Missandei
They had not long lingered on Ghaston Grey. The place was broken, devoid of hope. There was precious little shelter from the cold and the wind as well- it turned out that what remained of Sunspear's court had been living in holes dug into the floors of what ruins littered the island's sharp rocky sand. The voyage west was conducted with the same disciplined seamanship Missandei had observed as the one that had taken them from the shores of the Tor to Ghaston Grey itself.
"Straight west, and into the setting sun." she'd heard Lord Jordayne say once. "Aye, but not much sun to set, is there?" his captain had replied, looking wistful. In the end they'd simply gone by the coast until they could make out the opposite shore off on the northern horizon. "Soon the mountains will loom up and we'll not need the sun to go by." Lord Jordayne said with grim satisfaction. The hairs on the back of Missandei's neck stood up. The sun is the sigil of House Martell, shrunk now to two illegitimate daughters of a second sun shivering belowdecks. She was no navigator, no sailor and certainly no soldier, so Missandei returned to the cabin she shared with Torgo Nudho. On the Jordayne flagship too were the Allyrions, telling the rest of the ship about the army of the dead they'd seen off at Godsgrace, as well as the family of orphans whose poleboat had gotten Missandei that far.
"We'll must needs pass close by Yronwood." Yns Allyrion said one night. "My father-"
"will not have stood idle all these years with war simmering like a pot ready to boil over. Prince Doran will have given him more men than even Anders Yronwood would have known what to do with. No doubt he's got them all somewhere in the mountains, ready to cause some real mischief." her husband told her gently. Missandei drew another strand in the great web that stood in her mind, linking houses Allyrion and Yronwood. Strands the Others seem to cut in moments that took years and more to spin. While the Dornishmen were content to spend the voyage talking all the while, Torgo Nudho was close-mouthed even for an Unsullied. Or whatever he is now. Whenever she chanced to near him, he slipped a hand into hers or an arm about her waist when it came time to sleep. Perhaps he's gathering himself, she wondered. I doubt he expected to see me again. He seemed unable to choose his words, so in the end he went with something that in Missandei's opinion was rather trivial.
"How did it come to this for you?" he asked her one night, as they lay on a spare bed.
"Her Grace spoke of a darkness that once swept over these lands."
"I saw the scratches and the colors left on the walls of the cavern beneath Dragonstone." Torgo Nudho nodded. "Cold things that drove the dead."
"That drive them. They do it still and are no story." Missandei amended. She looked at her hand, at the half-grown nails fighting to emerge from the flesh of her fingers. She sat up and looked down at the wounds sunk into her chest, the ragged weeping pair of holes reduced to dark hollows like the empty sockets of a skull. "One among them found me at the top of the Tower of the Sun. She wore a fair and slight façade…but her real shape was neither fair nor slight." She swallowed. "She was as much spider as Other, as the Westerosi call them. Legs, fangs…" she touched the holes the Weaver's bite had left, "…eyes. A thousand eyes, it seemed, though that might have been the shock of being bitten. The wind-thing in her wake spoke the Common Tongue and called her the Weaver." Then she found herself describing the ruin that had once been a princess, a pitiless cursed thing reaching for vengeance.
"They cannot have known that you survived." Torgo Nudho said, stony affect well in place. Missandei gave a rueful smile.
"Perhaps the torn cocoon will be a hint." That made him swallow, an uncharacteristic chink in the wall of granite that was the Unsullied training.
"Well, to know your own strength, you must look at who opposes you." "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"No. It's supposed to make you feel resolved. These things that came out of the darkness, they exist to kill. To end all that they fall upon. Yet, you live, Missandei of Naath. You blunted their one and only purpose." She felt his fingers brush at the frizzy fuzz that had come in on her scalp.
"Naath is the Island of Butterflies, and what are butterflies but life taking on a new shape?" Missandei gave a wry smile.
"Perhaps, but I'd rather not be a butterfly with spiders weaving their webs all around me and cold hungry winds seeking to shred my silken wings." She lay back down. "Butterflies might scare slavers, but not the Weaver." He was quiet for a time, content to hold her, speaking only when she bade him. "There were other things as well. A male Other, a spearman, who felled Obara Sand. Hungry things with huge mouths and long spindly limbs…who failed to see me when a blind man could have. They were men among their race too…but a mother-to-be had taken up in one of the city's stables, turning it into a larder of horsemeat." Torgo Nudho said nothing as Missandei had expected- what was there to say in the first place? Then his hand slowly rose out of hers and up her arm, clapping on her shoulder so loud it made Missandei flinch.
"You are cold." he said.
"We all are."
"No, you are cold, Missandei of Naath. Your skin is cold, your flesh is cold." She blinked.
"What?" Then she remembered the hours, the days after the Tower of the Sun. When I felt no cold until at last the Weaver's venom began to fade. "What of it? The Weaver was colder than I am now, the brutes as well."
"Cold enough to stand out in sharp relief, I am sure. Not so with you. You're cold, but not that cold. It may have been the creatures were looking for the warmth of a living body, unmistakable to their eyes. Why would they have expected someone with cold venom in her veins, dulling the heat in her blood and the warmth in her flesh? Had they been looking for you the way we do, surely they would have seen you, as you said. But their hunger was your ally. Hoping for an easy meal ripe for the devouring, they missed the Naathi in their midst."
"They had noses too, how could those have failed them?" "Maybe the venom made you smell cold, too. No different from the rocks you hid in. In looking for a brushfire, they missed a lone candle." He kissed her shoulder. "For which I will be ever grateful."
Ryon Allyrion had figured it well when they began to sail past the coastline it was supposed belonged to Yronwood.
"Which isn't a given, I'll add." he said, seeming hell-bent on making sure his wife felt certain there was nothing to be gained in calling on the castle of her birth. "Yronwood isn't on the water as the Tor is, anyhow. We'd have to go overland to get there and we're in no fit shape for that, even if we'd kept the mules."
"Any castle surrounded for leagues by flat desert is nothing to us. If the dead can pile up a hundred deep around it in every direction, it is no sanctuary." Missandei added, coming up from belowdecks with Torgo Nudho behind her. "The Red Mountains will allow them no such advantage." She looked at them, looming ever closer as they wormed their way inland.
"The best I can figure, the two closest castles are Kingsgrave to the north and Skyreach to the south. Neither closer than the other, though, so which is the one we go for?" one of the Allyrion boys asked, poring over a map. Missandei looked over his shoulder.
"Skyreach gets us nowhere but closer to the very sands we've just fled. Kingsgrave is closer to the rest of Westeros and further from the dead men both." she said. When no one spoke to countermand her, she felt rather self-conscious.
"Do you think my lord father will be there?" Lady Yns asked, in a small voice.
"I suppose. The Dornish lords were mobilizing to march on the Reach in defiance of the Lannister-held Iron Throne, yes? The Red Mountains are an ideal place to hide such an army, as your husband pointed out. Even if he's not at Kingsgrave while his forces watch the Prince's Pass, if we make our way through the mountains as we plan to no doubt his army will find us."
"Aye, but who's to say he's not all that finds us?" Gyress muttered, eyes on the foothills growing steadily steeper on either shore.
