The sun rose over the calm sea. Waves slopped lightly against the harsh, steep rocks that marked the Eastern Coast of Westeros. The quiet of the dawn was broken suddenly, abruptly, by the sound of wood hitting water. Moving slowly, struggling against the current, a small row boat passed through the otherwise serene shoreline. Rowing with all of his faded might, breathing hot clouds into the brisk air, a young man struggled to keep his boat moving. Gendry had been rowing all night. He sighed, watching the sun rise over the open sea.
He still couldn't really believe what had happened over the course of the past year or so. He'd met two hands of the King, he'd worked with the Lannister Army, he'd been brought to Dragonstone, learned that his father had been the King, met his uncle, Stannis Baratheon, and….
He shook his head, rowing a little harder, anger, confusion, and, most of all, fear fueling his exhausted body. He'd been treated well for a time, and then he'd been used and thrown into a dungeon. He would have been killed, had it not been for the help of a member of Stannis' court, who'd given him the very boat he now rowed, and a day's supply of food, a supply that had, of course, run out.
Sighing, he contemplated his difficult past, and his uncertain future. He'd had a relatively normal life in Fleabottom. Then he'd met Ned Stark, and had been shunted across Westeros by nobles ever since. At times, he almost missed the grime and smell of his old life…almost. Although he'd faced death quite a few times, at the hands of practically all sides of the war, although at no point in the adventure had he ever considered that he'd enjoyed it, he far preferred it to the mundane life of day-to-day work as a smith in the capital.
He'd been happiest when he'd been adventuring with the friends he'd made, first on his way north, then in the prisons at Harrenhall. He wondered, as he rowed, where they all were. The last time he'd seen Arya Stark, she'd been annoyed that he was leaving her to go off with the Red Lady. He sighed again, and determinedly kept rowing, trying not to think of the turmoil that decision had caused. He wondered where Arya had ended up. She had been looking for the remaining members of her family, and Gendry hoped that she had come across them, though he had to doubt it. Her father beheaded, her mother and brother fighting a war, her sister a prisoner in all but name in King's Landing, her home under Iron Born Occupation, there was very little for her to turn to.
The rest of their little gang was probably still with the Brotherhood without Banners. Gendry smiled slightly, remembering the Brotherhood. They were outlaws true, but he had come to appreciate something about them. He had felt at home in their odd settlement, a hiding place in the forest, more den than house. He had found he liked it more than the miserable shacks of Fleabottom, and far more than his current residence, this boat. But perhaps most of all, he'd enjoyed their company, the feeling of brotherhood that came from necessity, for if they separated, they would all of them be killed, either by the Northern Army, or the Southern Army.
It was an emotion he could not say he'd felt in any other place. In Fleabottom, there was no sense of community. There was only revulsion, revulsion emanating from the majestic towers looming overhead, revulsion from travelers as they wrinkled their noses and attempted to pass through without noticing anything in the slum, revulsion from the very inhabitants of Fleabottom itself; everyone seemed to hate their neighbors and themselves for living there, for the inexcusable crime of being born poor. The Night's Watch, or what little aspect of it he'd seen from his brief time as a recruit of theirs, had not so much a friendship for each other, but rather a begrudging respect at their fellow soldiers for having survived the brutality of life so far north, with so many ways to die surrounding their daily activities. The Lannister Army, or what little part of it he'd seen at Harrenhall, had been a place of fear, of suffering. The troops had been united by greed, and an ability to relish the pain of others. They had disgusted Gendry. The Brotherhood without Banners, unlike any of the groups he'd seen before, seemed to genuinely enjoy being with the rest of their company. They had had a real feeling of camaraderie, and Gendry had looked forward to spending weeks, perhaps years with the group.
But then they had sold him out. They had thrown him from their ranks, sold him for bags of gold to a woman they knew would do her very best to kill her, to burn him, to attempt to sate her fire god with his own blood. He had not felt their betrayal until that moment. When it was happening, he was far too happy to be travelling alone with an attractive woman to worry about the people who, with time, might have become his friends, selling him out. Once it had happened, and he'd been thrown into the cells below the castle, he'd been too busy worried for his own life to ponder it. Now, alone with his thoughts, he felt angry bitterness at them, both at the Brotherhood without Banners, and at himself, for having not thought for even a second that he was walking into a trap. Still, he reasoned with himself, there was no way that he could have predicted that his father had been the king, and that his blood had some power that could be extracted from him.
