The pirate queen remained on board, watching her raiders spill into the streets of Yin.
It felt unnatural, mooring in the bay with the pirate colours tattered and proud, caught by a stiff breeze. During the last trade with the emperor of Yin she'd been forced to fly Dornish flags and attend with a single vessel. That's how the free folk liked their pirates – safe in mummer's dress.
Safety was an illusion.
If she'd wanted this city there'd have been a slaughter long ago. Rich men were soft and easy to kill but without their great cities in the East to buy her wares the pirate-way of life collapsed. No more money to fill their holds. Her mother taught her that piracy was a business. Today they would be rich, picking the bones of Yin. Tomorrow – if there was a tomorrow – they'd starve in its ruins keeping company with rats.
The silence made her uncomfortable. Death wandered over the world, getting closer to the water. Not even pirates could ignore it forever. Perhaps that's why she hadn't killed the foreigner as the others had wished. Fate was a filthy word to the men of the sea. It was a mistress that fucked with their lives, tore their ships and turned them into drowned corpses unable to rise from the depths.
And yet...
Something cold and wet hit her neck. She brushed it away. It happened again. Flecks of white filled the air. Feathers? No... Tiny pieces of ice. Shadows of the great hail stones from the summer storms. This must be snow.
A storm cloud lingered over head. It came from the North with a blue heart and white edges, churning as it clawed toward the fleet.
First came the wind. It hit their sails hard, filling them, tilting the ships enough to send men rolling over the deck. One crashed straight through the side and vanished into the water. The pirate queen held fast to the rail, groaning as her feet went from beneath her. Then it finished. The ship righted and the sails went limp. The cold stayed, as did the fine flurry of snow.
"Captain?" One of her navigators helped her to stand while others rushed to throw ropes to the pirate. "The gods watch us."
"If the gods ever gave a fuck about the city, it's too late now," she pushed him away. "Back to your men. Soon as the raiding parties return, we leave this cursed place."
"Captain..." he man lingered, unsettled. "It's – snowing in the East."
"It'll be snowing in your arse if you don't do as I ask."
WINTERFELL – THE NORTH
Brienne of Tarth cleaned her sword in the snow, leaving a stain. Oathkeeper emerged unblemished, gleaming under the filtered light streaming through the canopy of snow pines. Stannis Baratheon lay in several pieces at her feet. She'd seen a flicker of the brother in his his eyes as the head rolled away. Now, there was nothing left of Renly.
The victory was empty.
Renly's death could not fully be avenged while the Red Witch lived. She'd see her severed her head join Stannis in the snow or maybe she'd tie her mortal flesh to a pyre and watch it burn – a fitting end to a monster.
Brienne sheathed the Valyrian sword. In the distance, a storm of hooves cut through the silence of the forest. Roose Bolton and his men were heading to the protection of Winterfell. Stannis' army lay slaughtered. The few survivors were gathered up and tethered to horses. They'd be publicly flayed and burned – lanterns for the cold nights which were getting longer. There was no honour in the Bolton house. They were torturers, murderers and squatters. Some said they were bastard Walkers – half creatures that stole skins and wore them from one life to the next.
Winterfell.
Everyone heard the stories of the great Northern lords and their castle in the snow. According to her father it was built from ice and had walls a hundred feet tall. In reality it was a sad looking thing, grey and bleak, partially destroyed from the Greyjoy raid. Corpses were hung along the outside of the wall. Skinned. Frozen through. The only redeeming quality was bank of pines circling it. They were unnaturally green for this part of the world with enough deer and rabbit to stop Winterfell from starving in the winter.
She tore her eyes away from it and knelt down to start the unpleasant duty of searching Stannis' corpse. He was a tall man with tight armour that had to be wrestled off before she could reach the pockets and small pouches stitched into his clothes. It wasn't much. A small amount of dried fruits which she ate immediately, enough coin to buy a horse and leather maps that would require studying.
The pine forest was green because of the warmth, Brienne realised, as she ventured deeper into the woods. Night was coming faster than she'd expected and with so much meat laying in the snow, the wolves would be on their way down from the mountains. She could hear them howling to each other. Forming packs.