"I see no mob of dead, nor the stirred stand that betrays one's passing." Missandei replied. "Furthermore, we'll better spend our time getting ourselves where they cannot pursue than sitting here brooding on fortune's ill turns. At least we're alive to do it." She made no mention of the fact that none of the Dornish lords were of the mountains, had likely spent only as much time in the red passes as was necessary to get where they were going. I pray the lords of the Red Mountains fared better after all or we've simply taken the longer road to nowhere.
"Will there be somewhere to dock, or will we be wading ashore?" Lord Trebor asked, looking singularly unsuited for putting up with the wind's cold bite through soaking garb.
"I'll wager we'll not want for a place to dock." The captain seemed to think it was almost a given.
"How do you know?" his lord asked.
"This is the closest water to both Skyreach and Kingsgrave, as we've well been over. It isn't in the nature of the highborn to do without, even when that means building flea-tiny port towns in the arsecrack of a bloody mountain range. We'll find more than a few no doubt, on both sides of the river. Castles need supplies after all, and it beats bringing them in from overland." Trebor Jordayne blinked.
"One might think you've been down this way before, in less than savory circumstances."
"Might be I have, once upon a long-gone summer. Bit of honest smuggling never hurt nobody, and neither castle was like to rat out the other's, ah, hired hands for fear of losing their own handy access to cheap goods. I'll wager not a Fowler nor a Manwoody paid half what some true kings have for a few bolts of silk, a square of glass, what have you." His stony face had become a smirk. He knows exactly where he's going, Missandei thought.
A scant day later and they were easing up to a miniscule dock scarcely big enough for a fishing sloop, let alone a proper ship. The captain gave a low exhale when the ship stopped.
"Nice and easy. The Sea Snake couldn't have done better." With rather an impressed look on his face, Lord Trebor put a hand on the man's shoulder.
"Well done." "We're still too big for the dock, no matter the skill behind the docking. We'd best disembark and make room for the other ships, then start up into the mountains before aught else befalls us." Missandei said, wasting no time in following the first deckhands down the plank onto the rough wood of the dock. It struck her then that her shoes were little more than slippers, as it had been boats and mules carrying her thus far. Perhaps if we spot some dead men, I can steal a pair of boots, she mused. Still poring over her frayed shoes, she heard a gruff voice call out from one of the huts that honeycombed the rising path into the Red Mountains proper.
"Who are you?" She looked up.
"Who asks?" Torgo Nudho said, sounding a bit on edge.
"Eh, heh, very fucking funny. A right fucking mummer you are-"
"Borlane, shut your head." A young woman's voice snapped from the hut across the way.
"Come over here and make me, maybe I'll right and bloody well shut something of yours."
"A mummer. Yes. I have many jokes. What's funnier than a pair of talking houses?" Torgo Nudho cut through their arguing. "A pair of cold monsters knocking them down." He stepped up to the first hut.
"Bloody hell, you're not no Gilded Comp'ny."
"I am." Torgo Nudho replied.
"Horseshit, I've seen them myself-"
"You saw the Golden Company. I did not claim to be a man of the Golden Company." An old man with flyaway hair stuck his head out his window suspiciously.
"Then what's all this shite about the Gilded Comp'ny?"
"Nothing but what I decided just now. It is a joke. Now you laugh." The old man gaped at him. "Ha ha. I've had my fill of trying to convince stubborn, stupid old men to save their own skins. If you'll not come with us, you won't be forced. Maybe the cold ones will find you more amusing than I do." The old man gulped.
"I meant not but no harm, ser. Winter's a hard old whoreson even for us as live in Dorne."
"I do not doubt it. You are on the northern side of the river. If the maps are right, that path into the mountains will take us to Kingsgrave."
"Might be it will." The young woman from the second hut emerged. Slowly, the rest of the tiny hamlet began to come out of hiding. At once, Missandei saw there were no men of fighting age or even boys on the cusp of manhood. Gone off to join the army hidden in the high passes, no doubt. "Who's asking and why?" Togo Nudho turned away from the old man.
"We're trying to get away from cold things. Dead men." Muttering broke out among the smallfolk.
"You are not laughing. That is good. I have many jokes. This is not one of them."
"Have they come this way already?" Lady Yns called from where the others were disembarking.
"Nothing's come this way but wind. Sometimes we hear things coming down from the mountains, though. Down from Kingsgrave." the girl replied.
"And none of your people have gone to investigate?" Missandei asked, the girl's eyes widening as she approached.
"We'd be hard-pressed to reel in a hefty gar. Bugger bloody whatever's causing cold mischief up where the highborn dwell."
"Good. There's nothing to be gained by meeting the cold ones, or any they lead. You've made it this long here, but that may not last. One day, whatever's up there might chance to find out what lies at the bottom of the pass, and then you'll have nowhere to run."
"So what do we do? You've got a pretty lot of highborns over there but they don't look the sort ready to get stuck in halfway up a mountain."
"They're not, but it might be Lord Yronwood's soldiers are. First we have to find them, though. If that means going past Kingsgrave, then that's what we'll have to do." Preferably without crossing paths with anything we can't outrun, she thought.
The notion of waiting in the hamlet until the next morning was soon discarded.
"There's not near enough shelter for all of us here and if we spent the night outside half of us will be frozen come dawn. Or worse." Missandei told the Dornish lords. "The fittest of us can go first, I suppose, while the rest remain a safe distance behind. Preferably, ready for a mishap." After they figured it, the began the walk up into the mountains. Torgo Nudho led with a spear tipped by the piece of purple glass, the lone person among the rest of the forward party with not the least bit of business getting caught in a fight being Missandei herself. "You do not know what to look for, listen for, Torgo Nudho." she told him when she saw the objection in his eyes. "The dead are impossible to miss, the cold brutes only cunning when it occurs to them to be."
"Your Weaver will not have made it this far, Missandei. Nor your talking wind."
"Perhaps not, but there's no guarantee they aren't the only ones of their kinds." After a few hundred feet, Torgo Nudho spoke again.
"You are not worried about them, either."
"Were you an Other, would you leave your war in the hands of such as the Weaver?"
"What do you mean?" Missandei bit her lip.
"She did not strike me as an especially effective leader."
"She led the attack on Sunspear, no? She broke its towers and locked the city in cold webs."
"And a pack of alley dogs will run down a beggar. That takes no great plan. The Weaver and Myrcella were loosed, as a kennelmaster looses his hounds." His face was stony as ever.
"You think there is another. Another Other."
"I saw some at Sunspear, but they were just the weapons they held. Even their captain was only a spear, at the end of the day. There were no Others at all at Godsgrace, when the dead came deep enough to hide the sand beneath their feet. A single Other might have writ an end to us then and there." Torgo Nudho shrugged.
"So this Weaver is good at fighting and bad at warcraft."
"Exactly. Such an individual is not fit for leading an army proper. Enough was given to her to smash Sunspear in accordance with Myrcella's accounts of it, but not enough to take Dorne, much less hold it."
"Then this other Other, this kennelmaster…"
"…is whom the Others intend to do the taking proper, the holding proper. Someone we'll do especially well to keep well clear of." With only the Prince's Pass to get into Dorne and, hopefully, an army well set up in wait.
The pass was not so rough nor forbidding as something scarcely better than a goat track perhaps ought have been. The captain told it true. People have been taking things from the water to the castle for a long time. Missandei wondered if the Manwoodys had not the hamlet to thank, or at least the river through the foot of the mountains, for their surviving the Conqueror's wroth. As they ascended, Missandei heard a pair of sandaled feet trudging up the pass behind them, Nymeria Sand breathing hard as she approached.
