showed where it had been breached five years ago—a great ragged scar of newer stone, darker and cleaner than the rest, where the masons had filled the hole the trebuchets had made.
Above the gate, a tall iron spike stood empty against the sky.
Alyn looked at it for a long moment. Someone had taken Balon Greyjoy's head down, at some point. He wondered who. He wondered where they had put it.
The fleet came into the harbour at Lordsport in a great long line, ship after ship after ship—the black galleys of the royal fleet, Stannis's grim grey ships, the crimson and gold of Lannisport, and the wine-dark Redwyne galleys behind them, filling the harbour mouth and spilling out into the open sea beyond. The ironborn came down to the waterfront to watch. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Hard, weathered, silent men and women in salt-stained leather and roughspun, standing on the docks and the shingle and the rooftops of the little town, watching the fleet of the Iron Throne come in.
No one cheered. No one jeered. No one said anything at all.
Alyn had expected hatred. What he saw on those faces was something harder to read. A flat, watchful, wary stillness, like the stillness of a dog that has been beaten once and is waiting to see whether it will be beaten again.
They remember, he thought. Every one of them remembers.
Behind him, his father had come up from below, armoured and cloaked, his hammer slung across his back. Robert looked out at the silent crowds on the shore, and the empty spike above the gate, and grinned.
"Ah," said the king. "Home sweet home."
Lord Rodrik Harlaw met them in the great hall of Pyke, beneath a ceiling of black beams carved with krakens, and Alyn liked him at once.
He was an old man, or nearly—tall and spare and grey, with a long grey face and a neat grey beard and a pair of spectacles of Myrish glass perched on his nose. He wore plain grey wool and a heavy chain of iron round his neck as the badge of his regency, and his hands were ink-stained. He looked, Alyn thought, less like the lord of the Iron Islands than like a maester who had wandered into the wrong castle and been too polite to leave.
But his eyes behind the spectacles were sharp, and tired, and kind, and they missed nothing.
"Your Grace," he said to Robert, and bowed. "Your Grace," to Alyn, and bowed again. And then he looked past them both, at the lean, dark, hard-faced boy standing a pace behind the prince, and something in his long grey face softened. "Theon."
"Uncle," said Theon Greyjoy.
Harlaw looked at him for a long moment. Alyn saw his eyes move over the cropped hair, the hard mouth, the soldier's stance, the sword at his hip. He saw him take in the boy who was not the boy he remembered—the frightened little hostage who had been carried off to Dragonstone in chains five years ago—and try, visibly, to fit the one onto the other.
"You've grown," Harlaw said at last, quietly.
"Yes, Uncle."
"Your mother asks after you. Every day. She's at Ten Towers. She's—" He stopped, and adjusted his spectacles. "She's not well, Theon. She hasn't been well since your brothers. But she asks for you. Every day."
Something moved in Theon's face then. Alyn saw it. A crack in the iron, quick and deep, there and gone. The boy's jaw tightened.
"I will go to her," Theon said. "When this is done."
Harlaw nodded slowly. Then he turned back to Alyn and Robert, and was the regent again.
"Your letter came," he said. "I have read it a great many times. Shall we sit? I think there is a great deal we should discuss, before the captains come."
They talked for most of the afternoon, in Harlaw's solar, which was cluttered with books in a way that made Alyn feel briefly and violently homesick.
Harlaw was not a fool. He had governed the islands for five years under the king's peace, and he knew precisely how thin that peace was. He knew about the captains meeting in the dark. He knew about the priests on the beaches. He knew about the knife that had been meant for him—he had found two of the men who were to wield it, a fortnight ago, and hanged them from the walls of Ten Towers. He knew about the black ship off Old Wyk.
"It hasn't been seen since your fleet was sighted off the Arbor," he said. "Two weeks now. Not a sail, not a whisper. My sister's good-brother Euron is a great many things, Your Grace, but he is not stupid. He has no wish to meet three hundred ships with one."
Alyn felt something in his shoulders loosen that he had not known was tight.
He had been dreading it. For the whole of the voyage, lying awake in his coffin of a cabin, he had been picturing it: the great hall of Pyke, the captains gathered, his father at his back with his hammer, and Euron Greyjoy walking through the doors with that smiling eye. He had pictured Euron saying something—some soft, poisonous, mocking thing—and his father's face going dark, and the hammer coming off his back, and the whole of his careful plan going up in flames in the space of a heartbeat.
His father and the Crow's Eye in the same room. There was no faster way to start a war that Alyn could imagine.
Euron was not coming. Alyn did not trust it. He did not like what it might mean that the man was out there somewhere, unseen, watching from the dark. But for today—just for today—he would take it.
Then he laid out the plan, and Harlaw listened, and when Alyn was done the old man sat back in his chair and took off his spectacles and polished them slowly on his sleeve.
"It might work," he said at last. "It might. The islands are divided already, Your Grace. They always are. There are men who want the old way back, the reaving and the raiding, and men who have buried too many sons to want anything but peace. Men who loved Balon and men who hated him. Men who would follow Euron into the sea and men who would sooner drown." He put his spectacles back on. "The question is whether there are enough of the second kind to stand up and say so. Whether the boy can give them a reason to."
