Victarion Greyjoy was not naturally given to introspection. He would live as long and as well as he lived, and when he died the Drowned God would call him home to His halls, to feast and fight as training against the day when the Storm God made his last attempt to seize the world for his own. More had not been required of him, not when he had so many brothers and nephews. His marriage, his future reaving career, whatever else he might have had to do, all of that had been for his father to decide so there had been no point, to his mind, in thinking about it too much.
The years since the fall of the Targaryen's, he reflected bitterly as he stared at the crudely-engraved monument stone that marked the spot where his reavers and the men of the Legion had held wassail the night before they stormed Myr, had changed so much. First his father had died from a Dornishman's arrow. Then Euron had fallen off Fair Isle, where Aeron had been taken by the sea. Rodrik had died fighting Stannis's fleet in the Straits, and Maron had been taken and executed after coming within double arm's-reach of Stannis himself. Balon himself had been killed only a few days later, and Theon had been taken back to King's Landing as Stannis' prisoner. And word had reached him just this morning that Urrigon was dead, having challenged Jaime Lannister to a duel and fallen at his hand. Asha would take the name of whatever husband Viserys Targaryen bound her to and Stannis would never let Theon sire legitimate sons. All of which left him, Victarion, as the last of the Name of Greyjoy.
Which meant also that he was now faced with completely uncharted waters. He had never seriously considered seeking out a wife. His office as Master of Ships was not hereditary, and his duties with the Fleet had kept him from putting down many roots in Ironhold, which he had largely left to the stewardship of either Dagmer or Roryn Pyke. The God witness he did not lack for the company of women, he had paramours enough, but he had yet to sire a son on any of them, and in time he had expected to name one of his captains as his heir, or simply to leave the matter in King Robert's hands. And in his heart of hearts he could not find it in himself to usurp Balon's right as head of the House to arrange his marriage. To do so would have been as much as to declare that Balon was dead to him, and despite their feud he had still been his brother.
Not that he would grieve for him; by all accounts Balon had gone mad long before he had died on the Mastiff's blade, raving to the last. Only a madman could have led their people to such disastrous defeat that they were now prisoners on their own islands. Nor would he shed a tear for Urrigon; at least Balon had had the pride to stand and fight. Urrigon had shown himself to be a coward when he fled the Battle of the Straits, and then he had shown himself to be a traitor when he sold Asha to the Targaryen's. Victarion would have had to kill him with his own hands if he had ever dared show his face in Myr. And by all reports, Ser Jaime had killed Urrigon in a straight fight, even if only a lawyer could call it fair. Indeed, it could be said that he owed Ser Jaime a debt for sparing him from having to become a kinslayer.
Which still left him facing the fact that the line and Name of House Greyjoy was in danger of extinction and he was guilty of dallying. It was time, and past time, that he married. Hence his trip outside the walls of the city to this place where he had made the boast that had already become a legend; the city was simply too noisy for him to do the thinking he needed to do. He had already requested to meet with Robert King and Ser Gerion over dinner tonight to discuss his options, but he wanted to give it some thought himself beforehand, so as not to look too great a fool.
Attracting a wife would be no great difficulty. He was still young and handsome, the wars, his lordship, and high office had made him rich, he had power and influence only a few steps below that of the King himself, and he had one of the most famous names in the world; was it not known that mothers in Volantis used his name to threaten their children into behaving, and that those Tyroshi who yet lived had vowed to boil him in oil if ever he was taken alive? He was, arguably, the most eligible bachelor on the Narrow Sea. No, the difficulty would be in choosing between the women who would throw themselves at him, or who would be thrown by their parents.
First there would be the desperate, Ironborn Houses that had been reduced to poverty or driven into exile by the failure of Balon's Rebellion. For such as they, a marriage to Victarion would be a literal Godsend, restoring rank, wealth, and respect at a single stroke, earning him the eternal loyalty of whatever House he chose to rescue thusly. It would do much to forestall the mutual resentment and recriminations that had been building between the Ironborn who had immigrated to Myr before Balon's folly and those who had done so after, as well, which was not an outcome to be despised. There was no breed of war worse than civil war. On the other hand, such Houses would not be able to bring anything to the table themselves beyond the swords of their menfolk and the womb of whatever woman he married, and those would be few and chancy, respectively. Forbye, to align so with people who had rebelled against Stannis would do nothing to help and potentially much to harm Robert King's attempts to reconcile with his brother. Attempts that had only just begun, thanks to Stannis' edict of protection for Jonothorians who lived in Westeros, and would be vulnerable to any sudden shock. The survivors, those who had lost much but not all in Balon's Rebellion, would be under much the same circumstances regarding benefits and detriments.
