The tea was Yi Tish jasmine, pale gold in a cup of red glass, and it tasted faintly of smoke. Everything in the Temple of the Lord of Light tasted faintly of smoke. Melisandre had long since stopped noticing.
She sat in the temple's high garden, beneath a lattice of red vines, with the whole of Volantis spread out below her like a jewelled carpet. Across the Rhoyne, the old city glittered behind its Black Walls, where the old blood lived and plotted and grew fat on their slaves. On this side, the new city sprawled down to the river in a riot of domes and towers and markets, smoky and loud and alive. And behind her, rising three hundred feet into the afternoon sky, the great temple itself: a mountain of red and orange and yellow stone, pillars and arches and stairs and towers, so vast and so bright that it looked from a distance like a fire turned to rock. The night fires burned on its summit day and night, and had burned there, unbroken, for longer than anyone could remember.
Across the little table from her, Daenerys Targaryen was laughing.
It was such a small thing. A soft, surprised, girlish laugh at something Melisandre had said. But Melisandre remembered, very clearly, a frightened child beside a fountain in Pentos who had flinched at footsteps on the path. A child who did not seem to know that she was allowed to laugh. A child who had looked up at a stranger in red with a yellowing bruise along her jaw and said nothing at all, because no one had ever wanted to hear what she said.
That child was gone.
The girl who sat across from her now was fifteen. She held her cup the way a queen holds a sceptre. Her back was straight, her chin was high, and her silver-gold hair fell down her back in a long thick braid bound with tiny bells, in the manner of the Volantene priestesses. She wore a gown of white silk with a sash of red—the temple's colours, given freely—and she wore it as though she had been born to it. The bruises had faded long ago. There were no new ones. Melisandre had made very certain of that.
But it was not the silk or the poise that held Melisandre's eye. It was the stillness. The girl had found it somewhere in these past months, in the long nights before the fires, in the prayers and the lessons and the hours of silence. She sat now with the calm of someone who knew who she was. Who had been told, for the first time in her life, that she mattered—and had believed it. And had grown, in the believing, into something worth believing in.
A little guidance, Melisandre thought. That was all she ever needed. A little warmth. A little light. And she opened like a flower to the sun.
"You're staring at me," said Daenerys, smiling.
"Forgive me, Your Grace. I was thinking how much you've grown."
"Have I? I don't feel very different." The girl looked down into her tea. "I still don't know what I'm meant to do. You keep telling me I have a purpose, and I believe you, I do. But I don't know what it is. I don't know how to be—" She hesitated over the words. "Azor Ahai. The prince that was promised. I'm only a girl."
"So was every hero, once," said Melisandre gently. "Azor Ahai was only a man, before he forged Lightbringer. He failed twice before he succeeded. He did not know his purpose either, until the moment came. The Lord of Light does not ask you to know. He asks you to be ready."
Daenerys looked up at her with those great violet eyes, and nodded slowly, and Melisandre felt something warm and sweet and certain bloom in her chest.
You chose well, my lord, she thought, and sighed in something very close to bliss. You always choose well. How could I ever have doubted you?
The brother was another matter. The brother was always another matter.
Viserys Targaryen had not come to tea. He rarely came to anything before the sun went down. He was asleep, most likely, in the rooms the temple had given him at the base of the eastern tower—the finest rooms, Benerro had insisted, fit for a king—sleeping off the wine he had drunk last night, and the night before, and every night since they had come to Volantis. When he woke, he would bathe, and eat, and drink, and complain. He would complain about the heat, and the food, and the incense, and the priests who did not bow low enough. He would demand to know when they would sail for Westeros. He would demand to know where his army was. He would talk, endlessly and bitterly, about the Usurper and his stolen throne, and the great host that would rise for the blood of the dragon the moment he set foot on his own shores.
And then the sun would set, and he would come to Melisandre's chambers. And everything else would fall silent.
He was a fool. He had been a fool in Pentos and he was a fool in Volantis and he would, Melisandre suspected, be a fool until the day he died. He was reckless and proud and weak and vain. He had learned nothing in all his twenty-odd years and he would learn nothing in the next twenty. The temple's attendants had begun to avoid him in the corridors. The priests spoke to him with careful, rigid courtesy and spoke of him, when they thought she could not hear, with a contempt they did not bother to hide.
