Chapter 23: Interlude - Tears for Lys
Lys was on fire, and it wasn't Lelouch's fault.
At least not entirely his fault, Cici thought as she nibbled on a slice of lean ham, cheese, onions, and crisped bacon bits. Needs something sweet to balance it out.
"The city's gone utterly mad," Corwyn said as he set down his borrowed far-eye. "Brother, the people, they're butchering each other on the streets! Slaves just throwing themselves at armed men with their bare hands!"
"Can you blame them?" Lelouch asked with a grimace.
"What do you mean?" Corwyn asked.
"We've been starving them for weeks, haven't you realized? And before us, it was Maelys and Old Mother targeting their shipping, disrupting their food supply so badly that the Lysene magisters were forced to capitulate to a sellsail," Lelouch said. "A pirate, a person that makes a living stealing their wares on the high seas. I honestly think they'd have preferred surrendering to a slave. Do you imagine they'd suffer such humiliation unless their situation was anything but dire?"
Corwyn shook his head.
"When a city starves, hunger trickles up," Lelouch said. "Captain Bluebeard, signal the fleet. We are returning Lys to the king's peace."
"Aye, milord," Bluebeard said. "Brown like sand, land!"
Lelouch's Myrman drummer began to pound loudly on the kettledrum, bam-BAM bam-BAM babaBAM, and the Seafyre led the charge into Lys.
Cici swallowed her last bite and wiped her hands clean. "This shouldn't be too hard," she said.
Lelouch had some sixty-three hundred crownland levies answering to him directly, and half the Dornish contingent under Prince Lewyn added another twenty-five hundred to that. The other half had gone with the Yronwoods, thinking more glory was to be had on the mainland. Martell was gambling on the exact opposite.
Finally, her own Myrish Auxiliaries, though that was no longer an accurate name for it, had swelled to over fifteen hundred men. With every city they forced to capitulate along the Essosi shore, hundreds of new slaves flocked to her growing army.
All together, they had a little over ten thousand fighting men to bring Lys to heel with. Plus, the Iron Fleet.
By the looks of things, whatever guards and pirates the Old Mother had in the city would be too busy fighting for their own lives to notice them approaching. And even if they did notice, the chaos made it impossible for any significant resistance to form at the beaches and repel them. It was, in Cici's vast experience, one of the easiest landings to pull off on a hostile island.
"I don't understand," Corwyn said, looking at the numerous fruit trees picked clean and the blue-green waters teeming with fish. "They have all this food here… why isn't it enough?"
"Care to take a guess how many people live in the Perfumed Sister?" Cici asked.
"Five hundred thousand?"
"Try nine hundred thousand," she said.
Corwyn jerked his head back. "That's more people than in King's Landing!"
"Yup," Cici said. "Most of the Free Cities do, though the Lyseni are particularly active in that regard on account of—"
"I get it."
"—having so many whores," she finished as Corwyn continued to turn beet red. "Why does this still make you uncomfortable? Didn't you have your way with that pretty girl at the peace talks?"
"Jeyne was—"
"Jeyne?" Cici said, smirking. "You still remember her name? Awww, are you in love?"
"If you'd stop needling my brother, I would appreciate it," Lelouch said, walking up and down the line behind the rapidly expanding shieldwall. Each step of his was a concert of piano and violin to her; loud, something classical and suitably dramatic.
O Fortuna?
The gates of the city were wide open, and there wasn't anyone atop the walls of Lys to shoot down at them. "What are we even shielding against?" Corwyn asked as mounted on his chestnut charger.
Her Lelouch always planned for everything. "Maintaining formation helps keep discipline among the men," Cici said, "and when we penetrate Lovely Lys, their discipline will be tested by loot, plunder, and plenty of rape."
"Corwyn," Lelouch said, "take our knights and clear our way in, but do not advance beyond a bow's range from the gate."
"There's no glory to be had slaughtering slaves, and women at that." Corwyn slammed his visor shut and drew his sword. "Knights of Driftmark and the crownlands, to the gate!"
They left in a brief storm of hooves, kicking up sand everywhere, though Cici made sure to stay well away from them before they did. Behind them, a contingent of spears and bows followed after to fortify the gate and the walls above it.
Lelouch sidled up to her, and each quiet step he took on the sand sounded like drumbeat to her ears. "You still have your dagger?"
Cici tilted her head to the side. "Of course. I never know when I'll need something sharp and pointy to save you with."
"Velaryon!"
Cici turned around and took a step back so that Lelouch was slightly ahead of her. These lords were prickly about things like that, even the Ironborn.
