“My lady.”
Melisandre looked up. An acolyte stood at the edge of the garden, a young slave girl with a flame tattooed on her cheek, bowing so low her braid touched the stone.
"Forgive me, my lady. Your Grace." A deeper bow, to Daenerys. "There are men at the temple gates. Knights, from Westeros. A dozen of them, on horses. Their leader says he is a prince of Dorne. Oberyn Martell, he calls himself." The girl swallowed. "He asks to speak with the leaders of the temple. About the Targaryens."
Across the table, Daenerys went very still.
Melisandre set down her cup.
Oberyn Martell.
She knew the name. Every whisperer in the Free Cities knew the name. The Red Viper of Dorne. The prince who had studied at the Citadel and forged six links of his chain before he grew bored. The man who had ridden with the Second Sons and fought in the Disputed Lands and crippled the heir of Highgarden in the lists. The man whose sister had been raped and murdered in the Red Keep by a Lannister dog, while her children's bodies cooled on the floor.
She had seen the sun in the fires, these past weeks. A red sun, pierced by a golden spear. She had not known what it meant.
She thought she knew now.
"Bring him to the hall of the night fires," she said, rising. "And wake Prince Viserys. Tell him—" She paused, and smiled. "Tell him his destiny has come to call."
Oberyn Martell was lean and dark and dangerous, and he walked into the great hall of the Temple of R'hllor as though he owned it.
He was older than Melisandre had expected—forty, perhaps, with grey at his temples and lines at the corners of his eyes. But he moved like a man of twenty, loose-limbed and easy, with a spear in his hand and a dozen Dornish knights at his back in sand-coloured silks and copper scale. His eyes were black and bright and mocking, and they moved over the great hall—the pillars, the braziers, the night fires roaring on their altar of black stone—with the faint, amused contempt of a man who had seen a great many temples and believed in none of them.
Then they found Daenerys, standing at Melisandre's side in her white silk with her silver braid, and something in them changed.
He stopped. For a long moment, he simply looked at her. And Melisandre, watching him, saw the mockery go out of his face, and something else come into it—something old and raw and strange.
"You have Rhaegar's eyes," he said quietly. "Gods. You have his eyes."
Daenerys lifted her chin. "Did you know him, my lord?"
"I knew him." Oberyn's mouth twisted. "He was married to my sister. Elia. Her children were your niece and nephew, Princess. Rhaenys and Aegon. They would be about your age now." A pause. "They were murdered by Lannister men, in the sack of King's Landing. With the Usurper's blessing."
Daenerys's face went pale. She said nothing. But Melisandre saw her hand tighten at her side.
And then the doors at the far end of the hall burst open, and Viserys Targaryen came striding in—bathed and perfumed and dressed in his finest silks, his silver hair loose to his shoulders, his violet eyes bright with wine and excitement and something close to hunger. He had dressed in a hurry, Melisandre saw. His doublet was buttoned wrong.
"Martell!" he cried. "Prince Oberyn! Dorne has come! I knew Dorne would come! Dorne has always been loyal to the dragon!"
Oberyn Martell turned and looked at him.
It lasted only a moment. A flicker in those black eyes, quickly hidden. But Melisandre saw it, and she knew exactly what it was, because she had seen it a thousand times on the faces of priests and attendants and slaves since the day they came to Volantis. The Red Viper had looked at the last son of Aerys Targaryen and seen precisely what he was.
Then Oberyn smiled—a wide, white, dazzling smile, as warm as the Dornish sun—and swept a deep bow.
"Your Grace," he said. "Dorne has come."
He told them everything.
They sat at a long table of red stone before the night fires—Benerro at its head, ancient and gaunt, his face tattooed with flames; Melisandre at his right hand; Viserys and Daenerys across from Oberyn and two of his knights. Wine was poured. Oberyn barely touched his. Viserys drank his in three swallows and called for more.
And Oberyn told them of the house with the red door in Braavos, and the old knight who had kept them there. Ser Willem Darry, master-at-arms of the Red Keep, who had carried them across the narrow sea and raised them as best he could. He told them how Doran Martell had searched for them for years, and found them, and sent a man to that house with a proposal. A marriage. Doran's daughter, the Princess Arianne, heir to Dorne, to Prince Viserys, heir to the Iron Throne. And in exchange, Dorne would raise its spears for the dragon.
"Ser Willem signed it," said Oberyn. "In your name, as your guardian. My brother has the pact still, sealed with the dragon of House Targaryen. And then the old man died, and you were turned out into the streets, and we lost you." He spread his hands. "It took us a year to find you again. And by then you were in Illyrio Mopatis's house, and my brother is a cautious man, and he thought it best to wait."
Viserys was staring at him. His mouth had fallen open. The wine cup hung forgotten in his hand.
"Darry," he said. "Darry did this? He never—he never told me. He never said anything. I was a boy. I—" He stopped. Something moved across his face, too quick to name—grief, perhaps, or anger, or the dawning realisation that the old knight he had spent years blaming for every misery had been fighting for him all along. Then it was gone, swallowed up in something brighter and hungrier. "A pact. With Dorne. All this time. All this time, Dorne was mine."
