"What," the Lord Stannis Baratheon said, his face tightening in anger as his fingers tightened around the carved wooden figure, "in the seven hells is this?"
"The seven hells, Your Grace?" Melisandre rarely had to remind him anymore, but sometimes, when he was extremely agitated, his old speech slipped through.
Stannis' brows drew together almost to a point over his stormy blue eyes. "Woman, stop prevaricating. What is this ... thing?"
"A figure from your Painted Table, Your Grace. I believe it belongs," she said, "to the South. Sunspear: yes, that was it?"
"And why should I need a new Sunspear?"
Melisandre smiled, a sweet curved thing meant for Stannis alone, though the Onion Knight was with him in the corridor where she had stopped them to hand Stannis her small gift. The night the king had thrown her down onto the Painted Table — heaved her onto it, as if she were a sack of meal or the salt he loved so much — she had felt the towers and cities digging into her flesh; and as he thrusted roughly into her, once, twice, finished almost before he began, she knew the names of the mountains and rivers would be seared into her skin for however many lifetimes she had left. Later, a maid rubbed balm into the wounds on her back, where she had been pierced by the kingdom of Stannis Baratheon. The pain had been pleasure, a surrender, brief as it was, to her god and the god who lived within him — the god whose child she then carried and birthed.
"Yours was damaged," she answered, and watched Stannis' face change as realization stole upon him: clouds to storm to withering ice. He still despised himself for it, and it saddened her. R'hllor will teach him of his power, she thought, and meanwhile he would have this reminder. The pieces of the game of thrones had rolled off the table in all directions, some cracking, some escaping to dark corners, but all had been shaken to their roots by the king's power. It was funny, she thought: she would have preferred a soft bed and a bit of warm teasing before he took her, but in the end he mounted her atop his kingdom, and the earthquakes were felt over the world.
"Who carved it?" Stannis asked, the small tower of southern, scorched Sunspear now hanging loosely from his fingers, as if he was afraid to hold it too closely. Melisandre wondered if he would burn it, or keep it beside him, sleep with it and take it to battle, hidden in his wraps.
"Your squire." A glance quick as lightning passed between Stannis and Lord Seaworth.
They said the name as one. "Devan?"
"The same," answered the priestess. She did not tell them she had set Devan to crafting cities from north to south — the edifices of all Westeros, towns and towers that would fall beneath her soft pale skin and be crushed under Stannis' boot-clad feet, to be rebuilt again in the light of the Lord.
She merely looked up into her king's darkened eyes, then quickly to Davos — whose mistrust of her bled from him so violently that she feared the day it might kill him — before adjusting her cowl and continuing on her way. "The young man is a rare talent with the knife."