Fifty gold dragons, by the word of Wyman Manderly, Lord of White Harbor, for the safe return of Lady Wylla of House Manderly and Lady Arya of House Stark. Let any man with knowledge of them come to New Castle and fear nothing.
—cried at every gate and quay of White Harbor
The Sergeant
The noon bell has come and gone from the Sept of the Snows, Tomm's feet went numb in his boots an hour before it rang, and still they come: carts, wool, fish, a septon on a donkey. He waves them through and watches hands and faces, hands and faces, the same as he has done since the ravens came and turned every child in the North into fifty dragons walking.
Three children out of Winterfell, that's the word. The Stark girl, Lord Eddard's own daughter, one-and-ten, dark and grey-eyed; the bastard, four-and-ten and dark the same; and the lord's granddaughter needs no describing past the hair. Half this city watched that green braid go shrieking down the docks when she was small. Wolf pups travel with them, the word says, one grey and one white as milk.
He has lost count of the children he's stopped since. A fishwife turned in her own niece on Tuesday, wrong girl, and the captain went red to his ears over it. The wool factor's boys on Thursday, and their father shouting at the gatehouse till dusk. Now the captain's said it plain: next man drags him a false catch walks double watches through the first snows.
Then the crowd parts around a horse, and an orange doublet hits his eyes before the rider does.
Three children, the count right, the ages right.
"Hold." His hand comes up. "You three. Step aside."
The boy reins in. "Is there a problem, ser?"
Ser. Tomm's no ser and the boy knows it. Foreigners butter everything.
"Might be." He walks a slow circle round them, the horses, the clothes, the ages. "Where are you coming from?"
"Braavos, originally. More recently, Ramsgate." Tyroshi falls out of the boy with it, vowels chewed sideways, the Common Tongue bent in all the foreign places. "My father has trading interests. We're here to arrange passage home."
"Your father let three children travel alone?"
"My father doesn't know we're here." And out it tumbles, the boring uncle, the negotiations taking forever, the slipping off to see the ships. "Get out of Ramsgate for a few days. Is that a crime?"
Tomm has boys of his own. The grievance rings true enough.
"Long way from Tyrosh, Ramsgate."
"My father's business takes him many places."
"What's your father's name?"
"Noho Dimittis. He imports dyes. The purple, mostly—Tyroshi purple fetches good prices in the North."
Tomm looks at the doublet. Orange fit to water the eyes, slashed to show yellow beneath, paste stones at the collar.
"Dyes," he says.
"The family business isn't always... subtle."
A dye seller's son, wearing the stock, and all three of them wearing it come to that, the purple hair, the pink scrap showing under the little one's cap. The little one rides pillion at the boy's back, arms cinched round his waist, eyes down, carrying the fear of a father's belt he bets. The dog sits patient beside the horses, grey and road-dirty, tongue lolling, and the word says pups, says one of them white as milk, and this is a grown farm dog wanting its dinner. The word wants a boy and two girls besides, and Tomm would swear the little one under that cap is another boy.
Behind the boy, the tall girl chokes a laugh into a cough, and Tomm looks at her, and her chin catches him.
He has seen that chin.
He goes hunting for it through a fish stall, a festival crowd, somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, and every memory he tries opens on the green braid, but this girl's hair is yellow as old tallow, flat with road dust, shorn short. The memory niggles at him though.
"Ser." The boy's hand has gone to his purse, slow, where Tomm can see it. Silver catches the light. "I understand you have a duty to perform. But we're just three children who made a foolish decision and would very much like to see the harbor before we have to explain ourselves to our father. Perhaps... you could forget you saw us? For the sake of discretion?"
Say the chin is pullin right. Say he marches three foreign children up the hill on the memory of it, and joins the fishwife and the wool factor and every other fool this gold fever has made. Or say the Seven love him and the chin is right after all, and the fifty goes where coin always goes, up, into the captain's report under the captain's name, while Tomm gets an ale bought for him and a good lad with it. He has watched rewards travel all his life. They travel away from people like him.
And if these are truly the lord's runaways, then they're riding into the lord's own net, with every hull in this harbor searched two days past and the lord's men thick on every quay. The harbor will catch what the gate misses.
The stag is warm from the boy's purse.