But that, too, was a gift. Melisandre saw it clearly. A wiser man would have questioned her. A stronger man would have resisted her. A humbler man would not have needed her. Viserys Targaryen needed her the way a drunkard needed wine—desperately, completely, without ever once stopping to ask what it was doing to him. He came to her every night, and every night she told him what he wished to hear: that he was beautiful, that he was great, that he was the blood of the dragon and the true king of Westeros, and that the fires had shown her his crown. She stroked his pride as she stroked his hair. She whispered in his ear in the dark. And he drank it all down and asked for more, and every morning he woke a little more hers than he had been the night before.
He did not see it. He would never see it. He thought he had won her.
And through him, she had his sister. Where Viserys went, Daenerys went. What Viserys commanded, Daenerys did—or at least, Daenerys did not openly defy. The girl did not love her brother anymore, if she ever had. But he was her brother, and her king, and the last of her blood. She would follow him across the narrow sea to war, because she had nowhere else to go, and because Melisandre would be there too.
If I could not see that his foolishness is itself a blessing, Melisandre thought, then I would not deserve to serve the Lord of Light at all.
The temple loved the girl.
Melisandre had not had to do anything to make them. She had only brought her here, and let them look at her. The priests had seen her at the night fires, kneeling before the flames with her silver hair loose and the light gold on her face, and they had seen in her what Melisandre had seen. The slaves who served the temple—and in Volantis, nearly everyone was a slave, five for every free man—whispered about her in the kitchens and the stables. The silver girl. The dragon's daughter. The one the red woman brought, who sits in the fire. They left small gifts at her door. Flowers. Candles. Little carved dragons of wood and bone. When she walked through the temple courts, they bowed lower than they bowed to the priests.
Benerro himself, the High Priest, who had spoken with the Lord of Light for forty years and bowed to no living man, had knelt before her on the third night and kissed her hand.
For the brother, they had only courtesy. Strained, careful, rigid courtesy, like a smile held too long. They did not like him. Melisandre could hardly blame them. He was rude to the priests and cruel to the slaves and drunk at the night fires, and once, in the first week, he had struck an acolyte for spilling wine on his boots. Melisandre had smoothed it over. She had smoothed a great many things over.
But they did not touch him, and they did not refuse him, and they did not speak against him where he could hear. Because Melisandre had told them what she had seen: the brother, too, wreathed in fire. The brother, too, riding a dragon. Lesser than his sister—a candle beside the sun—but blessed by R'hllor all the same. Whatever else he was, he was the Lord of Light's, and he was the brother of Azor Ahai, and that was enough to earn him their silence.
She had been dreaming of the comet.
It had come to her first a fortnight ago, in the night fires, so bright and so sudden that she had cried out aloud: a great red star with a tail like a streamer of blood, blazing across a black sky. It had come again three nights later, and again, and again, until now she saw it nearly every time she looked into the flames. Sometimes it hung over the Wall. Sometimes it hung over a city of red stone. Sometimes it hung over a burning pyre in a grassy plain, and in the heart of the pyre, three dark shapes.
Born amidst salt and smoke, beneath a bleeding star.
The comet was coming. She did not know when. A year, perhaps. Perhaps less. But it was coming, and when it came, the world would change.
She had always believed that. Every red priest in the world believed it, in the way one believes in the sunrise. But she had begun, lately, to feel it in her bones. The fires were stronger than they had been. The visions were clearer. The glamours came more easily to her hands. Something was stirring in the world, something old and vast and long asleep, and the comet would be the trumpet that woke it. When the bleeding star crossed the sky, the magic of the old days would come rushing back like a tide—the magic of the dragonlords, and the greenseers, and the shadowbinders of Asshai, and all the old powers that had faded and dwindled since Valyria fell.
And with it, the dragons.
She saw it in the fires. A pyre, heaped high. Three stones in the heart of it. A life given for a life, to the Lord of Light. And the stones cracking, one by one, and the cry of something newborn, high and thin and terrible.
She would do whatever it took to see it done. Whatever it cost. Whoever.
The eggs were in her chambers.
They had been there since the night she left Pentos. Three of them, wrapped in red silk, locked in a chest of black iron at the foot of her bed, warded with words that would make any thief's hands blister. She had walked into Illyrio's vault the night before they fled, through the locked door, past the sleeping guards, and lifted them out of their velvet nest one by one. And in their place, she had left three smooth round stones from the magister's own garden, wrapped in a glamour so fine that they would look and feel and weigh exactly like dragon eggs to any man who did not know what to look for.