"Lord Greyjoy," Lelouch said.
"This was supposed to be just another raid," Quellon Greyjoy said, kneeling down to grasp a handful of sand. "This is good sand."
"Better than Dorne's?" asked Lewyn Martell as his own galley beached near them. He jumped off the ship and landed in a crouch, clearly already feeling better from the injuries he'd taken saving the dragon boy.
Greyjoy grinned as he stood. "Much better than Dorne's, though we'll see about their women. I like some passion in mine, and it sounds like the Lyseni have unearthed a lot of that recently."
They both looked to Lelouch. "This wasn't part of the plan," Martell said.
"The plan's changed," Lelouch said. "I saw an opportunity, and I took it."
"You're making a habit of taking Free Cities," Greyjoy said. "You sure you weren't born as one of mine in a past life?"
Cici smothered her smile.
"I'm positive," Lelouch said, glancing at her. "And I didn't take Tyrosh—"
"You just talked them into letting you fuck 'em," Greyjoy said. "Same difference."
"Talking is not quite paying the iron price," Martell said.
"The iron price is stupid," Greyjoy said, shrugging. "I want my people rich in plunder and covered in glory. Why should it matter how we get it?"
"That's rather enlightened," Martell said, "for an ironborn."
Greyjoy rubbed his hands together like a child on Christmas Eve. "I've never had me a Free City before. This'll go down in the legends for sure. Quellon Greyjoy and his reavers ravaging Lys the Lovely and her pillow houses."
"We should discuss our strategy," Lelouch said.
"Strategy? Here's my strategy," Greyjoy said, pointing to the walls. "There's the bitch, now let's go impregnate her. It's simple."
"And afterwards?" Lelouch asked.
Greyjoy frowned. "Afterwards?"
"After Old Mother is dead, after Lys has fallens, after the anger dies down," Lelouch said. "What next?"
"Then we leave," Greyjoy said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Free the slaves and let them sort it out."
"You'll leave, having earned the enmity of all Lys for three generations, free and slave alike," Lelouch asid. "You want to win the war, and that's commendable, but I want to make sure we win the peace."
Greyjoy crossed his arms. "This sounds like greenlander talk."
But you haven't walked away, Lord Viking, Cici thought.
"Well, how does this sound? A free Lys that counts the Greyjoys and the Ironborn as their fast friends. You'll have a safe harbor from which to launch raids on Volantis and all the slaving fucks beyond. When you dock, your mast will be seen to every night without fail, a Lysene beauty on each arm."
"You paint a pretty picture," Greyjoy said, narrowing his eyes. "What's it going to cost?"
"Some restraint is all I ask for," Lelouch said.
"So no pillaging?"
"Oh there'll be plenty of that," Lelouch said, "and raping and murdering too, I imagine. We just need to direct it at the right sort of people."
"And that would be?" Greyjoy asked.
Lelouch smiled that beautiful smile of his, when he was about to right a wrong in the world. "Why, the rich and the powerful, of course."
The Perfumed Sister's walls were not as formidable as the fused back dragonstone of Tyrosh, but then again Lys had been a pleasure paradise for the Valyrians, not a military outpost. Still, Lys' defenses were nothing to scoff at, and it was easy to see why Old Mother had chosen to starve the city into submission rather than take it by brute force of arms.
Those defenses only counted if someone was minding them though.
Lys was spreading its legs wider than an overpaid whore by how easily Corwyn, and now everyone else really, was penetrating her. They'd landed on the easternmost tip of Lys, so there was really only one way to go: deeper into her and further west.
"If we take all the harbors, we'll trap Old Mother in this city," Lelouch said.
Then the pirate queen from Leng would be done for, and her self-interested corsairs would scatter without that critical leadership binding them together.
"Leave that to me," Greyjoy said, lifting up his round shield and axe in hand. Some of Cici's ex-slaves followed behind them, shouting for the people to put down their weapons, that peace and order was being restored to Lys, that the magisters would pay for their crimes, but so would the rioters if they did not stop resisting. The Ironborn shieldwall advanced like the vikings of old, shoving their way in hard and cutting down anyone who chose fight over flight.
There was a time when she might have felt a spark of something for the Lyseni, but that was eons ago, long before she'd met Lelouch in this life or the last.
Lelouch sighed. "A bit more brutal than I would've liked, but he's a work in progress."
"Iron doesn't turn brittle overnight," Cici said. "It takes time, and maybe some drowning."
She caught a glint of amusement in his eye before he nodded to Martell.