"You are unfit for battle." Torgo Nudho said immediately.
"So is everyone else, if anything more than a few wandering dead men wait for us at Kingsgrave. Will the Manwoodys listen to you, Ser Eunuch? Or your well-spoken companion? On a good day they'd loose a few arrows from off the ramparts and that's the only hospitality you'd get from them."
"Whereas one of Oberyn Martell's daughters might see us safely behind the castle's walls." Missandei surmised.
"I grant you, I'd rather it be the Fowlers we were calling on, but needs must and Lord Dagos will hear me." If he still holds Kingsgrave. They began to pass towers, small keeps and the like, but there was no one to sound an alarm or even block their way. The crowned skull flew from each one, yet of the men who served the Manwoodys there was no sign. "Here." Nymeria pointed in the dust. "They've all gone on. To the castle, most like. Might be Dagos bestirred himself enough to get the ravens off and call his vassals." But is that a good thing or a bad thing? More soldiers waiting for us at Kingsgrave…or more dead men? Missandei remembered the hamlet girl's words. Noises coming down the mountain.
"Why do they call it Kingsgrave? Why name a castle thus?" Missandei asked Nymeria Sand, keeping her voice low. Nymeria smirked.
"Once, long before the Conquest, some Gardener king got it in his head to make war on Dorne. He made it as far as where Kingsgrave would one day stand before being cut down. The Manwoodys hold his bones still, in a crypt beneath the castle. Every meal, they toast His Grace and declare themselves honored that a royal guest would stay so long." Missandei wondered if Nymeria figured she ought be impressed. All she could think was well, at least a single dead man can't cause much harm. They came upon Kingsgrave proper next, the castle in its entirety shrouded by a low mountain mist. No one moved on the ramparts, drilled beneath its walls or sounded the alarm from behind the portcullis…which, to Missandei's sinking hopes, was up.
"Abandoned." Torgo Nudho said curtly. "We should move on." Nymeria Sand ignored him, trotting down the slope onto the flat ground before the stone walls. "Has House Manwoody gone to meet its captive, then?" The place came alive, soldiers in dark jerkins appearing seemingly from nowhere- out from behind boulders, a few leaping from shallow pits in the ground that dust-colored flaps had until then hidden, to say nothing of the hornet's nest that was emptying from Kingsgrave itself. Despite her somewhat gaunt appearance and hard, spare profile, Nymeria Sand's smile was unmistakable.
"A betting man would have expected you at Skyreach. All Dorne knows how fond you are of the Fowler twins." the commander of the Manwoody men said.
"There's nothing better than ruining a sure bet…and making a prince out of a pauper in the same stroke." Nymeria replied, wrapping her arms around the man as he followed suit.
While the rest of their sad herd trundled up onto the landing, Nymeria introduced them.
"Mors Manwoody, heir to Kingsgrave. Mors, these are…two of the dragon queen's acquaintances." Missandei spoke for herself and Torgo Nudho.
"I am Missandei of Naath, Daenerys Targaryen's herald, and this is Grey Worm, commander of her Unsullied." Mors Manwoody turned out to be a man of perhaps twenty-five, with dark hair and the lighter skin of Dornishmen born in the bosom of the Red Mountains. "Apologies for turning up so unexpectedly-"
"Oh, hang 'unexpected', Missandei of Naath. We knew you were coming the moment the first of old Jordayne's ships docked on the northern side of the river."
"And what of those passes?" she asked, pointing to the ones that led north and west, deeper and higher still into the mountains. "Are they watched so carefully?"
"Well, now, not so carefully as ones with half of Sunspear's court coming up. Where's the other half, though? Where's Obara, that she-viper?" Nymeria's mischievous smile disappeared and she turned to Missandei.
"Dead. One of the Others killed her. Ellaria Sand died when Sunspear fell as well." Mors Manwoody played the brash bravo, but Missandei could see the surprise in his eyes. "This isn't half of Sunspear's court, my lord, they're the survivors of its fall. But what of House Manwoody's fortunes? We heard word of frightening sounds that reached the hamlet…" Mors swallowed.
"Well, now, it's scarcely been plums and Arbor purples. Some days ago, we were attacked."
"By who, my lord?"
"You'll think me mad." He swallowed again as his men began to file through the portcullis. "Monsters, and do I mean it. He raised his spear some three feet higher. "About so tall." Missandei nodded.
"The Others are using them as shock troops. They've got sharp eyes and sharper noses-"
"-and sharp teeth besides. So you've come across them."
"I have, and would dearly like to keep my familiarity with them as it is."
"Have you seen one wounded?" The question startled Missandei.
"No, why?"
"That's the joke." He began to lead them into the castle after his men. "There were only three that came, and they bore neither arms nor armor. They acted more like beasts than men, though they came on two legs. A volley or two of arrows would see them off, we thought."
"Did it not?"
"They plucked them out of their cold hides the way you'd pull a thorn out of your backside. When we spilled out at them in force, encircled them…" he shuddered. "The fucking things grew back anything we lopped off. Even as we planted spears between their shoulders or in their guts or up their bloody arses, the wounds we opened closed. I took one nose off the same toothy face twice before I saw sense. Our valor cost us a dozen men and gave the monsters dinner." The portcullis descended behind the last of their number.
"Did they ever come back?"
"That's the fly in the pudding. No, and you'd think they would for another try at an easy meal. Certainly they'd not have a great deal of trouble bashing down the castle gate." Missandei's hopes sank further.
"The one I saw was not a ravening lackwit. He wore a white pelt and carried an icy club. Furthermore, he did not lack for speech. I suppose your three took up with the enemy proper after their meal at Kingsgrave, meeting up with the more disciplined among their kind."
"So what? A few more hungry howlers higher up the mountain, what does it all mean for us?"
"It means, my lord, that the brutes they fell in with know where you are, my lord. And if they know, then so do the Others."
Missandei was not overly surprised when her ill tidings were brushed off. Dagos Manwoody was not the sort to go knock-kneed on hearing stories of Sunspear's fall. She did not press her point, relieved at least to see everyone getting some well-needed rest and behind strong walls. Still, she advised that they would do well to wall up the portcullis.
"For even dead men will find it easily brushed aside with enough of them pushing on it."
"And turn Kingsgrave into a prison?" Lord Dagos said, washing down pheasant and peppers with wine so sweet it made even Torgo Nudho's nose wrinkle.
"It is either that or flee, my lord. Perhaps we might join Lord Yronwood, wherever it is he's gone."
"Is it 'we', then? I'll never turn away a daughter of the Red Viper's, Seven save me, but I've little and less need for more mouths, highborn or otherwise."
"That is not unreasonable. Might you know where Lord Yronwood has gone, then?" Missandei asked, doing better at keeping her exasperation within than the Dornish lords who'd come this far.
"There's only so many places a host can hide in the Red Mountains. If it's Yronwood's army you seek, best try the mountain range across the Prince's Pass. I daresay they'll be using the same hidden holdfasts and secret strongholds our forebears used when the dragons came the first time."
"The first time?" Missandei asked, her ill humor lifting a bit. Rhaegal and Viserion had quit Dragonstone soon after the queen's great fleet had landed and to the best of her knowledge, that was where the matter lay. Has one or both been sighted here in the Red Mountains?