"Can he?"
Harlaw looked across the room, to where Theon stood by the window, looking out at the grey sea with his hands clasped behind his back, exactly as Stannis had stood at the Painted Table.
"I don't know," said the regent. "But I find I very much want to see him try."
The captains came at dusk.
They came from every island—Pyke and Great Wyk and Old Wyk, Harlaw and Saltcliffe and Blacktyde and Orkmont, and all the little rocks in between. Lords and captains and reavers, fifty of them, sixty, more, crowding into the great hall of Pyke beneath its carved krakens. They were hard men, most of them, and they did not trouble to hide what they thought of the green-landers sitting at the high table. They came in salt-stained leather and old mail, with axes and dirks at their belts, and they stood in a great half-circle in the hall and looked up at the king of the Seven Kingdoms and his son, and the silence was like a held breath.
Alyn knew some of them by name, from Stannis's lessons at the Painted Table. There was Lord Baelor Blacktyde, slim and grave, who was said to be the most pious man in the islands and had knelt early at Pyke. There was Lord Gorold Goodbrother of Hammerhorn, broad and grey and wary, with a cluster of sons at his back. There was Lord Dunstan Drumm of Old Wyk, old and proud and hard as a sword, who had lost two sons in the breach and had never forgiven anyone for it.
And standing a little apart from the rest, against a pillar near the hearth, there was a young woman in a sea-stained leather jerkin with an axe on her hip and her arms folded across her chest, who looked at Theon with an expression Alyn could not read at all.
Yara Greyjoy. Theon's sister.
Alyn watched her watching her brother, and wondered what she was thinking, and could not tell.
Behind him, his father stood. Robert did not sit. He had told Alyn on the ship that he would not, and he did not. He stood a pace behind his son's chair in full plate, his great antlered helm under his arm and his warhammer resting on the floor before him, both hands folded on the haft. He did not speak. He did not move. He simply stood there, huge and black-bearded and silent, looking out at the ironborn captains with an expression of mild, pleasant interest—the expression of a man who has broken their gate once and would quite enjoy breaking it again.
It was, Alyn thought, the most terrifying thing he had ever seen his father do.
Lord Harlaw rose, and spoke the formalities, and sat down again. And then it was Alyn's turn.
He stood.
He did not make a speech. He had thought about making one, on the ship. He had written it out, and rewritten it, and polished it until it shone. And then he had remembered a lean, dark boy on the battlements of Dragonstone telling him that his letter was imprecise—that the ironborn did not understand courtly hints. That they understood iron.
So he threw the speech away.
"I'm Alyn Baratheon," he said. "My father is the king. I've come to give you back your lord."
He put his hand on Theon's shoulder, and Theon stepped forward.
"This is Theon Greyjoy," said Alyn. "Balon's son. Balon's heir. By your law and ours. The Iron Throne recognises him as the rightful Lord of the Iron Islands and heir to the Seastone Chair. Lord Harlaw will rule as regent until he comes of age. When he does, the chair is his."
A murmur ran through the hall, low and dangerous, like the sea against rocks.
"The Iron Throne will stand behind him," Alyn went on. "Until the day he comes of age, any man who calls a kingsmoot will be a rebel. Any man who lays a hand on him will be a rebel. Any man who lays a hand on Lord Harlaw will be a rebel." He paused. He let them feel the weight of it. "And if Lord Theon dies before his majority—if he drowns, or falls, or takes a fever, or is found with a knife in his back—then I will come back. With my father. With every ship in the realm. And I will burn your villages, and your harbours, and your longships on your beaches, every one, from Lordsport to the Lonely Light. I will not leave enough of the Iron Islands for a gull to land on."
He let that sit in the silence for a moment.
"That isn't a threat," he said. "I'm telling you what will happen. So that no one can say afterwards that they didn't know."
For a moment, no one moved.
Then Lord Dunstan Drumm stepped forward out of the half-circle.
He was old—sixty at least—but he moved like a much younger man, and his hand was on the hilt of the great old sword at his hip. His face was dark with fury. Behind him, half a dozen of his captains shifted, and Alyn heard the faint, unmistakable scrape of steel loosening in scabbards.
"The ironborn choose their kings," said Drumm. His voice was a growl, like rocks grinding in surf. "We have done since the Grey King. Not the greenlanders. Not the stags. We choose. And you would have us bend the knee to this—" he flung a hand at Theon "—this pet? This stag's whelp, raised on a greenlander's rock, sent back to us wearing a greenlander's leash? You'd have us—"
Behind Alyn, his father lifted the hammer an inch off the floor.
It was all he did. He did not speak. He did not step forward. He simply lifted the hammer an inch, and let it hang there, and looked at Lord Dunstan Drumm with an expression of mild, pleasant interest.
The hall went very quiet.
And into that quiet, before Drumm could say another word, Theon Greyjoy spoke.
