The flames had been speaking to Melisandre of Asshai for three weeks, and for three weeks they had refused to say what she wanted them to say.
She had been ready. That was what galled her. She had spent the better part of a year preparing—in the great red temple of Volantis, among the thousand priests and the Fiery Hand, kneeling before the night fires with the High Priest Benerro at her side. She had seen it so clearly, once. A man in the flames. A hard, grim, lean man with a close-cropped beard and a jaw like a clenched fist, standing on a black island beneath a smoking mountain, with a crown of red gold on his brow and a burning sword in his hand. A king who was not yet a king. A man of law and iron, who believed in nothing, and who would believe in R'hllor, if she brought the god to him.
Stannis Baratheon. Lord of Dragonstone. She had known his name for a year. She had seen his face in the fire a hundred times.
She had booked her passage. She had packed her few belongings. She had been three days from sailing for Westeros when she knelt before the flames one last time, to ask the Lord of Light for his blessing on the voyage, and looked into the fire for the face she knew—
—and it was not there.
She did not understand it, at first. She thought she had made some error. Grown tired, perhaps, or proud, and let the god's gift slip through her fingers. She fasted for two days and prayed for three. She burned sweet cedar and dried roses and her own blood on the coals. She went back to the fires, and she looked again.
And again, the flames showed her Westeros. And again, the man was not there.
There was something else in his place.
A stag.
A great black stag, standing alone on a hill of ash beneath a red and burning sky. It was huge—vaster than any beast that ever walked the earth, so vast that the hills seemed to shrink beneath its hooves and the castles of the Seven Kingdoms to crouch like toys in its shadow. Its hide was black as a moonless night. Its eyes were green. And its antlers rose from its brow like the branches of a great dead tree, spreading out against the burning sky in a crown so wide it seemed to hold up the heavens.
And from that crown of antlers, slowly, endlessly, there fell blood.
Not a trickle. Not a drop. It ran from every tine and every branch, crimson and bright, pouring down the stag's black face and its black neck and its black shoulders and pooling at its feet on the ash. Rivers of it. Oceans. It should have been a dying thing, a beast bled white. But it did not die. It did not even stagger. It stood there on its hill of ash with blood pouring from its crown, and it lifted its great head, and it looked at her.
Not at the fire. At her.
Melisandre had looked into the flames ten thousand times. She had seen kings and kingdoms, battles and births and burnings. She had seen the Great Other stirring in the frozen dark beyond the edge of the world. Nothing in all those visions had ever looked back.
She had jerked away from the fire so fast she fell, and lay on the cold stone floor of the temple, breathing hard, her ruby throbbing at her throat like a second heart.
She went back to the fires every night for a week. Every night, she asked for Stannis. And every night, the flames showed her Westeros, and every night, the black stag was there.
Sometimes it stood on its hill. Sometimes it ran, through forests of burning trees, through snow, through a great dark that swallowed even the fire. Sometimes there were other stags beside it, smaller ones, three of them, half-hidden in its shadow. Once there was a lion at its side, golden and old and terrible. Once there was a rose twined through its antlers, green and gold amid the blood.
But always, always, there was the crown of antlers, and the blood falling from it. And always, at the end, the stag would turn its great head and look at her with its green eyes, and she would wrench herself away from the flames, shaking.
She did not know what it was. She did not know if it was a warning, or a promise, or an enemy, or a sign. She did not know if it was of R'hllor at all. The Great Other had his own servants, and his own sorceries, and his own ways of clouding the fires.
She only knew that the man she had been seeking was no longer there. Something had taken his place. Something that filled the whole of Westeros, and would not let her see past it.
And then, on the twentieth night, the fires showed her something else.
It came without warning, as the god's truest visions always did. She had been kneeling before the night fire in the great temple, as she had every night for three weeks, half dreading the black stag—and the flames leapt up and roared and turned white-gold, so bright it hurt to look, and in the heart of that brightness she saw them.