"Get out of my sight," Tomm says. "And if your father asks, I never saw you."
The peacock touches his forehead, half salute, half jape, and the three of them ride into the crowd, and the crowd takes them.
"You. With the handcart. Hold."
***
The Barkeep
Sella has heard the runaways sold nine different ways across her counter this week. The bastard stole the girls. The girls ran and the bastard chased. There never was a bastard. A singer up from Oldcastle had it that the Stark girl rides a wolf the size of a pony and the Manderly girl charmed the seals off Seal Rock. The only parts that pour the same from one telling to the next are the green hair and the fifty dragons, and the stories grow more fantastical every night in the telling.
Two days past, the lord's men turned out every hull at anchor and found nay but salt cod and angry captains. A fishwife turned in her own niece, the steward's men whipped a fellow outside the Seal Gate yesterday for selling them an invented sighting, and the whole city has the fever. Sella pulls ale and lets word come to her.
The Tyroshi boy she marked the moment he came in, first for trouble—hair like that walks in asking for it—then for odd. One ale in two hours, and the level in his tankard slowly lowering. Boys his age drink or leave. This one is listening.
Dake shoves off the wall near the second hour. Dake hauled nets once, before ale got the better part of him, and what's left is big, slow, and certain that foreigners are the reason for all of it. Sella's hand finds the cudgel under the counter.
She has seen a hundred of these. Dake swings, the boy is somewhere else, and then Dake's head snaps back and comes down to meet a knee on its way up, and he's on her floor leaking from a nose set sideways, the whole of it taking less time than drawing a tankard. The boy pours the last of his ale over him and sets the empty tankard down with a click.
"Someone should drag him out before he bleeds on the floor."
The laugh comes up out of her without her permission. "You heard the boy. Get this fool out of my establishment."
Two sailors haul Dake away, and the room goes back to its cups. Then the boy waves her over, and silver slides across the wood.
"I'm looking for passage. Ship with spare bunks. Captain who doesn't ask questions."
She looks at the silver. At him. At the drunk being hauled out her door.
"Full of surprises, Tyroshi."
"Full of silver. Will that do?"
A second stag joins the first, and both go into the box below the counter.
"Depends where you're going."
"East. Braavos, eventually."
"You, or you and others?"
"Me and two younger companions. Dogs and a bird. Single cabin."
Her eyebrows rise. She leaves it there, and draws him a fresh ale while she thinks.
Two younger companions, sight unseen. Dogs, plural, and a bird, of all things. The tale the criers want is a Northern bastard herding two highborn girls and a pair of wolf pups, and what her counter has is a foreign boy who folded Dake without breathing hard, trailing brothers or sisters or cousins, when half the merchants' sons on this coast drag some manner of household behind them. And what would she carry up to New Castle anyway—a boy bought ale and asked after ships? Half this waterfront asks after ships. They'd whip her beside the fool from the Seal Gate, or worse, they'd believe her, and the lord's gratitude would come down that hill at a lord's pace and in a lord's measure, to a woman who keeps a dockside tap, which means she's unlikely to see any of that pretty gold.
And her house sells two things, ale and quiet, and the quiet is the better stock. The runaway 'prentices, the debt-dodgers, the younger sons with reasons—they drink here year upon year because nothing said across this wood goes anywhere else. Sell one customer to the castle and the quiet trade drinks elsewhere, until she's pulling ale for Dake and nobody. Fifty dragons spends once.
So she gives him the best she has.
"Matthos Reyaan. Gull's Reach. Merchant cog, makes the Braavos run twice a year." She leans closer. "Captain's honest—won't cheat you, won't sell you out—but he's not soft. Give him trouble, he'll dump you at the next port."
"I don't intend to give trouble."
"No one ever means to." She straightens. "Dock seven. Sailing with the evening tide tomorrow. You want passage, be there at dawn."
On his way out, a third stag rings on the wood without her asking.
It goes into the box with its sisters. By midnight Dake is back at the far end of the counter with a cloth to his nose, paying for his own for once, telling anyone who'll listen there were three of them, and one had a knife.