"Oh, come now. You did say you were the dragon queen's herald, yes?" Missandei's brief blossom of hope wilted.
"I did. King's Landing proved a more immediate concern to Her Grace than bringing Dorne on side. If anything, we were led to believe that Dorne would raise its banners for her from the offing."
"Whoever told you that hasn't got the wits the gods give a goat. It's House Martell that had its feud with the lions and the Red Viper's slut killed the last of those. Uller's daughter could lounge in Sunspear and fancy herself a prince's widow, but we were no more beholden to her than to each other." To Missandei's immense relief there was no outburst from Tyene Sand, seated at the end of the table.
"There were no others? None that Dorne might rally behind?" Lord Dagos stroked his pointed beard, black flecked with grey.
"I seem to recall that Doran Martell and his Norvoshi wife had the three children. The whelp was killed on his way to King's Landing, but the two older ones might have gotten out of the pot before it began to boil. Might be they went to Norvos, might be they went to the bloody moon. It's naught to us. They're not here now." More's the pity, Missandei thought. A Martell proper would come in handy just now. Not for the first time, she marveled at the Westerosi way of life. In Lord Dagos Manwoody's very presence sat two of the famed Red Viper's own daughters, yet because he had not been wed to either girl's mother, Sand was their name. With as much right to Sunspear as I have. What made it all the more absurd was that such a stigma could be so easily lifted. A king's sword on one's shoulder and she would be a Martell, unbowed unbent and all the rest.
Missandei quite found herself at a loss for what to do next. This Lord Manwoody was of precious little help beyond him letting them take refuge behind Kingsgrave's walls. It seems we must go west, across the Prince's Pass to find the Dornish army. The sobering reality that of them, few others than Torgo Nudho were fit even to attempt such a thing hung heavily in her thoughts.
"You've not had any ravens then, my lord?" Yns Allyrion asked. "No word from my father?"
"All that's reached us is the wind." Lord Dagos replied.
"And a few cold monsters, aye." Old Gyran muttered, prompting a few sniggers.
"If you're provisioned only to feed your own, my lord, we'll not long linger. Come dawn we'll begin the journey west and no doubt we'll come upon the army sooner or later." Missandei said.
"With those lanky creatures loping about?" Mors Manwoody said incredulously. "Say rather they'd find you." He turned to his sire. "Father, we would do well to get more spears about us if these tales are true. What if it were a whole horde of those hungry things? Kingsgrave would not hold and we would be slaughtered to the last." Lord Dagos did not, it seem, expect to be countermanded by his heir, and their bickering put an end to any hopes Missandei had of making further headway. She stood, excused herself and left the hall, Torgo Nudho at her shoulder. Once she reached the door she heard the others start to move, seeming to take her own retiring for the night to be permission to do the same. It took two flights of stairs to find a room that didn't seem in use. Perhaps servants' lodgings at the base of the castle, where the Manwoodys need not see them when they aren't working.
"These Dornish are proud." Torgo Nudho said finally, closing the door behind them. "They might have led you to a bedchamber proper instead of leaving you to find…this. Where are we, an empty storeroom?"
"Empty is all I require just now, Torgo Nudho." Missandei said, ready to settle for a bit of stone floor. "I'd rather have no bed and you than the other way around." His lips pursed.
"Mi-" A low, mournful sound issued from somewhere out beyond the walls, in the high passes of the mountains. Missandei tried to listen over the pounding of her own heart for what she felt was sure to come. The stony voices did not disappoint, grunting and rasping to each other loudly. They feel no need to take us by surprise. That, and the fact they were bothering to talk in the first place, struck Missandei as singularly worrisome. These are no ravening beasts. At least, not just ravening beasts. A moment later and the castle above exploded into motion, cries and commands mixing with the sounds of footsteps running from one end of the castle to the other. The sound came again, a kind of hooting, closer now. Above us. Above the castle. She half-expected one of the brutes to come charging into the room. Instead, a low, even carpet of white mist rolled in from the corridor. Missandei's breath hitched. This is no work of the Weaver's, nor Myrcella's. A faint scraping issued from the stones beneath her feet. Then the floor shook as something hit it, something from below, a crack running down the large flat slab in the middle of the room. Another blow knocked a torch from its sconce, extinguishing it immediately when the flame touched the mist and sending further cracks spiderwebbing out from the one that had near cut the slab in two.
"Let's go." Missandei said, even as a third blow forced the slab to split. Out from between the halves jutted a pitted bronze gauntlet.
"As you say." Torgo Nudho replied, taking her hand. They did not stay to watch the fourth blow send the slab scattering across the room of the floor, but Missandei heard it all the same. She heard the clank of ancient armor, too, as well as the clattering of age-old bones.
Fire, she thought. Fire, fire. They were only halfway up the steps to the next level when a panicked mob of Kingsgrave's surged down to meet them, mist pooling about their ankles.
"Wrong way." Missandei said tersely, as the sound of metal scraping on stone echoed up from the base of the stair. Clatter. Clank.
"What is it?" someone asked.
"Something we don't need to meet. We have to go, and go right now."
"We can't, those monsters have returned- and brought armed and armored of their kind as well!"
"They can't catch all of us, but we'll truly be done for if we stay where we can be trapped between enemies." Clatter. Clank. "West, go west, towards the Prince's Pass." Missandei said, more to purpose their fear than for any real hope at a strategic exodus. "Come, we're going on to find Lord Yronwood's army." Living or dead, I fear. She all but had them ready to run when someone gave a terrified wail and pointed down the stairs. Missandei didn't look, didn't even entertain the notion, moving quickly but calmy through the throng. Clatter. Clank. The hoarse roars and bellows of the icy brutes in the castle above seemed almost an irritation in comparison to what was following the sounds of life up the stairs.
"Don't use the glass on any dead." Missandei muttered to Torgo Nudho.
"I remember the words of the queen's visitors from the north." Torgo Nudho replied. "It will only break against their unfeeling bones." The sounds of chaos got closer, of battle and bloodshed. Another hoot made the hairs on Missandei's neck stand up. Clatter. Clank. On reaching the Manwoody's halls proper, she found them reduced to shambles already. Furniture lay broken or smashed against the castle's walls, corpses lay where they fell, and those still alive were only so due to luck more than intent. Nothing waited for them, so Missandei bid the lot of the crowd to come up out of the stairwell. We haven't the time to block it off, she thought, and I doubt doing so would do much good anyway. "West." She repeated, urging those who would go on.