"Dornishmen, advance!" Martell said. Round shields crafted like the Martell sun interlocked, then advanced in a lockstep motion. Slowly, surely, like a turtle their people once so revered, the orange clad sons of the Rhoyne pushed in, shrugging away thrown rocks and fists and knives. Occasionally, a spear would lash out like a viper, striking at the feet or arms of the most aggressive rabble rousers. More often, the butt of their lemonwood spears would knock the wind out of someone, or their poles would be used to discipline the rowdy Lysene children.
This part of Lys seemed the most unruly judging by the number of trampled bodies, mangled pirate corpses, magisters stabbed half-a-hundred times, and children hanging by their soft silks.
Some, mostly women and children, complied with the calls to stand down. These Lelouch made sure to treat with a gentle hand, taking them safely behind their lines. Food was offered freely, and protection too.
To the slaves who'd been mistreated their whole lives, Lelouch must have seemed an angel.
A fallen angel, maybe, Cici thought. But you had to be. The best of intentions were strangled in imperfect, cruel worlds unless you struggled.
Movement caught the corner of her eye.
It was a boy, no older than ten, moving in slow, pained motions you'd think he was an old man with old bones. "Please, help me!"
One of her people approached him. "Come, there is food this way, and healers if you—"
The boy pushed through despite the pain, reaching out to grab the sleeve of her dress like a drowning man reached for driftwood. "Please, my sister…"
His blood thrummed. There was promise here… power. Oh, it was but a faint plucking, a softly strummed guitar, but it was there. Cici considered him again, a head of moonlight mixed with honey and eyes like the summer sky with a hint of Valryian twilight in them.
"What's your name?" Cici asked.
"Darys," the boy said bitterly, like it was a curse.
Ironic, Cici thought. "You were saying about your sister?"
"We were separated before the mobs went wild," Darys said, eyes locked in a staring contest with the cobblestone. "She's with the master, but…"
"But masters are dying like flies lately," Cici said. "Do you know where?"
He shook his head. "I know not the name, but I can take you there. Please, she's only a girl of nine."
Cici let out a high-pitched whistle and a score of her men and women appeared at her side. "We're going on a little sidequest."
-ZeroRequiem-
Corwyn eyed the motley crew with apprehension. "Lelouch will not like this."
Sending his brother's lover into this wilderness of a city with nothing but some freshly freed collars and a boy of ten with the look of old Valyria?
He shook his head. "Lelouch won't like this at all."
"It's not up to him," Cici said. "I'm going."
"At least wait for the city to cool off a bit more," Corwyn said, tugging at his silver hair with both hands.
The boy said something in the flowing, liquid dialect of Lys.
"It will be too late when the danger has passed," Cici said. "No, I'm leaving now. You're welcome to join us if you're so worried."
"This is a fool's task," Corwyn protested.
"All adventures are in the story of knights," Cici said. "That's what makes them interesting, the uncertainty of the outcome."
Corwyn glanced at the burned wreckage not far from him so recently put out by the adhoc water brigade. They'd found charred bodies inside… children by the size of them, though there wasn't enough to say if they were born high or low. He grimaced. "The outcome of being burned or butchered by this mob of peasants?"
"We've got spears, and they have knives," Cici said. "Or are you telling me the big brave knight in his fancy armor is scared of some smallfolk?"
Was this all a mummer's farce to her? Corwyn shook his head and turned to Ser Dennis, the Knight of the Seax. "Ser Dennis, inform my brother of this foolishness if you would. I will venture out with Lady Cici to keep her from harm."
He might not be a knight yet, but he was a squire of Lord Leyton Hightower and the second son of Jaron Velaryon. No ex-slave could offer protection better than a man in a plate of glittering steel.
"You compound the things Lord Lelouch would find objectionable about this," Ser Dennis said. "You ought to at least bring more men with."
"They'll only slow us down," Cici said, already walking away with the boy in tow.
Corwyn groaned in frustration. "Insufferable witch. They're leaving now, there's no time to rally more men. I will have to do."
Ser Dennis nodded. "Tides take you, my lord."
"Where it flows, Ser Dennis," Corwyn said as he ran up to Cici who'd slipped into an alley that branched away from the main streets. He unsheathed his sword as he stepped over a slumped woman, bruised and bleeding between her legs. "Where are we even going?"
"To a master's house where winter roses bloom," Cici said cryptically.
More of her madness. Winter roses didn't grow, much less bloom, in tropical climates. Why did you have to fall in love with a crazy person, Brother.