Two of them. A man and a girl. Silver hair streaming in a wind of fire. Purple eyes. The blood of Old Valyria, unmistakable, the blood of the dragonlords who had once made the world tremble.
They were wreathed in flame. Not burning. Wreathed. The fire wrapped them like cloaks, like crowns, like the arms of a lover, and it did not harm them, and they did not fear it.
And they were riding.
Beneath each of them, something vast. Something with wings like the sails of a great ship, and scales that shone like molten metal in the furnace light, and a long, sinuous neck, and jaws that opened on a fire brighter than the sun. Melisandre saw the wings beat, once, and felt the wind of it in the temple, though the air inside was still.
Dragons.
She had heard all her life that the dragons were dead. That the last of them had died in Westeros a century and a half ago, small and sickly and stunted, and that the line of the dragonlords had dwindled to madness and ruin, and that the age of fire was over. She had believed it, as everyone believed it.
She did not believe it now.
The vision changed. The two siblings were gone, and in their place she saw three stones, round and smooth and patterned with scales—one black and red, one green and bronze, one cream and gold. She saw them in a great pyre, heaped with wood and oil and spices. She saw a body on the pyre, and blood on the stones, and a life given for a life. A sacrifice, to R'hllor. And she saw the stones crack, one by one, in the heart of the flames, and heard a sound like the first cry of something newborn, high and thin and terrible.
The blood of the dragon could wake the dragon's eggs. That was what the god was telling her. The blood of the dragon, and fire, and death, and the Lord of Light.
And then the flames showed her the girl again. Alone, this time. Standing in the heart of a great burning, untouched by it, unburnt, with three living dragons coiled about her—and she blazed. She shone like the sun at midday, so brightly that Melisandre had to shield her eyes, and in that blinding light she heard a voice that was not a voice, speaking a name she had waited all her life to hear.
Azor Ahai. The prince that was promised. Born amidst salt and smoke, beneath a bleeding star.
Not a prince. A princess.
Melisandre fell forward onto her hands on the cold stone floor of the temple and wept with joy.
The temple helped her. Of course it did. Benerro himself gave her his blessing, and the Fiery Hand gave her an escort to the edge of the Disputed Lands, and the priests of the lesser temples between Volantis and Pentos gave her food and shelter and whatever whispers had reached them. And the fires guided her the rest of the way, as they always had, night by night. A magister's manse on the shore of the bay of Pentos. A great house of pale stone and coloured glass, with a fat and smiling master, and a garden full of fountains, and two silver-haired children kept in it like birds in a gilded cage.
She went to the gate first, as was proper. She went in her red robes, with her ruby at her throat and her copper hair loose down her back, and she asked politely to speak with the Prince Viserys and the Princess Daenerys of House Targaryen. She brought no weapons. She asked for no coin. She smiled at the guards, and spoke softly, and told them she had a message from the Lord of Light.
The guards looked at her with the blank, flat eyes of men who have been very well paid to admit no one. A steward came, and looked at her, and went away. The magister himself came, fat and oiled and jewelled, and smiled at her with his mouth and not with his eyes, and told her very courteously that the prince and princess were not receiving visitors, and that she would do well to seek her fortune elsewhere.
She thanked him, and went away.
She came again the next day, and the day after, and was turned away each time.
On the third day, she did not go to the gate.
It was not difficult. It had never been difficult. Locks were nothing to a woman who had been taught in the shadow-haunted temples of Asshai. Walls were nothing. Guards were nothing—men saw what they expected to see, and if a woman in red walked past them in the dusk with a glamour about her like a cloak of smoke, they saw a servant, or a shadow, or nothing at all.
She found the girl in the garden, sitting alone beside a fountain in the evening light, trailing her fingers in the water.