"Find safety high in the mountains where the enemy will not follow." That same logic had failed them thus far, it seemed, but there was nothing to be gained from thinking on that much now. The brutes had swept aside Kingsgrave's foremost defenders and so the way to the portcullis was open, but Missandei still waited a breath longer than she was comfortable before she stepped out into the cold air. A hoot behind her nearly made her scream and when she turned, she almost fainted outright. A dragon, she thought, before she realized it was a deal smaller even than the queen's three, only juveniles themselves. It was skinnier, its head was narrower, and it was quite fidgety. On its back was an Other cloaked in mist, from whose finger poured a white waterfall, cascading down behind Kingsgrave's walls and smothering the castle in the stuff. Neither could fail to see her yet the winged creature's ice-blue eyes swept over Missandei over and over without reaction, as did its rider. Because I'm cold, she thought. Colder than the warm bodies they're looking for. The people waiting for her signal were not, though, and she stood there without the first idea of how to get them past the creature and its imposing rider. Then an idea came to her. Slowly she stooped, picking up a rock. From out of the corner of her eye, she saw Torgo Nudho ready. Time slowed to a crawl as she reared back and threw the rock, the sound drawing a hiss from the creature as it craned its neck into the alley beside it- and filled the dark space with a rain of needling icicles. Torgo Nudho dashed out while mount and rider were both distracted, and sent his spear, head of purple glass and all, sailing toward the pair. At most thirty feet. He cannot miss. Missandei caught a glint of purple before the creature's left shoulder exploded, the thing shrieking loud enough to deafen Missandei. Gracelessly it flopped off the rooftops and crashed to the stone of the yard, still flailing, all while Torgo Nudho ran toward it. When he tried to pull the spear out the wood splintered in his hands, only the purple shard of dragonglass, currently flipping through the air, pristine at the touch of the creature's cold flesh. Then it was clattering to earth, lost in the carpet of mist as Missandei's heart sank. Just as she got on her knees to fumble for the missing shard, something flew just over her head, thrown with enough force to have been thrown from a catapult. Blood splattered from the thing, beads sprinkling her left side. A body, she thought, baffled. When she turned to look, the people of Kingsgrave were fleeing, heading for the portcullis. Soldiers, smallfolk, lords, peasants, all who lived still seemed to have given up the castle for lost. As the rushing bodies thinned, Missandei caught a glimpse of a slowly advancing figure bulling through the last of them as though they were bales of hay. It was armored in bronze, with a moth-eaten fox-fur adorning its shoulders. What might have once been handprints dotted its breastplate, done in red clay or perhaps even blood. Missandei looked up to find empty sockets staring back at her out of a crude coif of bronze links. The figure wore about its temples a crown of golden hands, each clasping the next. By the way the dead king's gaze was trained on her, Missandei was quite certain that unlike the powers that had given him rise, he could see her just fine.
Though she couldn't hear his armor clank nor his bones clatter, Missandei tore her gaze away from the Gardener king to resume looking for the glass. The stones began to buckle beneath her as the king got closer. Then something cold filled Missandei's hand and she was flinging it toward Torgo Nudho, now dodging the drake-thing's snapping fangs- and occasional streams of icy needles. Pressed as he was, it looked as if he had never let Missandei out of his sight completely…and so when she sent the dragonglass at him, he caught it.
"Let's go!" she cried, though she was sure the creature's screams had left him deaf as they had her. Even so, he got the message, even pincushioning the writhing neck a few times to make their escape all the easier. The dead king did not seem about to dash after them and the she-Other had disappeared completely, but she did not reappear to block their way when they ran out the broken portcullis together. A wild, heedless part of her wanted to laugh aloud, to whoop and cheer, but the rest of Missandei of Naath was too busy running into the stony slopes of the Red Mountains to much find humor in the moment. It wasn't hard to follow the fleeing crowd, the stragglers of which she could still glimpse between the rocks ahead, and she didn't stop to catch her breath until the last of the stony barks faded from her still-ringing ears. Though he could have without effort, Torgo Nudho did not leave her behind. In fact, when she looked down, she found her hand was still in his. I shouldn't have stopped, she thought as her knees buckled. Whatever power carried me from Kingsgrave has gone. She slumped, exhausted, and would have cracked her head against one of the sharp rocks that littered the ground but for Torgo Nudho setting her on a wide, flat outcropping. That's twice I've survived an encounter with the Others, she thought. Perhaps the Tower of the Sun wasn't a fluke. I may not be a killer, but I've proven most able at continuing to live.
Missandei only rose when her knees stopped shaking, feeling about as steady on her feet as a drunk fresh off the winesink floor. Torgo Nudho turned to look down the rocks.
"Nothing." His voice echoed oddly still, Missandei's ears yet to come fully around. "One wonders why they have not pursued us."
"It isn't worth it." Missandei said. "They'd be able climbers, but they'd not catch enough of us for the chase to be worth it. There are corpses aplenty to devour at Kingsgrave and their leader has lost her wings- indeed, maybe we'll get respite aplenty if we head higher…away from the mists and the monsters."
"And the dead." Torgo Nudho added.
"And the dead." Missandei agreed. "That was something…different. The mob I saw at Godsgrace was comprised of walking corpses, no more." She looked down. "I once told the queen there were no masters in the grave. Little did I know there are kings even among the dead." Torgo Nudho had nothing to say to that, waiting patiently for her to be ready to move. When they pushed on, pushed up, they found the ground levelling out somewhat. The drop-off into the Prince's Pass lay some distance from the foot of the berm they stood upon, and Missandei's breath caught in her chest. The others were seated here and there, running from nowhere to nowhere or else just standing in shock. She approached the edge of the pass, shuddering as the world dropped out below into empty air for hundreds of feet. Mist coiled over the stones on the canyon floor, rolling and roiling over its dry expanse. "We have to find a way down. There is no other option." she said, slowly backing away from the cliffside. Missandei began to look around for any Manwoodys, or at least their arms. Anyone who knows the land around Kingsgrave, who will know if such a way into the pass is nearby. She found Nymeria Sand seated on a rock, blood running out of a broken brow as Tyene daubed it out of her half-sister's eye.
"Did you see any Manwoodys?"
"Dagos couldn't wait to prove his mettle against the foe. One of the brutes grabbed him 'round the waist and bit his head clean off and another smashed Mors against a wall so hard he popped. She gagged, then the fine dinner Lord Dagos Manwoody had served was splattering on the ground between Nymeria's feet. Missandei didn't move any more than Torgo Nudho did. "They said…the word from King's Landing was that Father died in a like way." There was no good way to take what was happening to them, Missandei supposed, but Nymeria Sand for all that looked close to her breaking point.
"Were there any others? Younger sons, cousins, anybody?"
"Me." Missandei looked to see a boy in the first hours of manhood standing by several of Kingsgrave's guardsmen. He does have the Manwoody look.
"And you are, my lord?"
"Dickon Manwoody." He gulped. "My uncle Myles was living with us too, but he held up the dead king so I could get away." A chopping log set to stop a greataxe. Nevertheless, Missandei smiled at him.
"Your uncle sounds a very brave man, in the vein of your father and elder brother. No doubt you will give your sons their names, in the time to come." Dickon Manwoody snorted.
"Don't treat me like a child. I know as well as you do I'm more like to ride a dragon."
"Are you?" her kind tone receded somewhat into something steelier. "That's twice I've survived crossing paths with the Others. If you live through the first time, you already know the trick of how."
"Which is what?"
"Getting away from them however you can."
"Is that how you two got away from the drake? Running?" one of the villagers asked.
"No. While it was perched on one of Kingsgrave's towers, I put a spear tipped in dragonglass through its shoulder, then stuck it a half-dozen times in the neck as we ran out." Torgo Nudho raised the hand that had not been holding Missandei's. Her stomach roiled all over again at the sight of the chips of frost, the blackening fingertips, the skin split from the cold of the purple glass it clutched.
"Were you going to say something?" she said, voice just shy of a scream.
"There is nothing to say." he replied curtly, though it did not seem as though he could open the fingers locked around the glass. The cold, she thought, despairing, the sharp edges of the glass itself! She made to ease his fingers apart but he gently pulled away before she could. "We should count ourselves lucky." he said. "Were it not for the wine of courage, we would have lost our only piece of glass." For the first time in her life, Missandei spat in the dirt.