They drifted further and further from the drums and trumpets and the words of great houses. The further they drifted, the deeper his grimace became.
The spring heat did things to men's minds, and it was a hot spring that promised a scorching summer.
Lys was old and decadent and vain, perpetually teetering like a tower built on rotting wood. It's collapse had come suddenly, violently, but not without prodigies and portents enough. The air was a dark, angry, choking thing, filled with smoke and the foul stench of fish and other rotting things. Centuries of degeneracy, moral decay, and slavery finally swept clean by blood and fire.
Each person did as they saw fit. A hundred thousand angry voices blurred into an indecipherable, omnipresent noise.
Broken bodies at the hands of a broken people blanketed the streets. People choked on silk scarves. Manses were burned. He heard the sound of whips from a public square where a crowd had formed. They cheered as a man was scourged to death before their eyes.
Vultures cried overhead. The rats grew fat. Blood seeped into the cracks and crevices of cobblestone.
If this is what a just war looks like, Corwyn thought, I dread to see what just a war is.
It was luck and by the Mother's merciful hand they'd not run into anyone willing to test them, though a few seemed to consider it. Always, Cici would bark something out in a strange, guttural tongue that he knew was Lysene, yet sounded nothing like it. Always, the people would run rather than die.
In the moments between those, Cici would speak to the boy, Darys, in a gentle tone.
"What have you found out?" Corwyn asked.
"He's a mummer," Cici said, "or he used to be, before his old master sold him and his sister for a considerable sum. To a foreigner too, though Darys does not know from where he came."
"What of his parents?"
"What of them?" Cici asked. "Dead, most likely. If he ever knew them that is. Oh, we're here."
Corwyn blinked.
The house Darys brought them to was… pristine, somehow, with winter roses blooming in its garden. This deep into Lys, its serenity bothered Corwyn more than the charred husks besides it. He wasn't the only one judging by the murmured words and tense stances of Cici's score.
"What now?" Corwyn asked.
"What else? We go onwards," Cici said.
Three of them stepped forward, but no one else. "Just us?" Corwyn asked, glancing at the guards rooted in their spots.
"You're a squire in glittering steel, and the master will be a fat man in silks," Cici said. "Or are you telling me the big brave knight in his fancy armor is scared of a coin counter?"
He grunted and barrelled past her, trying the door, but it was locked shut. Corwyn gripped his sword with both hands—
Cici placed a hand on his arm. "Let's try knocking first, shall we? There's no reason not to be civil. Just don't eat or drink anything he offers."
"You think he'd poison us, and still you'd offer him courtesy?" Corwyn asked incredulously.
"If I was uncouth to everyone trying to kill me, you'd never see me behaving," she said.
Darys put on a brave face as she knocked, but the shake in his hands would not leave him.
"Westerosi?" a voice like velvet called out.
"One of us is," Cici replied. "We found your wayward king."
The man laughed cheerily. "He is king no longer. I've had my use of him."
"He might surprise you," Cici said.
"I doubt that." The door's lock unlatched and it creaked open. The man was thin, not fat, and dressed in linen, not silk. "You, on the other hand, might do the trick. Please, come in."
The hall was lined with low burning candles, yet when Corwyn stepped inside he could barely see his feet. Keeping to the walls covered in warm dust, he crept along the halls behind Cici, squinting as his eyes tried to make out anything in the dark that would not end.
"Your accent is Myrish," Cici said. "What brings you so far away from home, master?"
"I am no master, not yet," he said. "Just an adept, however skilled I am. There is another greater than I who resides in Myr, and he foresaw its destruction at the hands of your lord."
Corwyn's hairs rose. Magic?
"Prophecies are dangerous things," Cici said. "Run from it and it finds you. Run towards it and it eludes you."
"Very wise," the Adept said. "It certainly found me here, a city in passion stained red. Next will be Myr, I think, as the city of slavers turned black. Then a third, though the words elude me."
"There are many cities of slavers," Cici said. "Volantis, Qarth, those of Slaver's Bay…"
"Lelouch Velaryon has no quarrel with them," the Adept said.
"Not yet," Cici said.
"You had a slave girl," Corwyn said, finding his voice small in the encroaching darkness.
Finally, they reached the end of the hall and entered into a round chamber filled with tomes and tonics, bubbling reagents and crushed leaves, flowers, and roots. In the center was a glass candle, cracked and unlit.
"I used to," the Adept answered, walking over to a table and stirring his tonics, "but her blood was weaker than the boy's even. I have no use for useless things."
"Where is she now?" Cici asked.