When it was nearly black and the snow started, she happened upon a small pool of water with a layer of steam rising from the surface. A great, red tree arched over it, dropping fading leaves onto the surface like tears.
"A Weirwood tree," she whispered. It was gnarled by age and a strange mix of grotesque beauty. The face carved into its trunk was caught in a silent scream as if a child of the forest had been burned into the wood for all time. She reached out, pressing her hand to it. Brienne knew well enough the power of magic. If a shadow could wield a blade then a tree could whisper secrets. She rested her head against it, closed her eyes and listened. She must have slept because she awoke to snow and a swarm of glowing insects, dancing over the waters of the pond in a frenzied dance.
Screams echoed from Winterfell as Stannis' men had their flesh torn off.
YEEN, SOTHORYOS
"Pull him up! You there – help the man. Come on!" Varys staggered wildly about on deck. He as a vision in yellow silk, embroidered with the Targaryen dragons. If there was one thing that Varys knew how to do, it was pander to the ego of kings – or queens as the case may be.
The vessel rocked as Unsullied scrambled to pull Grey Worm out of the water. He emerged pale and crinkled. Missandei was beside him, needlessly fussing.
"The queen," Varys insisted, shoving Missandei away, interested in nothing else.
"We must take ships to beach." Grey Worm insisted, trying to stand. He fell immediately to his knees and coughed up half the Summer Isle. "Forest men. They come. They corner us on beach and kill many men. The queen."
"Grey Worm – what happened to the queen?" Varys stood up and shouted, "Let out the sales!"
"The queen, Jorah the Andal and small man all on beach. Jorah – he told me to swim."
An explosion of fire consumed the beach. Wverybody ducked involuntarily with the noise. Varys turned to watch a pair of dragons swoop and dive over the distant beach, streams of fire coming from their mouths. He didn't know what to say. He'd wanted this – worked for a return of a dragon queen to unite the warring kingdoms but to see the power of a real dragon – the truly wild violence – was a shock. They were not weapons or political games, they were animals and he'd let this one loose.
YIN, YI TI
While the pirates had their fill of the palace, Daario wandered from room to room, following the ornate panels set into the walls. He couldn't read the inscriptions but far as he could guess they were telling a history of the world from further back than any of the maesters in Old Town. Some of the stories he recognised from children's songs, others were foreign.
The most startling was a wall of black ice with five forts rearing up from the sand – ghastly things. At first he'd thought it a crude depiction of The Wall but this was different. Surrounding the structures were fields of diamond-embossed grass. He'd reached forward to touch the glimmering surface when he heard pottery smash nearby.
"I said, 'don't break anything'!" Daario sighed and wandered toward the noise. Stealing was bad enough but there was no need to lay waste to a treasure like this. "Come on – go out into the city with the rest of the -"
Daario stopped. The room was empty. A shattered bowl lay on the floor, shivering from the break. There were no pirates here. Priceless jewelled relics were untouched, covered in dust. Daario felt for the hilt of his sword and groaned when he remembered that it was locked away on the ship. The pirate queen didn't trust him with a blade. He made do with an ancient, curved sword with a golden handle mounted on the wall. He yanked it free with a shower of dust. It was blunt but better than his bare hands.
"Show yourself then," Daario insisted. "Life's too short to dance the shadows. If you mean no harm, I'll do none to you."
Nothing.
Daario frowned, edging into the room. The further he went the darker it became. Dozens of silk curtains rustled in the breeze. He twitched at each movement, eyes darting from shadow to shadow. He hated this.
"Friendly or not, if you don't show yourself I'm going to give you one hell of a thrashing."
There it was. A set of eyes in the dark. Blue eyes, peering from far side of the room. A child, he guessed. Daario lowered his sword and offered his hand. "You don't have to be afraid of me," he promised, cooing as Dany did with her dragons. "Is this your home?" He followed it with a poorly pronounced phrase in the Eastern tongue. They eyes backed away, nearly vanishing.
Daario was about to follow when a hand grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him away.
"Raven's arse!" Daario shouted in fright.