"Piss on the wine of courage, the Good Masters of Astapor, the House of Nakloz and Kraznys himself in particular."
"Missandei of Naath should not swear."
"I'll swear as I please." she said, liking not at all the look she saw on Torgo Nudho's face. I know a smile when I see one, even one borne by an Unsullied.
"Very well, but you should know a child could do better. On either side of the Narrow Sea."
"That's enough out of you. I thought Unsullied were supposed to be quiet. You'll next speak when you're spoken to." she said, ignoring the burning in her cheeks as she set about finding someone with a fire lit to try tending to his hand.
As the sky darkened, people got to finding what space around the little fires they could. Missandei set Torgo Nudho to warming his hand over the largest of what seemed to be five, kept alight with what sparse greenery had until then stuck out from the rocks. She visited each in turn, keeping their spirits up as best she could- or at least trying to stop them from sinking any lower. Among countless people whose names she never learned, Missandei heard from Myria Jordayne of the passing of Lord Trebor. By some bizarre twist of fate, it had not been the Others that had spelled an end to him, though.
"Father had looked out of sorts at dinner. When we got to our chambers, he kissed me on the forehead as he had a thousand times before, bid me goodnight and went to sleep. When I woke from the bellows and screaming…I found him as I'd left him, save for his left hand brushing against his right arm."
"I am sorry for your loss, Lady My- Lady Jordayne."
"It was the climb, no doubt. The walk up to Kingsgrave."
"Perhaps. But a death in sleep is one to envy." One the Manwoodys certainly would. Missandei found Gyran and Nymeria unscathed, but Gyress and Yrissa were nowhere in sight.
"Mother was always stubborn." Gyran said, sniffling through sobs. "She knew Father would never have gotten away and she herself little further, so they stayed in their room rather than be parted." Nymeria touched her forehead to her husband's temple, murmuring soothingly in the Rhoynish tongue. The Allyrions alone had not lost one among their number, mostly because Lord Ryon and Lady Yns were relatively young and fit, they and their sons far abler to endure the hardships they had borne. Even Teora Toland had made it, though she seemed to be on her last legs.
"It is not much farther now, Lady Toland." Missandei told her. "We go down into the pass and take our time getting up the other side, no doubt Lord Yronwood's army will be glad to see us."
"When?" the frightened girl squeaked.
"At first light. We should make as much use of it as we can. Dead men will fight on regardless of day or night, but what little light reaches the Prince's Pass ought be enough to keep the Others and their pets at bay." Hopefully.
She was woken with a gentle jostling.
"It's time." Torgo Nudho was murmuring. Missandei sat up, looking around. The fires burned still, but low, and what passed for dawn was limping its way down the berm toward them. Many still slept, if fitfully, left to dream for a moment while Missandei checked Torgo Nudho's hand. The frost had gone but the cruel rents where his skin had split were very much still evident. No less troubling were his fingertips, gone from black to grey.
"Here." she said, handing him a torch as she bound up the cuts the glass had opened on his fingers. The wine of courage makes treating him all the more difficult, she thought. What little he can feel of pain is of no help. Then again, the men who made Unsullied were not the sorts to much put thought into their slave soldiers' well-being. As the Ghiscari envisioned it, an Unsullied is fighting-fit or he is dead.
"You are crying." he said softly. "Do not let the Dornish see."
"I'll cry tears of blood for all of Westeros to see. Why shouldn't I?"
"Who do you think they're following, Missandei of Naath? The Sands? Some lord or other?" His implication was so unexpected it actually managed to take her mind off his hand.
"We are here at the queen's request."
"We are," he said, speaking again after a long silence, "but she's not here now. We have no way of knowing how she's fared, if this darkness has fallen elsewhere in Westeros…the Martells are gone, they will not save Dorne. But someone may." Missandei was still dazed when word of a way down into the pass came to her.
"To the north," the soldier was saying, "nice and easy. Nothing to it." 'Nothing to it' turned out to be the remnants of ages' worth of landslides, which troubled Missandei not so much at the prospect of descending down it as ascending the other side.
"Come." she told the Dornish, before she started her descent. To her amazement no one voiced opposition, doing as she bid. Once, I was an orphan in the belly of a ship headed for Slaver's Bay. The going might have been relatively safe, but it was too demanding to allow for talk and so the only utterances Missandei heard (or gave herself) were gasps, short breaths, huffing and the like. It is not so steep, she told herself, if someone slips, they'll only slide a short way. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered what the Weaver and Myrcella were up to. No doubt they know I live by now. How had they reacted? Would the Weaver be content to dwell in the ruins of the Tower of the Sun? Not likely, with Myrcella's ire a tireless weapon to use against the Dornish. But the Weaver could no more fly than her teeming horde of spiders could. It would be a long march from Sunspear, even for such fast creatures. Unless the ice-ship ferried them…
By the time they made the canyon floor, the light was already going. And with it, what paltry safety we might have.
"We must keep moving." Missandei said, starting across, relieved the ground had gone flat beneath her. The far walls of the pass were in view, but there was no way they would reach them before true nightfall. Even if we had, ascending in darkness? We'd have done just as well to stay at Kingsgrave. The Dornish behind her seemed to pick up on this, yet Missandei acted as though a night spent in the Prince's Pass was just a matter of course. Then she saw the mists congealing and was reminded of an unpleasant reality. She remembered the mist-wielding she-Other at Kingsgrave and was in no hurry to call a halt where the mists might simply roll over them once the last of them had fallen asleep. Even when fatigue began to seep into her limbs, Missandei did not allow herself to stop. A sudden cry had her jump a foot in the air, looking around for the source. A raven circled low overhead, contenting to come straight to her. She froze as it perched on her forearm, head flicking about. On its leg was a small roll of parchment of all things…and the Missandei remembered that Westerosi lords used just such birds to carry messages. Trembling, she removed it, the bird taking off at once, headed west. Up the walls and into the mountains. She unrolled the small parchment, squinting at the writing in the fading light.
Soldiers wait at the bottom of the western cliffs to see everyone to safety. Among other horrors, there is a countless horde of dead coming through the pass from the north, so don't tarry.