That revelation had also surprised him greatly. He'd always assumed his father, the always absent father his mother never spoke of, was some worthless, penniless wretch. How surprised he had been to discover that he'd been not only highborn, but the king. King Robert Baratheon, the legendary man who'd displaced a dynasty that had lasted centuries, who fought his way through savage battles to always come out on top, the warrior who had killed Rhaegar Targaryen, the Last Dragon, at the Battle of the Trident, the first man to conquer the Seven Kingdoms since the legendary Aegon Targaryen, and he'd had to use dragons to do it.
And to think that such a legendary figure would have been with his mother, a lowborn living in Fleabottom. To think that his parents had probably met one night, and never saw each other afterwards. He supposed it made the lords and high-born families from on high a little less powerful, a little less prestigious. After all, they had all of them knelt before Robert Baratheon, and Robert Baratheon had slept with a low born woman from Fleabottom, the lowest of the low.
He looked out, at the vast emptiness that was the sea before him. He remembered seeing the Blackwater Bay some time after the battle, remembered gazing, amazed, at the wreckage of a vast navy, sunk by some horror he had not seen. He looked around, the very memory making him a little more nervous than he'd been before, half expecting to see some monstrosity looming out of the depths. He'd never rowed before. Despite growing on the coast, he'd never learnt to swim. He saw the sea as a boundary, not as a path, more open than land for transportation. Now, here he was, out on the sea with no one but himself.
Exhausted, he stopped rowing, and instantly felt the current pull his little craft backwards, towards the island he knew he must never return too. It was if that woman's inexplicable power drew him in. He had passed towns, towns that he'd been warned against stopping in. He'd stared longingly at warm houses, thinking of a place to sleep, to rest, of warm food. But fear of the Red Lady and being sacrificed outweighed the possible benefits of stopping for a meal and a good night's rest. Instead, he'd sighed, and carried on, rowing into the unyielding cold of night, consoled only by the few pieces of drying bread that were his only company. He'd eaten all of that, the last piece had been finished off only a few hours ago. Water was also running dangerously low.
He rounded a corner of rocks, and there, before him, was Kings Landing. It had not been too long a time since he'd lived in the city, and even less time since he'd seen it with his own eyes, but he felt as though he hadn't seen it in years. The jagged mountain from which the royal castles red towers shone in the rising sun, and the rest of the city below, houses half built, half carved into the huge mountain. From here, he could not see the place he'd worked as an apprentice smith, but, in his mind's eye, he saw it clearly. He smiled, a smile that vanished as he looked around him, at the masts surrounding him, jutting out of the water, glistening like bones just under the surface. He looked back up at the city, and tried to imagine the battle that he knew must have happened. He had asked the Red Lady about it, when he'd last passed over the Blackwater Bay, and she'd given him her typical mystic answer, though he hadn't much cared about it at the time. But now, with no one but himself, he thought about it. He simply could not visualize the walls of the city, the walls he could see at this very moment, the walls he'd grown up around, under attack, could not picture the dozens and dozens of ships that now surrounded him sinking, the hundreds of people dying, drowning, killed on the beaches, burning.
And then he was pondering who many countless people had stared at these very walls. Certainly, there had been the fleet of Stannis, but before them, the Lannister armies had ransacked the city, taking the Capital as King Robert –as his father, he reminded himself – marched the brutal battle of the Trident, wiping out the very last of the Targaryen armies. And then, he envisioned Aegon Targaryen himself, sliding off the back of his gargantuan dragon, looking up at the rocks, deciding he would rule the world from here, before climbing back onto his dragon, and burning the seven kingdoms into submission. How many more armies would this city face? What more suffering would this place see?
He looked back at the city, the city he'd called home and realized he had no connection with it, anymore. The city had changed, he could feel it in the air, could see it in the skeletons of the navy below him. Moreover, he had changed. His travels, if they could even be called that, had changed him. He had never noticed himself changing, but now, now that he was confronted with going back to the beginning, acting like the past year had not even happened… he found he could not bring himself to do it. He stared at the city, and sighed. It was depressing, really, to be here, before the gates of the city he'd lived in for so long, and to realize that it would never be home again.
Turning his boat awkwardly, taking care to avoid ripping the bottom of it against the sunken masts, he sailed out of the harbor, and into the open sea. Adventure called, a new life waited for him, somewhere, beyond the world of Westeros.