The glamour would have faded within a day. If the fat magister had bothered to check his vault the morning after they fled, he would have found three garden stones sitting on a velvet cushion, and known exactly who had taken them.
As far as Melisandre knew, he had not checked. He had been too busy sending men after the siblings.
She smiled a little, thinking of it.
But three eggs were not enough. That was what the fires had been telling her, these past weeks. Three dragons had conquered Westeros, once. Three dragons had made Aegon a king. But the war that was coming was not a war for a chair. It was the war—the only war—the war between light and dark, fire and ice, R'hllor and the Great Other. And the Great Other's host was endless. Its soldiers did not tire, did not hunger, did not die. Three dragons might not be enough.
So she had sent people looking.
Benerro had given her men. Priests, and acolytes, and a dozen of the Fiery Hand—the temple's sworn soldiers, slaves branded with flames on their cheeks, who had given their lives to R'hllor and feared nothing in this world. She had sent them east, to the Shadow. To Asshai, where she had been born, and the lands beyond it—the dead cities along the Ash River, the black ruins of Stygai where no man went, the great shadowed valleys where the sorcerers of old had hoarded their treasures. There were legends there. Old, old legends, older than Valyria. Of dragon eggs hidden in the dark places of the world, turned to stone by the ages, waiting.
Perhaps they were only legends. Most things were.
But the comet was coming. And Melisandre had learned, in her long life, that the Lord of Light rewarded those who sought.
And then there were the lessons.
She had begun them in the second week, in the deep places of the temple, where the old fire-pits had been dug into the black stone beneath the great hall. She taught them both, the brother and the sister, side by side, the way the dragonlords of Valyria had once taught their children.
The girl had taken to it like a fish to water.
The first time Melisandre had asked her to put her hand into the coals, she had hesitated. Of course she had. Every instinct in her body must have screamed against it. But she had looked at Melisandre, and Melisandre had nodded, and the girl had swallowed and reached out and laid her palm flat on the glowing embers—
—and nothing had happened.
No scream. No blister. No smell of burning flesh. Only a faint, wondering heat, the girl had said afterwards, like holding her hand near a hearth on a winter's night. She had held it there for a full minute, staring down at it with her violet eyes very wide, and then she had looked up at Melisandre and begun to cry.
That had been three months ago. Now the girl could walk barefoot across a bed of coals as though it were a summer meadow. Last week, Melisandre had ordered the great fire-pit in the lowest chamber stoked as high as it would go, until the flames roared up taller than a man, and had watched Daenerys Targaryen step down into the heart of it, and sit, and fold her hands in her lap, with the fire wrapping round her like a cloak. She had sat there for the space of a hundred heartbeats. The sleeves of her robe had blackened and burned away to the elbow. The arms beneath had not so much as reddened.
She could not yet make fire of her own. She had tried—gods, how she had tried, night after night, staring at an unlit candle until her eyes watered, reaching for something inside herself that would not come. But Melisandre had felt it, last night, in the dark of the lesson chamber: a flicker. A warmth. The candle's wick had not caught. But it had smoked.
Close, Melisandre thought. So close.
The brother was another matter.
Viserys could sit on hot coals, now, for a little while. After months of training, of burns and blisters and screaming, he had learned to bear it—the way a man learns to bear a hot bath, or a cold sea. He could walk across embers if he walked quickly. He could hold his hand in a candle flame for the space of a breath before he snatched it back. It was not nothing. It was more than any ordinary man could do.
But he was not his sister. When he went too close to the fire, he burned. His hair singed, his skin blistered, and he howled and cursed and blamed the priests and the coals and Melisandre herself, and drank himself to sleep, and came back the next night swearing he would do better. He was the blood of the dragon. He believed it more than anything in the world. And the fire did not care what he believed.
Not yet, Melisandre thought.
The fires had shown her Viserys cloaked in flame, unblemished. Riding a dragon into a burning sky. She did not doubt it. The Lord of Light did not lie. But the vision had not yet come true, and she believed she knew why.
The comet. When the bleeding star crossed the sky, the old magic would come rushing back into the world—and into the blood of the dragon, which had been thinned and weakened and diluted by a hundred and fifty years without dragons. The girl was already strong. She would become stronger than any dragonlord since the Doom. And the brother, perhaps—perhaps—would become enough.
And then the vision would be fulfilled. The girl burning like the sun itself, and the brother wreathed in fire, unburnt, at her side.
"My lady."