"They're waiting for us, the Yronwood troops." Missandei called, hearing herself echo across the floor of the canyon. "I'd much rather spend the night in a cave somewhere, out of the cold and the endless mists." Even when night fell properly, she dared not stop, envisioning the merry fires the army no doubt had crackling high in their unmapped hidden fastnesses neither dragon nor Other ever found. Whatever sticks and branches remained were lit so as to keep the people visible to each other and somewhat counteract the mist. Where is it all coming from, anyway? We're in a desert, at the bottom of a pass… The next minutes, hours, were something out of a nightmare. The world had become a black void beyond their sputtering torches, the mists clinging to their heels like entangling weeds. The clatter of a torch on the ground made Missandei turn and go cold. The mists were dousing the flames already, and there was no hint of what had become of its bearer. Then a long arm shot out of the darkness toward a Kingsgrave sergeant and yanked him off his feet, and chaos erupted as the crowd stampeded all over again, the bellows of the brute nipping at their heels spurring a flurry of similar barks from somewhere in the distance to the north. Far, Missandei thought as she ran, Torgo Nudho behind her with his piece of glass lashed to a thin branch he could wield in a single hand. But not so far as to pass up on a free meal. There seemed to be only a single of the monsters, a lone feral content to lope after them and pick off the slow or the injured once its first attacks had filled its belly. It must have spotted the torches and the living bodies pooling in the pass. How could one among their ravening kind resist? Then there were shouts from further on and Missandei could hear flights of arrows being loosed. To duck for cover was to stop and to stop was to die, though, so she kept on and so did the Dornish. I suppose it's as easy as shooting into the darkness, where they're sure we aren't! She heard the brute howl as it was feathered, fists and feet flailing against whatever it could reach be it Dornishman or hard ground. Suddenly she was rushing past rows of stakes and crude palisades, the dark forms of rows of archers paying her no mind. "Come on!" she shouted into the chaos, waving people on for all the good it would do in the darkness. Why are there no torches? No fire arrows? That question was answered most concretely when Missandei heard the clank and the clunk of a siege weapon form somewhere further up the mountain. A burning boulder crashed down the mountainside, flattening the brute hard on the heels of the last of the survivors still to make the relative safety of the stakes. "We have to go." she was telling the first soldier she could find, talking faster than even she could follow.
"Easy, good lady. Worry not-"
"But they're coming-"
"-so they are, but even a guide born and raised in these mountains won't be of much help if you're beside yourself so. The dead are plodding chattel anyway, if the scouts are to be believed."
"Those aren't." Missandei replied, pointing at the crumpled monster. "What's more, they-"
"-have rather a bad habit of shrugging off whatever's done to them. Well, most whatever. Fire puts an end to that, though." He put his hands on her shoulders and Missandei caught sight of a sand-blonde mustached face and a pair of clear blue eyes. On his breast was a black portcullis. The Yronwood arms. "We Guard the Way." Missandei said, trying not to sob the house's words.
"Aye, so we do." the soldier replied, grinning.
No less than a maester was among the Yronwood troops waiting for them, and he was well busied with binding wounds and setting broken fingers. As Missandei knew Torgo Nudho would never ask on his own behalf, it fell to her to put the maester on tending to the badly mangled hand once the Dornish had been seen to as best as could be done. The way up the mountain she was left alone, the better to keep her breath for the climb, at ascent's end finding herself in a cleverly hidden tunnel at the base of a brace of boulders. While the Dornish highborn and low warming themselves around fires free of the cold white mists, the soldier took her measure.
"Who are you, good lady?" Missandei had by then caught her breath.
"I am Missandei of Naath, sent by Daenerys Targaryen to be her envoy to House Martell of Sunspear. Only…"
"Just about every part of all of that's gone right arse-up and no mistake. Oh, well, no harm done. Someone might have let the rest of Dorne know a Targaryen envoy was being received at Sunspear, but I suppose that was too much to ask of the Red Viper's pet. Come, Lord Yronwood waits in the hall." Hall? We're in a cave, Missandei thought, only to see the army waiting for them was just that, with countless men coming and going from as many tunnels and side caverns. She spotted barracks, kitchens, armories… "Impressive, no? Our ancestors started on these when the dragons came. Three hundred years on, we've…elaborated on them a bit." her companion said, smiling.
"But what of the dead? They're sure to be here in a day at most."
"So they will, but if you think they're slow overland, wait until you see them try to scale a bloody mountain. It's funnier than a mummer show, or would be pardoning the circumstances."
"Ice spiders are not so clumsy. The Others have flying mounts as well."
"Oooh, ice-spitting drakes. What's that to us in here, my lady? They could have all the dead of Westeros milling about the bottom of the mountain and a dozen flights of those hooting drakes, it wouldn't help them none. No doubt their White Lady knows that, or at least has realized it by now."
"White Lady?" Missandei said, remembering the she-Other at Kingsgrave.
"Aye, the same. Our eyes in the northern peaks spotted the lot of them coming south from the Reach, most likely Highgarden, snaking flush to the mountains before turning into the Prince's Pass. The dead, the hungry brutes, drakes and spiders and Others astride them besides…and at the center of this great cold hammer, the White Lady and her cadre of mist-binders. They're where all that business is coming from." he said, so matter-of-factedly. My kennelmaster, Missandei knew in the pit of her stomach. Leading not a pack, but an army.
Lord Anders Yronwood might have been old enough to be a grandfather, but Missandei would never have guessed it had she not known his reputation. He stood a head taller than Torgo Nudho with a crop of strawberry-blonde hair and quick blue eyes and the lighter coloring she'd seen on the soldier. These mountain Dornish are nearly a race apart. He was muttering something to one of his officers when Missandei came into the hall, the place complete with tables, barrels of wine and even tapestries.
"Your forebears certainly weren't afraid of rough living."
"Rough? I've had rougher visits to the privy." Lord Yronwood straightened for a proper look at her. One of his men handed him a parchment, which he glanced over. "I suppose you're to thank for all these lives saved. Are you so fond of Dornish noble houses?"
"Better to thank chance. I didn't carry anyone to safety."
"Not with your arms and your back, no. But we've had no group half so big reach us here. Toland, Manwoody, Allyrion, Jordayne…those aren't pennies you find stuck to the bottom of your shoe." Missandei shrugged.
"If we're trapped here, how safe are they?"
"Safer than they'd be had you died somewhere out on the sands, or the Sea of Dorne, or in the mountains. No doubt a good number of your people died. With the Others making every effort to find and stamp you out, well, that can't be helped. Those that made the journey will find themselves safer, warmer, and better fed here than anywhere else in Dorne."
"Until the Others bestir themselves."
"Will they?"
"The mists may roll up the mountainside after us and fill your tunnels."
"Not with the winds that howl down these red rocks most every night." Lord Yronwood smiled. Missandei was not so assured.
"There is one among their number, a she-Other with an affinity for the great cold spiders that follow them by the packs. Myrcella Baratheon…or whatever the Others have made of her called this she-Other the Weaver."
"And you think they'll clamber on up after us once they've been marshalled, do you?"
"Won't they?" Missandei asked. Yronwood shrugged.
"It might be they do. And when they do, we'll drop a mountainside's worth of rocks on them, see how well they climb splattered flat. Even a big spider's just a spider, Missandei of Naath. One only needs a big enough boot."
Only then did Missandei realize how hungry she was. Running for one's life puts food quite out of one's mind. She found herself passing by the taunting aromas of soup and roasting goat, though, to seek out what could be found of fruit and vegetable.
"Greens? Will the smell of meat heavy in the air?" the man across the stable where such provender lay asked, almost incredulously. "Naathi eat no meat, and I would sooner keep that piece of my home with me than lose it to something as fleeting as hunger." she replied. He held his hands up.
"Naathi, eh? Word's going 'round about how you made a hobby of plucking highborns right out of the Others' fingers. Take all you like, Seven know they'll see precious little use otherwise." There were some leeks, an orange, a bag of wild grains. Better than nothing, Missandei told herself. Torgo Nudho found her in time, hand thoroughly wrapped up.
"I will keep my fingers, but without feeling the maester is unable to tell if my hand will be of any use. He is not optimistic." he said, stiff even for an Unsullied.
"Well, even if your hand is useless as a third ear, it doesn't matter. Should we live to see an end to this darkness, our fighting days will end."