A second option would be one of the new lords of the Isles. The various branches of the Harlaw clan had sent many a maiden to try and mend the rift between the Isles and the East. The newly risen Ironmaker's had sent two of their finest to convey Lord Alfric's regards; no doubt Alfric hoped to increase the already precipitous ascendance of his House even further. Taking either a Harlaw or one of the Ironmaker maids would give him access to their family's ships, men, and gold, and help close the division between the Isles and the East before it became irrevocable. On the other hand, those Houses were oceans away, and would perforce be more attentive to matters in Westeros than in Essos. And allying with Stannis's supporters made Victarion's stomach rebel; he had heard the stories of what the greenlanders had done on Orkmont and Saltcliffe and Blacktyde and Old Wyk, not to mention Pyke itself. All might be fair in love and war, but some things simply could not be allowed to pass unchallenged. Forbye, Ser Harras Harlaw was greatly changed from the man who had fought so well and won such glory at his side, by all reports. The massacre of his family, it seemed, had struck him hard, enough so that he skulked in Grey Garden well his cousins squabbled over Ten Towers and Stannis' new Order ran roughshod over their people. And whatever Robert King's intentions he and Stannis would likely remain rivals. Their heirs certainly would be, barring some unlikely chance. That being so, tying himself to one of Stannis' vassals would likely prove inconvenient and embarrassing.
Then there would be the offers from his own followers, the fellow lesser sons, impoverished adventurers, and hungry bastards that had first followed him to Myr and would deserve such a reward for their years of service and loyalty. The benefits were obvious, but little that he did not already have. Had they not stood with him against Dagmer? Were not their swords and sails already his to command?
Which left everyone else. Greenlander lords of Myr seeking an alliance with one of their king's original captains, merchant families with more ambition than sense, a handful of Braavosi Houses hoping that one of their daughters in a lord's bed would lead to some advantage of trade, even a company of Lorathi sellswords who had presented him with a girl they claimed was the fairest maid of their misty islands. Victarion snorted; whoever he married, it wouldn't be the Lorathi girl; their way of talking annoyed him no end. And Lorath was not a power worth allying with in any case; they were simply too far away. A greenlander's daughter, or a Braavosi's, would make more sense, if he could find one suitable to be a Lord Reaper's wife.
Victarion's gaze swept over the monument stone, tracing each line of the runes chiseled into its face that told the story of what had happened here. Stones such as these were not meant to be glorious in themselves; it was the story they told that gave glory and fame to those who had been part of it. It was time to stop being the stone, he knew, and become the story. His captains were all worthy men, but when the sons he would sire came to a man's age, with him to train them and Robert King and Princess Cassana to command their allegiance . . . then the world would see in full what the Ironborn could do in a worthy cause.
XXX
Daario pressed his fingertips against the front corners of his temples in an attempt to stave off the headache he felt building behind his eyes. "Don't fucking tell me . . ." he half-commanded, half-begged his scribe.
"Master Hestion took full advantage of his opportunity to address the court, master," his scribe said with gentle implacability; Daario had manumitted him, but the habits bred by a life of slavery died hard. "His speech was wide-ranging, but the gist of it is that he accused the Conclave and the Gonfalonier of selling Lys into slavery to the Volantenes, condemned the inhabitants of the isles as fools and cowards, and ended by declaring that the only men left in Lys were those under your banner."
Daario groaned. "Of course he did," he grumbled. "Because I didn't have enough problems already. You may go." As his scribe-slave bowed and left the room, Daario took his hands away from his temples, slumped forward in his chair, and beat his forehead against the surface of his desk. "Hestion, you stupid, pompous, hotheaded, heedless, ignorant . . ." eventually he left off, leaning back in his chair and rubbing at his forehead. He had had a feeling this day was going to be a bad one.
When he had heard that Norello Hestion had been summoned to court for his slanders against Magister Ennaar, he had known to expect trouble; Hestion had been merely the loudest of an ever-growing clique of young magisters from the mainland. Where the islanders had reacted to the Slave Wars by trying to carry on with business as usual to as large a degree as possible, in an admirable but to Daario's mind misguided attempt at stoicism, Hestion and his fellows had taken the opposite approach. Where before it had been the fashion for Lyseni magisters to pride themselves on the softness of their hands, the smoothness of their skins, and their disdain for the crudities of physical violence, the younger magisters claimed such attitudes to be symptoms of a decadence that was intolerable, even dangerous, under current circumstances. Instead Hestion and his comrades prized the ring of callus around the thumb, web of the hand, and forefinger that came with wielding a sword, the battering their features took from spending long hours in the saddle in all weathers, and the skill they were beginning to acquire with sword and spear and mace and poleaxe. There was an old Valyrian philosopher, Daario had heard once, who had claimed that after a sufficiently long period of time in opposition enemies inevitably came to resemble each other; if that philosopher were alive today, he would undoubtedly take Hestion and his fellows as proof of his theory.