"You lost two sons at the breach," he said. "Denys and Donnel. I remember them. Denys taught me to throw a knife when I was six."
Drumm's face changed.
"I am not a pet," Theon said. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. It carried through the hall like the cold edge of a blade. "I was taken from my father's hall in chains, as a boy, and sent to live among strangers. I did not choose it. I did not weep about it. I learned what they had to teach me, and I learned it well, and now I am home. I can sail better than half the captains in this hall. I can fight better than most. I know the law of the islands better than any priest on the beaches." His dark eyes moved over the captains, one by one. "I am Balon's blood. I am the last of his sons. And I did not come back to bend the knee to anyone. I came back to rule."
He turned, and looked straight at Drumm.
"If you would have a kingsmoot, my lord, wait until I am grown. Then stand against me on Old Wyk, before the bones of Nagga, and let the captains choose. I will be there. I will not hide." His mouth tightened. "But if you would have me dead before then—if you would have a knife in my back in the dark, because you are afraid to face me in the light—then you are not ironborn. You are only a coward. And everyone in this hall will know it."
The silence stretched.
Then, from the far side of the hall, Lord Baelor Blacktyde stepped forward.
"The boy speaks the law," he said quietly. "A kingsmoot is for an empty chair. The chair is not empty. Balon has a son." He looked at Drumm, steadily. "And the Drowned God does not love kinslayers, Dunstan. Nor cowards."
A murmur ran round the hall again. But it was different this time. Alyn heard it change. Heard it fracture. Some of the captains were nodding—Goodbrother, slowly, grudgingly, his sons muttering behind him. The Harlaws, of course. A dozen others whose names Alyn did not know, men with grey in their beards and old scars and the tired, wary look of those who had buried too many sons. And some were not nodding. Some were looking at Drumm, and at each other, and at the king with the hammer, and saying nothing at all.
But it was enough. Alyn could feel it. It was not a victory. It was not even close to one. But it was enough.
Lord Dunstan Drumm stood in the middle of the hall for a long moment, his hand still on his sword. Then, slowly, he took it away. He looked at Theon—a long, hard, searching look—and then he spat on the floor at the boy's feet, turned on his heel, and walked back to his place in the half-circle.
He did not leave. That was the thing Alyn noticed. He did not walk out of the hall. He stayed.
Behind Alyn, his father lowered his hammer back to the floor with a small, soft, regretful thunk.
It went on a while longer after that. Lord Harlaw spoke. Oaths were sworn—not to Theon, not yet, but to the king's peace and to the regency, which was something. Some of the captains came forward afterwards and spoke to Theon in low voices, and some of them did not. A few spoke to Alyn. Most did not.
And at the very end, when the hall was emptying and the torches were burning low, Yara Greyjoy pushed herself off her pillar and walked over to her brother.
She looked him up and down. The cropped hair. The hard face. The greenlander's sword.
"Welcome home, little brother," she said. Her voice was dry as old salt. "Try not to die."
And she walked out of the hall before he could answer.
Theon looked after her for a long moment. Then he turned to Alyn, and inclined his head—a short, sharp, correct bow, exactly the right depth.
"Your Grace," he said. "Thank you."
"You did the hard part."
"No." Theon's mouth twitched—and it was, Alyn realised with some astonishment, very nearly a smile. "The hard part is the next four years. But you gave me the chance to try. I will not forget it."
They stayed three days. Theon went to Ten Towers to see his mother. Robert drank with Lord Goodbrother and lost a wrestling match to one of his sons, and then won one, and declared him a knight, and then forgot. Alyn walked the walls of Pyke, and looked at the empty spike above the gate, and thought about Euron Greyjoy somewhere out on the grey sea, and wondered what he would do now.
He did not know. That was the trouble with men like Euron. You could never know.
But the thing was done. Theon was home, and alive, and the islands were split down the middle, and the crown had four years to work with. It would have to be enough.
And on the morning of the fourth day, Alyn Baratheon climbed back aboard the King's Hammer, and felt the deck shift beneath his boots, and the familiar sour smell of tar and salt and unwashed men rose up around him like an old enemy greeting him at the gate, and his stomach turned over in a long, slow, sickening roll.
Twenty-six days. Twenty-six fucking days, all the way back.
By the end of the first afternoon, he was hanging over the rail again. By the end of the first week, he had won eleven silver stags at dice off the crossbowmen and lost fourteen. By the end of the second, he had learned three songs so filthy that he could never sing any of them within a mile of his mother, and had sung all three, loudly, at the top of his lungs, with Ferret and the cook who thought he was a knight.
And somewhere around the coast of Dorne, lying on his back on the deck under a sky full of stars with a cup of his father's terrible Dornish red in his hand, he finally understood something that had puzzled him all his life.
He had always wondered why sailors were the way they were. Why pirates and reavers and the crews of trading cogs were such drunkards and brawlers and gamblers and liars, such loud, foul-mouthed, godless degenerates, every one.
Now he knew.
It was because there was absolutely nothing else to do in the middle of the fucking sea.