"That isn't up to us, Missandei. Danger may come from anywhere, at any time. Ser Barristan told me such things, about how danger only truly ends with death."
"Then we'll go somewhere where the danger will be minimal. After the Others, what's to fear?" she asked, letting him ease her down near a roaring fire, the smoke vanishing up into a crudely dug chimney. Hot plumes issuing out of the mountain the Dornish make no effort to hide. Perhaps Lord Allyrion does have the right of it, and we are truly safe here. At least, for now. That thought was enough to put her on her side close her eyes and have her sleeping all in the same breath.
She woke to a tumult, as she feared she might. Not so safe after all, she thought, terribly weary. Then she realized there were no screams, no cries of panic, just the Yronwood soldiers readying as though it were their hundredth battle. When one of them saw Missandei awake, she recognized the man from the bottom of the mountain.
"It seems you had their measure after all, Missandei of Naath. They're massing in the pass. A pack of spiders dozens strong, with silver-clad brutes and Others proper to piss in our pudding. Sprinkle in some frothing feral monsters and an army of dead men and you have a fine feast the Others seem quite keen on serving us. Well, not before we serve them a dish of our own preparing."
"You're going to try the falling rocks?"
"The same. Might be some of us won't make it, but that's battle." Not enough, she thought immediately. A few rocks won't quench Myrcella's rage, nor sate the Weaver's hunger.
"How many rockfalls has Lord Yronwood had you set?"
"Around a dozen. Lovely things. Pull a lever, the gates open and out tumble the stones."
"A dozen rockfalls will slow them, but not stop them." An idea was brewing in Missandei's mind. "And, if I may…a dozen slaps do little harm compared to a thrown fist." Quite apart from ignoring her words or even scoffing, the man seemed intrigued. "I think I should pay Lord Yronwood a visit, if he isn't too busy."
"If there's one person in this anthill Lord Anders has time for, it's you, Missandei of Naath."
She stood at the table in the lord's hall with Torgo Nudho at her side, elbow to elbow with some of House Yronwood's most seasoned officers- and a few come from Kingsgrave besides.
"You're going to pepper them with rocks, my lord, but what good will that do us?" she asked.
"With luck, a few spiders will catch a flattening and the brutes will be dissuaded from coming up for a second sniff-around."
"And the Others?"
"The White Lady's host comes ever further south, but she moves no quicker than her mists will allow. She's not one to be caught without her shroud."
"We cannot wait for this White Lady to augment the Weaver's smaller force gathering below us. Myrcella is a hateful wind all her own now, there will be no hiding from the mist as it climbs the mountain."
"'Course she's hateful, she's double Lannister. That's like saying fire's hot." one of the captains muttered, spurring a few snorts and sniggers from his fellows.
"There's little we can really do from up here but wait, Missandei of Naath. We can't make your Weaver attack." Lord Yronwood said, not ungently.
"You can't." Missandei replied. "A dozen slaps will not suffice. If it can be done, your men should move what rocks they can further up the mountain where they can roll through the advance force as well as whatever waits in the pass below both."
"So we'll kill a few more dead men, squash a few more spiders. It scarcely seems worth the effort."
"There's only one spider you need squash." She breathed. "If we kill the Weaver, that will throw her force into uncertainty. Dead men cannot pose a threat to us and brutes unpurposed by a leader are little more than animals. A few spiders may reach us…"
"but we know how to handle those." Torgo Nudho finished for her. "If this works, my lord, this will hurt them. Even if Myrcella kills the lot of us in return, the cold ones will be bereft of a leader- until this White Lady turns up and complicates matters."
"So this isn't going to be a battle, then? Not truly?" one man asked. "Sounds more like an assassination. Do you take us for hidden knives, my lady?" Missandei looked at him.
"No. I take you for Dornishmen." The laughter made it sound as though a hundred men were present.
She waited by the entrance to the cave, trying to still her humming heart. Even if we fail to kill the Weaver's captain, he is only a single spear. The Weaver is the threat.
"Drop a few rocks when they come some way up, then flee as quickly as you can. They may well think that was all we had waiting for them, the better to lure them up to where the rest waits." Missandei told the soldiers moving out to reach the lowest of the drops.
"Should you be out here? Battle is sure to join." Torgo Nudho said.
"As I recall, I've got two encounters with the Others to your one." And I know the Weaver will want to kill me properly this time. After all, if a hunting dog fails to kill its quarry, what good is it to the kennelmaster? More soldiers descended and still more after them, sharp in their purpose to curl the fingers of rock and sand and dust that Lord Yronwood had set in place. A boot big enough to spell an end to the Weaver, Missandei hoped. When the last of the groups returned, they looked singularly pale.
"And I thought normal spiders bad," one of them said in passing. So they are on their way, then. She waited there, as she'd waited in the Tower of the Sun. She turned to Torgo Nudho.
"Save it." he said, not bothering to face her in turn. Perhaps he thinks if he looks at me, he will not be able to refuse. "I left you in the tower as you bid and thought that was the end of you. I will not grieve for you a second time." he said. She heard the clicks and shrieks, the hoots and pack-song of the spiders as they drew ever nearer up the mountain. Archers filled the mouth of the cavern behind her, arrows dipped in pitch and lit.
"Wait until you've marked your target." she said, hoping they knew what she was saying from what she meant. Myrcella speaks the Common Tongue, after all, and there's no telling where she might pop up in all this. No need for her to give the Weaver a warning, even a fleeting one. Missandei wondered if the pitch that pooled at the edge of the descent would have reflected the stars, had the cloud cover allowed for such. The second the countless blue eyes of the first spider appeared above the berm, the fire arrows flew. Hoots and clicks became pained screeches as the pitch caught the fastest members of the pack in a shallow pit of tar and flame. The bellows behind the flames told Missandei that whatever brutes had come in the Weaver's force were reluctant to try crossing them. And risk lingering injury, the sort that renders one unable to fend off its ever-hungry fellows. The Weaver must come now, and put the fire out. Just as the flames began to shrink, Missandei gave the order. By the time the long legs strode past the guttering fire, the wooden gates to either side of Missandei were opening. She watched the Weaver bring her twisted form to bear, the muttered prayers and sounds of voided bowels from the men behind Missandei curiously muted. At the sight of Missandei of Naath the Weaver's many eyes widened, her clicking pincers going slack. Missandei saw the peripheral eyes glint in the direction of the open gates, a low grinding sound already uttering from each. A landslide's worth of loose earth, rocks, boulders, sand and whatever else the Dornish had packed behind the gates rushed toward the Weaver. Even as she leapt into the air, Missandei felt something hard and jagged slip into her hand. Then a rope of silk looped around her waist. Just as she felt the tug begin, Missandei raised what she'd been given. Goodbye, Weaver. She brought it down on the white strand, the web melting into nothing at the dragonglass' touch. Missandei watched the Weaver fall, knocked off her eight legs and tumbling backward into the darkness from which she'd come. Now, she thought a heartbeat later, as the hidden drops dug into the mountain's side by generations of Dornishmen loosed their own landslides. Now, she thought again, another heartbeat on as it happened once more. The ground began to shake and the mountain began to tremble. "Torgo Nudho." she found herself saying, shouting, the better to be heard over the growing roar.
"Missandei of Naath." he replied.
"Come with me now." she said, taking his hand and running into the waiting warmth of the mountain fastness.