Ordinarily, he would have welcomed such a change in attitudes as being most gratifying, after enduring the veiled disdain of his employers for almost all of his adult life. The problem was that the youngsters embracing those attitudes were adopting them with the zeal, and the contempt for holdouts, of religious converts. Their common refrain of "safety and security by any means necessary" was not calculated to win debates by convincing doubters, but by rhetorically clubbing them into the ground. The budget that the Conclave had announced for the next year had drawn their particular ire by not having any increases earmarked for spending on the army or the fleet; more than one, Daario knew, had written to the Conclave and the Gonfalonier or made public speeches predicting disaster unless the purse strings were opened wide to spend on arms, ships, warhorses, armor, and fighting men. That such expenditures could only be funded by increased taxes on the city proper and the other isles of Lys, the mainland being already taxed to what conventional wisdom considered the limit, they declared to be immaterial. If the islanders did not have the stomach to fight for their city, then they should at least be generous in their support of those who did.
This was hardly an attitude calculated to win support in the isles, even if it weren't accompanied by disparaging comments about the prowess of the islanders when they did take the field. Daario knew that only a handful of the men under his command called the isles of Lys home instead of the mainland, but he also knew that the fleet was predominately manned and officered by islanders, and he also knew that they had paid in blood for their successes against the Myrish, the Braavosi, and the Westerosi. Those of his men who knew as much as he did, which he had tried to make sure was as many as possible, apparently didn't care. They knew that their homes, families, and livelihoods were in peril of being sacked and massacred by Robert the Bloody's killers, and they didn't see the islanders lining up to fight by their side to forestall that evil day. Attitudes had consequently hardened, and when mainlander and islander met these days the islander was usually greeted with contempt, disguised to varying degree depending on the mainlander in question. The islanders, for their part, returned contempt with icy scorn; a familiar rejoinder was that at least on the islands they remembered the etiquette that became the scions of Valyria. Daario had found himself spending as much time pacifying disputes between mainlanders and islanders visiting the mainland as he did training and leading the army, and even more time writing to the Conclave defending his more vocal subordinates from various charges brought against them by outraged islanders.
That alone would have made his position precarious, for the islanders in question tended to be men of influence, but another of his innovations had made the ground under his feet even more shaky. When he had taken service with Lys, the Stormcrows had come with him, and quickly found themselves serving a dual role. On the one hand, many of their officers and senior sergeants had been parceled out through the various companies that Lys had raised to act as trainers and advisors to the aristos who nominally commanded them. Which in practice meant that the Stormcrows thusly dispatched usually ended up doing the actual work of commanding while the aristos in question devoted their time to the social scene and only returned to the company when a campaign was in the offing; it was a common enough occurrence when a Free Company took a long-term contract. On the other hand, they had also been the force that Daario knew and trusted best, and which was most immediately responsive to his leadership; if he had been an Andal lord, they would have been considered his household men, his fighting-tail. As a result, he had had to keep their numbers up even while sending many of them some distance afield, and the easiest way to do that had been to promote those who remained even further and fill the void with fresh recruits that could be seasoned by their veteran comrades. This he had done, taking advantage of the situation on the mainland in order to recruit from the younger sons of the magisterial families. He hadn't intended to convert so many of them to the life of arms, the plan having always been to recall the detached Stormcrows when their companies were sufficiently trained, but the repulse of Ser Lyn Corbray's raid had bound the new Stormcrows into the company with bands of iron, and made true believers of them at the same time.
It had been gratifying at the time, but it had made the Conclave nervous; too many of the Band of Nine had been charismatic captains who had built up a following that was loyal to them before the governing body of their particular city. The fact that so many of the newer Stormcrows had taken up the cause of militancy had made matters even worse. A rabble-rouser or an editorialist was one thing, but a rabble-rouser or editorialist who made his speeches while wearing the colors of his company or who prefaced his signature with his rank was another matter entirely. However many times Daario had written to the Conclave reassuring them that he had discipline well in hand, and however many times he ordered his men to keep their opinions to themselves in public, he had sensed the Conclave's patience with him shortening by the month. Hestion's summons to court for slander had been meant to warn him as much as to punish the young man himself, if Daario was any judge; Hestion was a corporal in the Stormcrows' red banda, and the bailiff had waited until that banda had been assembled for pay parade to serve him the notice of summons.