She was small and thin and very young—fourteen, though she looked younger—with that silver-gold hair falling to her waist and great violet eyes that seemed too large for her face. She was dressed in a gown of pale silk that someone else had chosen for her, and she sat the way a frightened animal sits, very still, as though she were trying not to be noticed. When she heard footsteps on the path, she flinched, and looked up, and Melisandre saw the old yellow ghost of a bruise along her jaw, half hidden by her hair.
The brother, Melisandre thought. Of course.
"Don't be frightened," she said softly. "I haven't come to hurt you. I've come to tell you something, Princess. Something no one has ever told you before."
The girl stared at her.
"You have a purpose," said Melisandre. "The Lord of Light has shown me. You were born for something greater than anyone in this house can imagine. And I have come a very long way to help you find it."
It was so easy that it almost troubled her.
The girl had nothing. That was the truth of it. She had a brother who beat her and a magister who kept her like a prize heifer to be sold, and no mother, and no father, and no friends, and no home she had ever seen. She had grown up in other people's houses, on other people's charity, always afraid. No one had ever been kind to her. No one had ever told her she mattered.
Melisandre told her that. And it was enough.
She came to the garden every evening after that, and they talked. She told the girl of R'hllor, and the war between light and dark, and the long night that was coming. She told her of the visions—some of them. The dragons. The fire. She told her she would be a queen, and more than a queen. She told her that the blood of the dragon ran true in her, truer than in any Targaryen for a hundred years, and that one day the whole world would know her name.
The girl listened with those great violet eyes, and believed every word. She asked questions, shy at first and then eager. She laughed, once, and seemed startled by the sound. By the end of the first week, she was waiting at the fountain before Melisandre arrived. By the end of the second, she had asked to see the dragon eggs that the magister kept in his vault, so that she could show them to her new friend.
Melisandre had already seen them. She had walked into the vault the night before, through a locked door, and stood over them in the dark. But she let the girl show her anyway, and let the fat magister find them there, and watched his face go grey.
She did not enjoy it, exactly. She was not cruel. But she did not trouble herself much about it either. The girl was the prince that was promised. The girl would save the world from the darkness. What did it matter if she came to her purpose a little faster, a little more willingly, because a stranger had been kind to her?
The Lord of Light had made her for this. Melisandre was only helping her see it.
The brother was another matter.
Viserys Targaryen was twenty-two years old, and he was a fool.
Melisandre saw it in the first moment. He had come storming into the garden on the fourth evening, having heard from a servant that his sister was speaking with a strange red woman, and he had seized the girl by the arm and dragged her up from the fountain, and turned on Melisandre with his face twisted in rage. Who are you? How did you get in? Do you know who I am?
He was handsome, in a thin, sharp, brittle way. He had the same silver hair as his sister and the same violet eyes, but where hers were wide and frightened, his were narrow and wild, red-rimmed from drink and lack of sleep. He wore a doublet of fine silk, stained with wine, and smelled of it, and of the perfumes of a pleasure house. His hands shook.
He drank. He whored. He spent his days lounging in the magister's house, eating the magister's food, and his nights in the pleasure houses of Pentos, spending the magister's money. And when he was not drinking or whoring, he was talking—endlessly, bitterly, about his birthright, and his father's throne, and the Usurper who had stolen it, and the great host that would rise for him the moment he set foot in Westeros. He would be king. He would be king. He was the blood of the dragon. Didn't they know who he was?
He was a failure. A weak, cruel, frightened boy in a man's body, who had been told all his life that he was born to greatness and had never once done anything to deserve it.
And he was perfect.
Melisandre had seen him in the fires. That was the thing the fat magister did not understand, and the girl did not understand, and Viserys most of all did not understand. The vision had shown her two siblings, both wreathed in flame. The girl had blazed like the sun—she was the one, the chosen, the prince that was promised. But the brother had burned too. Not as brightly. Not as purely. But the fire had cloaked him all the same, and it had not harmed him, and he had ridden a dragon of his own into the burning sky.