***
The Captain
Two days past, Lord Manderly's men came through the Gull's Reach with the rest of the harbor. Six of them, boots wet, turning his furs with the flats of their swords as though a highborn maid might be folded into a bale of wool. Half a day's loading lost. Matthos stood on his own deck and counted what the lord's grief had cost him—he counts everything—and the lord's men went down his gangplank without leaving so much as an apology behind.
Dawn finds him at the lines, and the purple hair announces the boy from fifty yards.
"Captain Reyaan?"
"Who's asking?"
"A customer. Passage east. Three travelers, two dogs, one bird. Single cabin."
Matthos looks him over and takes his time about it. Young, but he stands wrong for young, weight settled even, hands loose at his sides, and his eyes go to the three crewmen working aft before they ever come to Matthos.
"How old are you, boy?"
"Old enough to pay." The purse clinks. "And young enough to learn. I want you to teach me sailing during the voyage. Whatever you're willing to share. I'll pay for your time."
Forty years of passengers, and that one is new. The runaway boys make a long, dull ledger: bastards shipped to relatives, 'prentices a step ahead of their masters, debtors' sons, somebody's by-blow outrunning somebody's wife. The criers' tale wants two girls; his gangplank has a Tyroshi alone who wants to learn sheets and knots and will pay for the teaching.
"Keep clear of the rigging," Matthos tells him. "Don't bleed on anything I have to clean."
"Deal."
"Not yet." There is the other half of the manifest to settle. "The dogs. I need to see them before we agree. I don't take animals aboard sight-unseen."
"This evening. When we board."
"If I don't like what I see, the deal's off. No arguments."
"Clear."
They shake on it, and the boy's palm is callused in the wrong places for a merchant's son. Matthos files that with the rest and says nothing.
"One more thing." The boy holds his gaze. "The dogs are... unusual. Northern breeding. Larger than most. But they're well-trained and they won't cause problems."
"How unusual?"
"You'll see."
His lips move over the sums. Three passengers, the cabin, meals from his stores, two large dogs berthed somewhere they won't eat the crew: four dragons for the carrying and two more for the not-asking, since the not-asking is plainly the cargo the boy values most. Half before a line is cast.
Against all of which sits the fifty the whole port is drunk on. To touch it he must seize paying passengers on his own deck, the boy who counts crews among them, then ride at anchor through a lord's inquiry while his furs and wool miss the Braavos market—and the market is the year. Then a Westerosi lord's gratitude, paid to a Braavosi captain at the lord's leisure, less whatever the steward shaves on its way down the hill. And after all that, the name: the Gull's Reach, the ship that sold her passengers. The quiet trade pays him twice a year, every year, and it pays on the strength of one rule—what happens aboard stays aboard.
His lips stop.
"Evening tide. Be here an hour before. Half payment now."
Three gold dragons. He counts them twice, thumb walking each coin across his palm, his left ring finger short its tip and clever for all that, and the coins go away into his coat.
"See you tonight, Captain."
He's already back at his lines before the boy finishes saying it.
They arrive with the last of the light, hooded, the dogs heeling close. The dogs he looks at first, because the dogs are the lie he was promised: boarhound-tall, wrong in the shoulder, one black and one grey, and they take his gangplank with no sound on the planks at all. He told the boy the deal was off if he didn't like what he saw. He doesn't like what he sees but the deal holds anyway.
"Northern hunting dogs," the boy says. "Crossed with something—my family's bred them for generations."
Matthos holds his eyes, and for the space of that look the fifty crosses his mind one last time, all of it standing on his deck now and the lord's men a shout away. It would need steel drawn, his crew's and likely his own, and he has no appetite left for steel at his age. The dogs alone would be a nuisance to settle. And there's the look the boy is giving him, level and unhurried, a look Matthos has met before on men it proved costly to press. That one would make a fight of it, and a fight on his own deck costs the winner too. Best not to deal in that trouble at all.
The lie has a use—it's the answer either of them will give, should anyone ever ask.
The sister under the yellow hair doesn't look Tyroshi, and the little one studies his rigging the whole way up the plank and none of it is his business.
The tide turns. Lines come in, canvas fills, and White Harbor's lanterns drop astern one wave at a time. Somewhere past the harbor mouth a raven falls out of the dark onto the boy's shoulder—one bird, as contracted.
The boy paid. That makes him cargo.