Which meant that he was now faced with a choice. His first option was to order Hestion to be drummed out of the company for disobedience of orders, which strictly speaking he was entitled to do as Hestion had disobeyed an order but was hesitant to do; Hestion was popular, and discreet enquiries by way of the sergeants had informed Daario that Hestion was considered among the men to have committed the crime he was charged with while defending the honor of the army, the company, and of Daario himself, which taken all together made it a ticklish situation. His second option was to keep Hestion in the company come what may, which would send an even more disconcerting message to the Conclave. It could, in fact, be said that to choose such a course would be as much as to give Hestion's words his imprimatur. Option the third, to await developments and react accordingly, also had merits but was tantamount to gambling with the Conclave's remaining support for him. If Hestion were found not guilty, which Daario considered unlikely but not impossible even if he had been tried in the city, then the Conclave would be justified in considering itself to be under threat from an army that considered them worthless and had a replacement leader already lined up and waiting, whether said leader knew it or not. Under those circumstances, it would be an easy step to ordering him killed, regardless of the military situation; men in fear of their lives could not be expected to behave rationally.
Daario wearily drew a sheet of paper out of one of the drawers of his desk and dipped his pen in the inkwell; normally his scribe did his writing for him, but this was not a normal letter he was writing. If he did not convince the Gonfalonier and the Conclave that he had no designs on the rulership of Lys, then his life might be measured in days.
XXX
Tyrion Lannister popped a handful of wakebeans into his mouth and chewed, grimacing as he did so; the little brown beans, a recent import from the Summer Islands, did wonders for one's wakefulness and mental alertness, but even after roasting they were irredeemably bitter. Some of his classmates at seminary had experimented with grinding the beans and steeping them in hot water, where they could be flavored with honey, but Tyrion considered that particular innovation to be inefficient and time-consuming. Besides, he had developed a taste for the whole bean, and the bitterness could be easily washed away with a well-watered draft of Arbor Gold.
And the gods knew that he needed as much wakefulness as he could get. Even at seminary he had never worked as hard as he did now.
After Balon's Rebellion his father had named him Steward of Lannisport, the latest in a line of office-holders stretching back more than nine hundred years. The nature of the office had varied with the nature of the lords, and before them the kings, who had reigned from Casterly Rock; Stewards had been everything from glorified couriers between the Rock and the city's aldermen to the next thing to an independent lord. His tenure, judging by the instructions he had received from his father, was to be closer to the latter. He had been charged with overseeing House Lannister's affairs in the city, maintaining the peace and order of the city, ensuring its defense against enemies both foreign and domestic, and, to use the phrase of the charter his father had had drawn up, 'take such other measures as the good of the city and the honor of House Lannister shall warrant.' Which was almost terrifyingly vague, when you thought about it, but which so far Tyrion had chosen to take as approval to continue his oversight of the city's rebuilding. Urban planning had been made fashionable among the learned by King Stannis' efforts to rectify the failures of the Targaryen's to adequately plan the growth of King's Landing. And what hadn't found its way into even the seminary's discourse Tyrion had read about during his study of the Free Cities, which he had undertaken to better understand the world his brother had been banished to. Lannisport was hardly the barely-restrained chaos that King's Landing was, but it had long been considered a poor second to Oldtown. Tyrion had ideas about how to change that.
And he might not have much time to implement them. The wife that Father had found for him after he had been laicized, a Crakehall girl named Amely, was not pregnant yet but she would be soon enough, the gods willing, and he was under no illusions as to how long it would take Father to send him back to the Faith if he fathered a healthy son that lived past the age of five. He might be Father's heir, but only for lack of other options. Cersei had not only failed to produce a spare so far, but she had become 'Baelor with breasts and Maegor's temper', as one of Tyrion's former classmates had said in a recent letter. And Jaime . . . Tyrion closed his eyes for a moment to fight back the familiar wave of sorrow that came whenever he thought of his brother. Jaime was lost, thanks to Jonothor's temptations and, he suspected, Father's obstinacy. He didn't know exactly what had passed between them on Dragonstone, no one did, but the fact that Father refused to discuss it with anyone confirmed in his mind that whatever had happened had been singularly painful. He didn't talk about Mother's death, either.
