PROLOGUE
Jiub shared the hold with a girl in quilted furs who slept clutching a sheathless sword.
Though her finery had the mottle of a long voyage and her face the same in bruises, she was no worse for wear than any prisoner he'd sailed with in his spotty career—and was like as not no prisoner at all, he wanted to say, if she'd been allowed to keep the stiletto, but he left that an open mystery for the nonce. It wasn't hard to smuggle a pin into any jail, and while the thickness of her doublet made her build a mystery above the knee, he couldn't see any maid not of Skyrim doing damage with such a slim blade, nor could he see one of Skyrim taking it over a bearded axe or spear. Perhaps she was fleeing somewhere, and some mage's knife was all she found to grab. He'd been there before.
With little else to do as Seyda Neen approached—his new home, with almost as much shit and fungus in the water as the Imperial hole he'd been rotting in—he watched her subtle fits, and admired the way sun and dust danced on the silken wolf of her mantle, until a shuddering hump far below sent her rolling onto her back. The eyes kept mum, but her breath puffed shallow and wakeful in the Thief's afternoon chill. If she intended to fool herself back to sleep, he thought, as the lean ship's lean crew land-hoed from stern to bow, she had her work cut out; prisoner or no, Cyrod or Nord, the n'wah would be tipped out like a cup of curdled milk if she didn't lift herself up on her feet soon.
"Wake up," said Jiub, crouching to her level. Dark brows knitted at the sound of his voice, then dark lids lifted over light eyes, grey as the West Gash. "Why are you shaking? Are you OK? Wake up."
The girl's eyes were wide open, but she may as well have been in a coma. Had she never seen a Dunmer before?
"Stand up . . . there you go." He looked her up and down, as she did the same to the ship's hold, then back to him. Am I truly the first mer she has beheld? The tips of his ears flushed. "You were dreaming. What's your name?"
"Arya Stark," said Arya Stark.
"Well, Arya Stark, not even last night's storm could wake you," said Jiub. "I heard them say we've reached Morrowind."
"And I heard you talking about a strange tower nearby." The girl took a deep breath and shook, but she didn't seem to know what to say. "I thought there'd be more to it than people in hoods and masks standing around waving axes."
A sailor broke between them to fetch a pair of casks, then rolled a barrel out with his foot. They both ignored his parting suggestion that they be quick about disembarking, but Arya thrust her sword in her belt and smoothed her furs nonetheless, showing no care to avoid bristly patches, or those matted in old blood. Locks of hair salted into brown wire shook in her eyes as she reached and fiddled about, but she didn't seem to notice. Nor in truth did Jiub. Perhaps they were both still hanging on what she had said.
"The Tower was in my head, Arya Stark." He let a little Dunmeri venom seep into his gravel, and followed her to the ladder when she ignored him too and, satchel slung across her breast, strutted away with hands behind back. "I spoke of it only in a dream."
One rung up, Arya looked down at him, and her mouth was still. "Maybe we shared in the dream. I saw the tower as if it were the greatest and most dangerous woman with the most power, and I was afraid it was her when I woke up. In the dream, I said to myself, 'I shall be king for your women but I have no strength to kill her.'"
"Maybe we did," he said, teeth half-bared, jaw half-clenched. "I dreamt her too, feared her, and spoke the same words. No strength . . . yet in the end I killed her."
She stared. "How?"
"She has grown old as a woman."
"Why did you do it?"
"Because it was a lie, and no king can have a dream, no matter how clever and skilled his dreams are."
The steel plates in her eyes seemed to melt. She smirked a serpent's smirk, holding out a leathern hand to shake, and he pulled back his forked tongue, and they walked down the pier a pair of Tsaesci. A pair of n'wahs, exiled to the ashen dungheap he had left so long ago that they were practically newcomers in arms, with a sword and a Tower between them.
In the distance he could hear the laboured pealing of a silt strider. An elderly man called from it with a large, black, ornately carved saddle-bag; it was full of books. With its heavy hinges and scabbard a gryphon with the back of a ram roosted beside him, carried on a winged steed. He had lost his eyes, which in his youth had been in perfect working order and which were bright. He was wearing grey woolen riding-gear, carrying two large black spade-shaped mules, and was a very small man, almost the size of his horse, very gentle and gentle-hearted. His saddle-bag was filled with books. And the old man was talking to a small boy who appeared rather childish; some books were in the bundle by his side.
As he neared and sat beside Arya, it was very strange that he seemed to be in such a gloomy mood. They walked a very long distance, as if they had never seen anything of each other before. "What am I saying?" asked Jiub. "He appears to be quite calm. Are these men that you are following following their wildest dreams? Or do you intend to accompany me, my lady?"
Arya said just that she had thought very quickly of things to do after her visions, and so made haste on her way to the customs and excise office of Seyda Neen.