The Lord of Light had a use for him. Melisandre did not yet know what it was. But she knew this: the girl could not be moved without him. He was her brother, and her guardian, and her king, in the eyes of the world. Where he went, she went. What he commanded, she did.
Control the brother, and you controlled the sister.
And the brother was so very, very easy to control.
She did not argue with him that evening, in the garden, when he screamed at her. She did not flinch. She simply looked at him, with her red eyes and her red lips and her copper hair burning in the sunset, and when he had shouted himself hoarse, she smiled, and said, very softly:
"I have seen you, Your Grace. In the fires. Crowned in flame, upon the Iron Throne."
He stopped shouting.
She saw it go into him like a knife. Everything he had ever wanted, and been told he would have, and never had. Your Grace. No one called him that, here. Not the magister, not the servants, not the whores. Not even his sister, most days. And now a beautiful woman in red was standing in a garden in the dusk, looking at him as though he were a god, telling him that the fire itself had seen him king.
He came to her chambers that night. He came the next night, and the night after that.
It was not difficult. It was never difficult with men like him. They wanted so little, in the end. To be admired. To be believed in. To be told that they were great. She stroked his pride as she stroked his hair, and whispered in his ear in the dark, and he drank it all down like a man dying of thirst. Within a week, he would not hear a word spoken against her. Within two, he had begun to call her my priestess. Within three, he had told the fat magister that he would sooner sell his own sister to a goatherd than be parted from the red woman, and the magister had smiled very carefully and said nothing at all.
The girl followed her brother. The brother followed Melisandre.
And Melisandre followed the fire.
She woke before dawn, as she always did, in a bed hung with silk in the finest guest chambers of the magister's manse.
The room was dim and warm. The shutters were drawn against the sea wind, and a brazier glowed in the corner, burning low. Beside her, Viserys Targaryen lay sprawled on his back among the tangled sheets, one arm flung over his eyes, breathing slowly and heavily in the deep, sodden sleep of a man who had drunk far too much wine the night before. In sleep, the sharp lines of his face had softened. He looked younger. He looked, almost, like his sister.
Melisandre propped herself on one elbow and looked down at him for a while.
She laid her hand on his bare chest, lightly, and felt his heart beating beneath her palm. Slow and steady. Warm. She stroked her fingers across it, once, the way one might stroke a sleeping hound, and he stirred and murmured something and did not wake.
Blood of the dragon, she thought. Poor, foolish, beautiful thing. You have no idea what you are for.
She rose from the bed and crossed the room on bare feet, and took up a robe of deep red silk from the back of a chair and drew it around herself, and tied it at the waist. Then she went to the brazier, and knelt before it, and looked into the embers.
She had not meant to look for the stag. She never meant to, anymore. But it was there anyway, as it always was—faint now, small and far away, as though seen across a great distance of water and fire. A black shape on a hill of ash, beneath a burning sky. A crown of antlers, wide as the world. And the blood, falling and falling from it, endless and bright.
It turned its head toward her.
Melisandre looked away.
Not yet, she thought. Whatever you are. Not yet.
She rose, and went to the window, and opened the shutters. The sea wind came in, cool and salt and clean, and with it the first grey light of morning over the bay of Pentos. Somewhere below, in the magister's house, she could hear the servants beginning to stir.
The fat magister did not know it yet. Nor did the eunuch who wrote to him in secret ciphers across the sea, and thought himself so clever. Nor did the horselord in the grass sea, waiting for his silver bride.
But they were leaving. Tonight, after dark, when the house was asleep. A ship was waiting in the harbour, bound for Volantis. The great red temple was waiting at the end of the voyage, with its thousand priests and its Fiery Hand and its night fires burning forever on the black stone. And the girl would come, because her brother would come. And her brother would come, because Melisandre had asked him to.
She smiled.
Behind her, in the tangled sheets, the dragon's son slept on, and did not know that he had already been sold.