Not that he would necessarily object to taking the cowl again; he had enjoyed his time in the Faith. Even if he had no real call to ministry, the attraction of a life where he could be judged on his mind rather than his body was undeniable. And while he and Amely were reasonably friendly given the haste of their betrothal and marriage, they were by no means a love match. He knew that she had had her heart set on Addam Marbrand before Tywin had made her father an offer that he couldn't refuse, and he expected that once their marriage was annulled she would find some way to make that dream come true; Addam might have married a Lydden girl recently, but women died all the time in childbed and Amely was both patient and iron-willed. She certainly wasn't shy about draggin him into bed when she decided that he was failing to properly balance the duty of attention he owed to his work against that which he owed to his wife. If she found him repulsive she concealed well enough that he could not for the life of him notice, and he repaid that mummer's skill by making sure that she seemed as pleased by their bedplay as he was. She also kept his household in good enough order that he only needed to keep a light hand on the reins, even if she had no appetite for politics beyond that which normally belonged to ladies. It was a far cry from what he had heard of Father's relationship with his late lady mother, but he had little to complain of in his marriage, even if it was wholly an artifact of politics.
That said, he had found that he had a taste for wielding authority, these years since he had first taken over this office. To have only to give the word and have men leap into action, whether with brick and mortar or sword and shield . . . well, he understood some of the stories about Aegon the Unworthy in a different light, after tasting that drug. And above that, there was the fact that he had finally received what he had longed for but dared not hope for ever since Jaime had donned the white cloak. He was no longer simply 'the Imp', but Lord Tyrion Lannister, heir of the mighty and dreaded Tywin, and so the courtesy that was shown to him was no longer the strained and formulaic stuff that was the only variety he had been shown previously. He had power now that no longer relied solely on coin and fear of his father; had not the Council of Aldermen recently voted a resolution praising him for the work he had already done to rebuild the city, and had not the city's knights sworn fealty to him as Father's representative? For that alone he would do anything in his power to advance Father's plans, to prove that he was worthy to take Jaime's place as heir, and Father's as Lord of the Rock. He didn't have Jaime's prowess or reputation for heroism, or Cersei's beauty, but the Seven had blessed him with a keen mind and a loyal heart, and he would exert both to the utmost to show Father that he deserved to sit the Lionseat after him.
He had already done two things that he had known were necessary to achieve that goal. The first, ending his correspondence with Jaime, had been the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, but the necessity had been unimpeachable. Father had cut out the tongue of the last minstrel to sing the praises of the Black Lion in Casterly Rock, and even leaving aside the unnecessary savagery of the punishment he could understand its logic. The simple fact was that Jaime had turned heretic, and heresy could not be tolerated. Stannis might have given Jonothorans the right to be heretics in the privacy of their homes and their minds, but the laws against the open practice of heresy remained in force, and one of the few unequivocal instructions Father had given him was that anyone foolish enough to break them was to be given a fair trial and hanged at sunrise the next day. And even if Jaime hadn't turned heretic, he had still turned his back on him, his brother, and that he could not forgive, no matter how much he might respect Jaime's ideals.
The second, falling in line with Father's policies on the Faith, had been easier but not by much, partly because he found himself of two minds on the matter. The idea of reforming the Faith, he knew, was hardly novel; there had been no less than four General Councils within the last ten centuries, although there had been none since the Conquest. And while the importance of combating heresy was self-evident, it had to be said that Jonothor, at least, might have a point. The gods knew that there were good and worthy men in the North who would laugh in your face, at best, if you asked them to pray to the Seven. And he knew as well as anyone who had studied theology that the Seven bestowed their blessings, not on a select few as the Old Faithers claimed, but on all mankind. It logically followed that the Seven would have no problem allowing sufficiently worthy persons who had never worshipped the Faith in their lives to enter the Heavens. That said, it did not follow that the Faith had to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, with all the upheaval and dislocation that would follow such a drastic measure. It was, all told, a very thorny question indeed, and one that he had yet to fully puzzle through. Which was why his thoughts on the matter were confined to his private papers, until such time as he might come to some solid conclusion. And even if he did, he would likely have to sit on it until he found himself with more freedom to act. His conclusions so far were unlikely to meet a warm reception among the Most Devout, much less with Father. Even Aunt Genna, who had given him the instruction necessary to do the Steward's job well and who he suspected was his most stalwart supporter, had all but told him outright to keep his thoughts on the Faith to himself until Father died.
He shrugged and opened one of the folders that his secretary had brought in over luncheon. Questions on the nature of salvation could wait. The state of Lannisport's sewers could not.