The Adept did not answer. Instead, he held out a goblet to each of them. "Are you thirsty? I'd be a poor host if I didn't offer you something to drink."
Cici accepted hers, smiled at Corwyn, and—
The Adept screamed as his tonic splashed his face, stumbling backwards into a heap.
Cici stood over him, drawing a dagger from her sleeve, and planted her foot on his neck. "You should really know better than to leave the ingredients of your tonics out in the open. Someone might see," she said.
"It was just tea!"
"A very hot tea," Cici said. "Something to leave us immobile and speechless?"
The Adept bit his tongue.
"Now the girl, where is she?" Cici asked, leaning down to press the dagger against his face.
The man blurted out something in Lyseni, then the boy, Darys was on the Adept in an instant, bringing both his fists together. He smashed down once, twice, thrice—
—and Corwyn reached out, putting a stop to this madness. It seemed to grow noisier outside.
Darys glared at him, screaming something unintelligible to his ears.
"He took my future, my family," Cici said. "He is a slaver, an abomination against your gods. Why do you stop me?"
"This is not justice, just revenge," Corwyn said.
"Then who ought to judge him?" Darys said and Cici translated.
"One wiser than any of us," Corwyn said. "My brother, Lelouch Velaryon."
Cici seemed to find that amusing, but she repeated his words nonetheless. Then, she added a few more of her own.
Darys stared at her for a long while before standing.
"What did you say to him?" Corwyn asked. I really need to learn some Valyrian.
"That we might find his sister yet," Cici said. "The Adept sold her to a brothel, though he doesn't remember which one. Still, I'm sure a pleasant stroll seeing the sights of Lys will jog his memory."
Corwyn pulled the man to his feet, keeping his sword to the man's throat as they made their way outside. Ash, he realized. The walls were covered in ash, not warm dust.
It seemed whatever vile magic had been placed on the house faded, for a crowd had gathered and kept barely at bay by Cici's men and women. It was smaller than those they'd seen on the way here.
They shouted something, and Cici replied calmly. A path formed, and then the house went up in flames behind them.
"What did they want?" Corwyn asked.
"To burn the manse," Cici said.
"And you just let them? We're supposed to be returning this city to order, not helping the people burn more of it down," Corwyn said.
"We're also to channel anger at the rich and powerful," Cici said. "Besides, our guest will be dead soon enough. As far as I'm concerned, the house is free real estate. Let the people do as they wish and release some of their anger on something acceptable."
The smoky skies were beginning to clear and the crowds seemed to be settling down other than the occasional lynching. It didn't take much longer to find Darys' sister afterwards. She was a small thing, with big blue eyes that looked hollow and pale gold for hair streaked with silver.
She looked almost like Alarra when she was younger, if not for the golden hair.
Darys kept murmuring to her, but she was insensate. The only word he understood of it all was "Serra".
-ZeroRequiem-
Darys held tightly to her sister's hand as the squire carried her in his arms. She remained unresponsive to his calls, put into stupor by some foul drink they gave young girls in the brothels.
Darys scowled and glanced behind him, where the master and madame were bound and held at spearpoint. At least those responsible will face justice for this.
The city seemed to have been drained of its anger, but what it left in its wake was a scarred land that would take decades to truly heal. Though he was not sure what awaited Lys after this day. There didn't seem a single living magister left, and he'd heard rumors the Old Mother was found trampled, her guards either overrun or abandoning her as she fled to the docks.
They reached the public forum at last where the banners of the Seahorse flew from atop buildings.
A carpet had been laid out to the side, with tapestries piled high on it.
In the center of it all, surrounded by men in steel and a crown of his people, was the one they called Lelouch Velaryon. Though his hair was black as night, he was without doubt from the blood of Old Valyria. His eyes and the manner he held himself spoke of his long lineage.
As Cici described to Lelouch all that had come to pass, his face grew wroth. His justice was swift for the crime of slavery, drawing his sword in a smooth arc and opened up the master and madame in six long strikes.
Cici and the squire, Corwyn, fell silent at his actions, impressed as Darys by his decisiveness no doubt.
Darys kneeled before him. "Truly, you are a man more worthy to be named king than I."
"I'm just a man," Lelouch said, without the faintest hint he was not Lyseni.
"If you are just a man, then so am I," Darys declared. "Your people tell me I am free now?"
"It is so."
"Then of my own free will I spit on the name Darys," the boy said.
"You will need a new name," Lelouch said.
Valar means all men, the boy thought. "I shall be named Varys," the boy said, and Varys liked the sound of it.