At one time he was asked about those dreams. He replied, "A dream is just a dream." Then he thought to himself, "The most wonderful thing for us to do here will be to look into those visions."
"They are indeed a kind of magic."
Arya told him that this is what the visions are. The visions of dreams. For if a man's mind is turned into a mirror, the man can see and understand clearly only the thoughts. For they come from nowhere and are not there, but are something that one knows.
As Arya came to the castle and spoke to the people, she seemed to be asking them about something that she must know. Perhaps she also brought to attention that this is something that they had been doing for four hundred years, that they must know, that they too had gone through the same dream-world which was to them the mirror of the minds, that they were at least in the same place. That this place could have been seen by the eyes the way the moons could be viewed. "What if I see you there, with the shadows and darkness and smoke?"
"It is possible," she said.
"Here is Vivec," said the clerk. Jiub froze, but Arya Stark rose from her chair to meet him. On either side of Arya stood two men he had seen on the ship—Terrance, a tall and muscular man dressed in royal armor, and a balding black-haired fellow with pale blue eyes—a black man, the one he had heard talk of. Arya nodded at them and strode forward. "The man who brought me over was a member of the Kingsguard," she said. "He's been with us since I left Winterfell." She stopped and stared at Jiub. "This is Lord Stannis."
"You're my brother?" asked Lord Stannis.
"No," she answered firmly.
"Who was my brother?"
Vivec opened his eyes. "Ah. This is Dany."
"Dany is gone," said Terrance.
"Do you know why?" asked Lord Stannis. "She's in Volantis."
"That's right," Arya said patiently. "But she left there for reasons we've yet to understand. I suppose that makes no sense. Is that all?"
"It's what makes Dany's story so amazing," said Terrance. "What would Dany have done?"
"I think the truth is more complicated," she agreed, smiling. "But I don't know what to believe. They're trying to help me understand things."
"I've seen the books," said Vivec.
"When you were growing up?" Arya raised her eyebrows. They cruised into conversation on things Jiub did not understand. He blinked, twice, and knew that Terrance and Stannis were one.
Arya was asking what Vivec knew of the Tower. If I were him, he thought, I would have killed her. The Tower was in the stars, and it was in Vvardenfell, and it was in the slipstream. But Vehk saw something else, and as he spoke Jiub felt dread sweat punch through his stomach, and his soul escape through the hole.
"They were waving swords. If they were walking in a straight path you could have mistaken them for a giant," said Vivec. "All that, and your face and arms and legs—how could you have not seen the signs?"
"I saw you in a dream about the tower," said Arya.
"And the sword in that dream," he said, "was the same sword that I killed in Balmora. That wasn't the same sword of your father. I saw it when you were on the steps of Morrowind." He put his finger to his lips in wonder. "I'll never forget what I saw, little girl. My sword is made in Mehrunes Dagon. You look nothing like Arya from another world."
"It was your sword that killed my father," Arya said softly. Jiub could see a light in her eyes as she spoke, the first of many things that sprung from her eyes. She was so beautiful now that Jiub could feel the heat of her skin, the breath on hers as she spoke, the smile of her lips, the way she looked at him.
"I am your princess," she said, suddenly acting it, "daughter of Eddard and Catelyn, Lord and Lady of Winterfell. I came here with the blessing of my brother, Bran the Broken, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms."
Her voice was so soft, her voice so warm. Her face was almost the same color as her skin as she said, "I want to fight your brothers and destroy these men. I want to take their wives and daughters, and I want you to stop fighting them. I will find you brothers, and kill you!"
But then Arya smiled wide again, a smile that would not go away. She was so beautiful, so full of life, like a rose blossom in the summer sun. And that was just Arya.
"Vivec," said Vivec.
"Not today," said Arya Stark. Jiub blinked again, and Stannis drew his sword, and all of Seyda Neen was afire, but Vehk stayed to see none of it.
A second on the road, Arya turned to him. "Will you be my husband?"
"I suppose." He took the girl's hand. Once again Jiub stood before the girl. "May I ask something of you?" he asked. Her cheeks were flushed pink and her eyes were closed. Fat golden fingers traced along the side of Arya's head and she lifted her head to look at him, then back to a well-fed Altmer hedgemaid in the grass. She wore a crossbow at her side, over and under a netch leather apron that had been chopped and slashed and thrust and burned, and in her other hand was a blackened kwama forager.
"Will you be my wife?" he asked, but he wasn't sure if she heard him.
"Arya." As Arya said the words, the hedgemaid's finger traced back up the side of the head of Arya's head again; this time, she wasn't smiling. The fingers moved up inside her hair to reach above the girl's neck and between her legs, where were the fleshy lips, skin and ears. Now the hand was Jiub's own, and he was the hedgemaid, and Stannis disposed of his corpse, and took his common pants.