The arm belonged to the largest pirate in the fleet. Whitewash they called him, on account of the shoulder length bleached hair, braided with shells. He had red eyes and a temper to match – probably a dragon bastard. There were many of them in this part of the world. A few banded together a while back and roamed the free world under the name Blackfyre. He'd worked for one in Myr and learned that there was nothing more savage than a famous name.
"Demon..." Whitewash pointed his broadsword at the eyes.
"It's a child," Daario insisted. "Probably scared half to death by your lot trampling around the city."
Whitewash shook his head and tried to push Daario behind him. "No," was all he said.
The next thing Daario saw was a silver flash as Whitewash brought his sword down an inch from his nose. The set of blue eyes had moved, erupting from the shadows like a snake – throwing itself at them with teeth and claws. It was child-like but possessed with some form of unholy rage. The force of its impact on Whitewash's sword pushed them both onto their backs with the creature gnashing at their faces. Daario swung his blunt weapon, knocking it off long enough for them to stumble to their feet. It was on them again. Its rotten, black teeth went straight for Daario's neck but Whitewash near cut the thing in half, his sword stuck half way through its back bone. It smiled malevolently before falling to the ground – twitching.
"The fuck was that!" Daario rapidly retreated, wary of the shadows.
Whitewash prodded it with his sword. "Demon." He'd never been a man of many words.
They left the dead thing writhing on the floor and returned to the ships. Daario paused to watch snow falling over the harbour as if they were in bloody Lorath. Already the golden city was vanishing beneath its white coat, like a scene from one of its story panels. "Where are the raiders?" he asked, hand curling around one of the ship's ropes.
The pirate queen leaned over the rail. "They went back. There is more gold here than our ships can carry. We're switching the fleet over."
"Call to them. We have to leave this place."
She laughed. "I could not bring them back if I wished. They are pirates not soldiers. Leave your sword on the wharf."
"This thing?" Daario held it up. "Don't you want to melt it down?"
"Keep it then," she laughed. It was a useless anyway.
Daario kept to his cabin, locked away in the windowless room with an upturned wine barrel as a table and straw mattress pushed to the side. He'd traded the sword for candles and sat with the old pirate maps, learning the lay of the East. As a sellsword he'd travelled far, often on the pay of generals. They had maps, of course but none as detailed as these. The pirates had been pillaging the world for hundreds of years and had kept track of places that empire-employed cartographers lost track of. There were dozens of towns he'd never heard of – the last known locations of roving tribes and abandoned settlements that could be used as safe harbour.
There it was.
Far inland to the north of Yi Ti, 'The Burned Wall' ran from the base of the Bleeding Sea to the mountains of the Shadow Lands, keeping The Grey Waste segregated from the rest of the continent. The pirates had labelled it as worthless land full of flesh-eating criminals. They were probably right.
Knock. Knock.
"Yeah," Daario replied. Whitewash entered, stooping to clear the doorway. He couldn't stand so he sat on the floor in front of the wine barrel. "Was there something I can do for you?" Daario asked, when his guest offered no explanation for his unlikely presence.
"The snow," he started. Words ground in his throat as if it weren't used to making them. When he spoke, it was with the faintest memory of nobility. Once, perhaps, he'd been someone's son. "It is not the first time for these waters."
"In all my years I have never hear of snow at the Jade Sea. The water is too warm and there are enormous deserts and half a world between us and the frozen worlds of the North."
"In stories," he continued. "I remember the ones about the snow."
"Bedtime stories to frighten small children?"
"The same as yours – is there not truth in those?" The pirate had a point. "Our stories are of the the golden age when immortal kings ruled the realms of men. Glorious kings of unimaginable wealth."
Figures, thought Daario. This part of the world was fascinated by trinkets.
"A long, dark night came to punish their greed."
Daario looked up, caught by the strange, red eyes of his companion. "Those are more than children's stories I think," Daario replied, running his fingers through the candle's flame. Did this pirate see things in the flame? This part of the world was rife with sorcery. The realisation stilled Daario's fingers in the flame. Whitewash was afraid of him. "Gods!" he growled, when his flesh started to burn.
"Careful, fire burns anything that gets too close."
