Braavos

Lanna didn't have to ask the three men huddled around the corner table what they were about. The islands beyond the Titan, full of soldier pines and black spruce, acted as windbreakers to shield the harbor from the worst of the storms. Since Braavos' founding, it had been illegal to cut such trees down. But there was no shipping coming in and no need to protect the harbor-not that they much could- and so under cover of darkness, proud men reduced to little more than brigands had gone out to skim what firewood they could from the islands. More than one such party had not come back. Those who had spun mad tales of half-sunk hulks drifting through the Titan's legs, a great iceberg floating beyond it. Fools, part of her thought. Heroes, another answered. Foolish heroes. She knew better than to give her opinion to grown men, as well, especially when it wasn't sought out. Not that many people ever asked her thoughts on anything. The Happy Port had become the furthest thing from since the snows began to fall, more a tavern where a man might rub feeling into his thighs than a true brothel any longer. Merry had not been blind to the changing times, either. Her girls, Lanna included, had been taught how to wash and mend clothes, bind up a wound and most anything else anyone who happened by the Happy Port could teach them. Nobody has coin to spare on whores these days, not with firewood worth more than gold. After all, a freezing man can't burn gold. That thought had Lanna moving to a window, peeking through its shutters. Braavos had become a city-sized necropolis. The sounds of boasting bravos, whores on the docks and sailors cursing each other had been replaced with whatever might escape the confines of one building or another. It was too cold to spend time outside during the day and death if you were caught without shelter at night. No matter how heavy a man's purse. For all the new Sealord's bravado on replacing an "old done man" as Tormo Fregar had called his predecessor, he had been powerless to stop the cold. Nor had the fearsome Iron Bank been of any help. Snows cannot be bought off, cold winds scything in off the sea cannot be threatened with a visit by a Faceless Man. Speaking of the Faceless Men, the only god that heard Braavos' prayers was death itself, freeing his charges from the burdens of cold, hunger and fear.

The pungent reek of a newly added shovelful of nightsoil to the fire in the middle of the common room had Lanna heading for the stair. The next hour would be next to unbearable even if warm and stinking was better than cold and dead. Supposedly. Upstairs, her mother was sleeping fitfully as most often she did. Lanna gave her a soothing pat and pulled the blankets up over her shoulders, ignoring the white clouds that lingered a hair too long whenever either of them happened to exhale. The cold end, the slow end. Once, the earliest Braavosi had been slaves of Valyria, escaping into the mists to hide from fire in the sky. What can men do to hide from cold that rolls in off the sea? She peeked out another window, this one facing the canal. The water below had frozen over, as had every canal throughout Braavos and the aqueducts and pipes besides. The only water that could be drunk had to be boiled first, and any such source of heat soon had a crowd of people around it anxious for their chance at a warming up. Trying to cut away the ice above the canals was madness, as Braavos had discovered when first they'd frozen over. Even now, Lanna could see the dead men schooling beneath the thick ice, oozing along like so many flies lapping up the blood trailing from a wound. And Cossomo thought his card tricks magic.

"They will think the simplest tricks magic if they have no better explanation." Lanna whirled around, jumping half out of her skin to find a buxom redhead idling in the doorframe. A whore, she knew at once, but not one of the Happy Port's. A less articulate, more instinctive part of her thought otherwise, though. Whores were not the sorts to stride about unfamiliar grounds as if they owned the place, at least not any Lanna knew. We're mummers of a sort, and better ones than can be found in many playhouses. There was something in the air as well, something other than the now-familiar smell of shit-smoke. A spice Lanna could not place, something heady that seared the ennui from her vision. If she's a whore, I'm a water dancer. It could have been that a whore was all the woman wished to appear, but Lanna knew better. Nor did she much appreciate the way the woman was looking at her mother, fast asleep and for a precious moment, at peace.

"Who are you?" Lanna asked, feeling a nervousness she could not explain. Whores at the Happy Port don't smell of spices from lands further than the nearest fish market.

"A friend…" Helpful. "…of a friend…" Evasive. "…of your father's." Lanna felt her stomach jump into her throat.

"I don't have a father." she said, surprised she could get the words out without choking on them.

"Of course you do, as all do." She blinked, and Lanna could have sworn she saw a glint of gold in the woman's blue eyes. "Well, most all."

"My father's dead. Yna told my mother so." Distaste colored the stranger's flawless face.

"And did Yna ever guess that only when next your mother heard from him, he'd be dead, with many a year of life in between? Your maegi are bloodthieves, poking their needly mouths beneath the skin of the world. If only they knew what might be roused, they'd pull out their own eyes, bite off their own tongues, and cast themselves into the nearest corpse-pit themselves." Lanna felt her lip quiver. Not a whore, then.

"You'd do better to act the maegi yourself, I think. Or at least the cushy courtesan. Any whore worth her bruises would know you for anything but what you claim from the start." The blue eyes flashed again, gold seeping through the blue like blood through too thin a layer of wrapping. "Whoever you are, what brings you to the Happy Port?" To us? The stranger looked to the bed.

"Her."

"Well, you can't have her, so push off." Lanna said, moving between the woman and the bed immediately. Quite to her mounting unease, the stranger smiled.

"My…employer is most anxious to meet your mother." She looked at Lanna the way one of the city's bankers might appraise a gemstone, looking for flaws in its surface. "He would be most…appreciative of news of you as well, I think. Receptive to your presence, most definitely." Employer?

"Well, whoever he is, tell him to look elsewhere. I don't care how much my father owed him, the sot, that gives him no claim over my mother. Or me."

"Oh no, dear girl, you mistake me. It was the other way around, I think. He would be much happier knowing the two of you were nearby and kept well safe instead of languishing in this rotting sore of a flesh-pit with only the cold and walking corpses for company, and even those unlikely to last." Lanna felt feeling worm its way back into her hands and feet.

"What do you mean? This cold will lift?"

"You would be better served seeing for yourself." She closed a pale hand and when she opened it again, a gold dragon of the Seven Kingdoms rested in her palm. Lanna had never seen the like. Not of the gold, nor the sleight of hand. Nor the crowned head upon the coin. She was no student of Westerosi history, though, so it mattered little that Aemon the First was a name unknown to her. "This ought get you where you need to go, and in no little style. Simply present it to the captain of a certain Goldmane and you will promptly be ferried on." Goldmane, Lanna thought, committing it to memory and snatching the coin out of the stranger's hand despite her misgivings. Gold minted on my feet feels better in hand and in my purse both than coppers mined on my back. "Clever girl." the stranger said, as if she'd heard every word. When she turned to leave, Lanna couldn't help blurting out.

"But what should I tell my mother?"

"The truth. That your father had friends and they are eager to see your mother live as a woman of her station is only due. You as well, when they learn of you." She reached into a sleeve and pulled out a long strip of red silk. It seemed to flow out as if it were water from a decanter, until the stranger held up another corner to reveal a lion of cloth-of-gold roaring and prancing upon the crimson field. The dragon Lanna held could not have paid of more than a few threads. The stranger raised it up, let it flutter down with perfect grace over her mother's sleeping form.

"We will not meet again, I think, Lanna of the Happy Port." She made to leave again.

"Then at least tell me your name." The stranger froze just outside the doorway, then turned to take the knob.

"Call me Ros." she said, before pulling it shut. Lanna dashed to the door, yanked it open hard enough to pull a hinge from the frame. The stranger was gone.