"Dorne has waited a long time, Your Grace," said Oberyn. "My brother has grown tired of waiting. He would have the pact honoured. Now. Arianne for Viserys, the sun for the dragon. And when the dragon comes home—" His black eyes glittered. "Dorne will be at his side. Fifty thousand spears. Every pass through the Red Mountains held open. And Robert Baratheon and Tywin Lannister and their whole rotten brood will pay for what they did to my sister."
Melisandre, sitting very still at Benerro's side, felt something warm and bright unfold in her chest like the petals of a flame.
Fifty thousand spears.
It was exactly what they needed. A foothold in Westeros. An army on the ground. A great house with a great grievance and a whole kingdom behind it. The red priests could not give the dragons a throne alone, nor could the temple's slaves, nor could the Fiery Hand. They needed a sword. They needed a shield. They needed a door into the Seven Kingdoms that would open from the inside.
And the Lord of Light had sent it, riding out of the desert on a sand steed, with a spear in its hand and vengeance in its heart.
A blessing, she thought. Another blessing. How could I ever have doubted?
She opened her mouth to speak. To counsel caution, perhaps—a show of it, at least, for the Red Viper's benefit, so that he would not think them too eager. To suggest that Prince Viserys take a day to consider, and pray, and seek the fires' guidance.
She did not get the chance.
"Yes," said Viserys Targaryen.
He was on his feet. He had not looked at her. He had not looked at Benerro or at his sister or at anyone. He was staring at Oberyn Martell with his violet eyes blazing, his whole thin body trembling with it.
"Yes! Yes, I accept! I'll marry your niece. I'll marry her tomorrow if you like! Tell your brother the dragon remembers his friends. Tell him that when I sit the Iron Throne, Dorne will stand higher than any kingdom in the realm. Tell him—" He laughed, high and wild. "Tell him I'll give him the Lannisters. All of them. Tywin and his whore of a daughter and her Usurper's whelp—I'll give him every one of them, and he can do with them whatever he likes!"
Oberyn smiled. It did not reach his eyes.
"I'll tell him, Your Grace."
Viserys turned then, at last, and looked at Melisandre. And Melisandre, who had been sitting perfectly still with her hands folded on the red stone table, realised that something must have shown in her face—some flicker of surprise, perhaps, at how quickly he had leapt—because he came around the table to her and took her hand and pressed it to his lips, and looked down at her with an expression of tender, condescending, perfectly ridiculous sympathy.
"Don't look so stricken, my priestess," he murmured, low enough that only she could hear. "It's only a marriage. A political thing. The Martell girl can have the crown. But you'll have me. You'll be at my side when I'm king—my lover, my counsellor, my red queen. No Dornish wife will ever take that from you. I swear it."
Melisandre looked up at him for a long moment.
Then she smiled, slowly, and lowered her eyes, and let him think he had comforted her.
Inside, she was laughing.
Oh, you poor, sweet, foolish boy. She had wanted it. She had prayed for it. If he had hesitated for so much as a heartbeat, she would have spent the whole of the night whispering in his ear until he said yes. And instead he had leapt to it like a hound to a thrown bone—and then turned around and consoled her for it, as though she were some jealous tavern wench weeping over a lost suitor.
He thought she wanted him. He thought she wanted a crown. He thought he was the hero of this story.
He did not understand that there was no story but the Lord of Light's. That he was a piece on the board, and she was a hand moving it, and the hand was moved in turn by something greater than either of them, burning in the heart of every flame in the world.
He would never understand. That was the beauty of it.
They sealed it that night, before the night fires, at the summit of the great temple.
There was no septon. There were no Seven. Only the flames, roaring up into the black Volantene sky, and Benerro in his robes of crimson and gold, and the Fiery Hand standing in a ring around them with their spears and their burning-tattooed faces. Oberyn Martell signed the new pact in his brother's name, with his brother's seal. Viserys Targaryen signed it with a flourish, as King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men. And Daenerys signed it as witness, in a small careful hand, her violet eyes very dark in the firelight.
It was to be kept secret. Oberyn had insisted on that. The Usurper had eyes and ears in every port from Braavos to Qarth—the eunuch's little birds—and Dorne was not yet ready to show its hand. Arianne would be told. A handful of trusted lords would be told. No one else. Not yet.
But it was done. The sun and the dragon, bound together, as they had been once before, in another age, when a Dornish princess had married a Targaryen king.
Afterwards, when the others had gone, Melisandre stood alone before the night fires and looked into the flames.
She saw the comet, blazing red across a black sky. She saw the three eggs on their pyre. She saw the girl, burning like the sun. She saw a red sun pierced by a golden spear, flying beside a dragon.
And far off, at the very edge of the flames, almost lost in the smoke—small, and distant, but unmistakable—she saw a black stag, standing on a hill of ash, with blood falling endlessly from its crown of antlers.
It was not looking at her tonight. It was looking south.
Toward Dorne.
Melisandre watched it for a long time. Then she turned from the fire, and smiled, and went down the long red stair toward her chambers, where the dragon's son would be waiting.
A union of sun and dragon, she thought. Let the stag look all it likes.
The Lord of Light was with them now.