Whitewash had seen Daario in a fever dream while he lay with death after a shipwreck. Daario had been younger, with long dark hair worn the Northern way. He stood at the helm of a fleet, flying the blood-stained colours of the Greyjoy banner. Drowned men. The scourge of the seas. Led by a pirate king with lust for power that reached far beyond the Iron Throne. A patient, accomplished liar with charm to spare and a dragon in tow. He was a ghost made flesh. Here he sat, two feet away. The pirate king and a wolf amongst the sheep.
"A common problem in the company of dragons," Daario brushed it off. "This one's from last month." He showed off a larger burn on his forearm.
"The dragon ate three of the men last night – our lookouts in the crows nest. I was aboard The Dying Seal and watched it circle and drag them from the mast, screaming."
"There's nothing else to eat. The seas are filth and the land picked clean by something far worse than a dragon."
"Is that why you won't go back into the city with the raiding parties?"
"Is that why you won't?"
Whitewash offered a smile. "I'm not in it for the money." He looked to the maps. "You'll not find answers on this side of the sea," he added. "The North remembers, the East moves on."
Daario folded up the maps. "I'll see if I can do something about the dragon."
The pirate nodded and left.
Dragons were worse than cats. Impossible to control, fundamentally wild and invariably dangerous. Viserion was the poorest example. He was latched onto one of the cliffs surrounding the city, chasing gulls. A hail or rock fell into the water below as he scraped at their nests, shoving his snout into the hollows of rock.
He'd dug out a bit of a nest on the shore. It contained an orgy of murder – including a severed arm with teeth marks on the bone.
"Viserion!" Daario shouted, walking the beach at the furthest edge of the city. "You bastard. Get down from there! Leave the poor things alone."
The gulls screeched, circling the dragon in a viscous swarm of feather and noise.
"Of all the Targaryen blood, you went and got the mad batch. Not your fault. Your mother shouldn't have named you after such a crazy fuck."
Viserion's golden scales were nearly the same shade as the city, as if he were born to roam this corner of the world. Just as Daario had given up and begun the long walk back to the city, the creature landed on the beach. He felt the rush of wind on his back and smiled to himself. He was no dragon rider but he certainly had some kind of connection to the creature.
He turned and could have sworn that the dragon sported a guilty look aided by a seagull wing stuck in its jaw.
"Quit eating the pirates," he instructed the dragon sternly. "Now, I've gone and got you a cow. Stick to that, yeah?"
The dragon saw the cow tethered a boulder. It chirped at Daario, tilting its enormous head from side to side so that its neck writhed like a snake. It was almost mesmerising.
"Good, I'm glad we understand each other. And don't sleep on the beach – you hear?"
WINTERFELL – THE NORTH
The Weirwood leaves on the lake sank below the surface. Its water began to boil, scaring off the insects that had been living off its warmth. Brienne woke to the noise. In the dark, with snow falling heavy, the mysterious pool at the centre of the wood raged.
It spat hot water at the edges, quickly melting the ice and stripping it back to bare rock. What once had been concealed was now shown to be a man-made rockery, encircling the pond. It almost looked like an entrance to a tomb with the beginnings of steps leading into the water to Brienne's left.
She sat up and stared at the strange sight. A flooded tomb guarded by an ancient tree and... Brienne lit a torch fashioned from pine and moved over to the far side of the pond. It was a mess of scrappy forest brambles but directly opposite the tree she found a smooth rock. Brienne held the flame to the stone, melting the thick layers of ice. The rock was covered an another layer of half-frozen moss which she scraped away with her hunting knife in thick, foul-smelling clumps.
King of Winter
Brienne chiselled away the rest of the muck, throwing her flaming torch in the snow where it burned under its own magic.
Brandon Stark – The Breaker
Then the symbol of a horn. Not one of her father's stories then. The rock beneath her feet was real and so was the tomb. The bones of Brandon Stark were safe beneath the melted snow.
Under those dark, boiling waters was a shaft. The steps led down into it, twenty feet at least before it flattened into a tunnel with life-sized statues of distant Stark relatives, drowned and surrounded by pond life. At the end, a stone sarcophagus with the image of Brandon Stark, laid peacefully on its lid. From there, another sets of steps led up, out of the flooded crypt and into the depths of Winterfell where a dragon slept.
