Rhaelarr Belaerys was drinking wine on a rock in the Shivering Sea while his dragon burned a village, and, quite frankly, I wasn't surprised.
I'd spotted the smoke from a hundred miles out, a greasy black column climbing out of the island canopy and bending east on the wind, and I'd brought Zathisrax down through the cloud cover and counted the islands as we descended. Nineteen of them visible from altitude, dark and blunt-edged and scattered across grey water that looked cold enough to kill you. The forests that covered them were all wrong, every tree the same stunted species with bark that had a wet shine to it, the canopy so uniformly dark that the islands looked like they'd been dipped in ink. Mist hung in the channels between them and sat in the valleys and wouldn't move.
Zathisrax's claws scraped black gravel when he landed on the northern shore. The air hit me when I dismounted and it was bitter, a wet and cutting cold that got through the riding leathers and sat against my skin. I hadn't been genuinely cold since arriving in this world. The Freehold ran on volcanic heat and dragon warmth and sorcery, and Valyrian blood ran hot, and I'd forgotten what it felt like to step outside and have the air push back. It was bracing, honestly. The Shivering Sea didn't care that I was a dragonlord.
Taerenis swept overhead while I walked the shore, and the dragon was gorgeous. I hated that. Rhaelarr's mount had scales that caught every scrap of grey light and threw it back in cerulean and sapphire, and his wingspan was broader than Zathisrax's by about fifteen meters. The dragon banked south over the treeline and roared, and the sound rolled through the forest and shook the mist loose from the nearest hollow, and somewhere in the interior people screamed.
The camp sat on a flat shelf of rock that jutted out over the water at the shore's western end. Rhaelarr had set up a silk pavilion in Belaerys black and gold, staked into the stone with iron pins, and underneath it he'd arranged a low table with a spread of food and chilled wine that belonged in a Valyrian dining hall, on a frozen rock in the middle of nowhere, with screaming in the background. Belaerys excess at its finest.
The chairs were what stopped me.
They were Weirwood. White wood, pale as bone, carved into high-backed seats with smooth armrests. The grain ran straight and clean through the lumber and the surface was hard and polished beneath my fingers when I touched the nearest one. Weirwood didn't rot and didn't warp and didn't split, and the pieces sitting under this pavilion would still be sitting here looking exactly like this in five hundred years if nobody moved them.
Rhaelarr changed in ten years. The boy from the sky ship had turned into a man of twenty-one with sharp cheekbones and a jaw that could cut cloth. His silver hair was long now, pulled into a knot at the crown and hanging loose behind his shoulders, and the robes were travel-cut Belaerys black and gold with a Blessed Steel knife at his hip that had seen actual use. He was the sole surviving heir of the most powerful house in the Freehold, and he looked comfortable in the role in a way that would've worried me if I hadn't been the one who'd helped him get there.
"Little Haemonis," he said, and lifted his cup. "You are late."
"I was surveying the western approaches." I sat in the other chair and the Weirwood took my weight and it was comfortable, which felt wrong given the wind and the cold and the distant sound of his dragon terrorizing an indigenous population. "These are remarkable, Rhaelarr. Where did you find Weirwood furniture in the Shivering Sea?"
"Pentosh, three weeks ago. He told me they came from a castle in the North of Westeros, but I'd wager some Ibbenese whaler pulled them from a longhouse on a raid and sold them downriver. Does the provenance trouble you?"
"It does not." I ran my thumb along the armrest. The wood was hard and smooth. "Though I imagine the Northmen would have strong feelings about their sacred trees being turned into seating for a Belaerys on a pillaging holiday."
"This is not a pillaging holiday." He waved his cup toward the interior, where a second column of smoke had joined the first and the screaming had stopped, which was somehow worse. "This is a research expedition that has been complicated by the absolute refusal of the local population to cooperate with anything resembling civilized discourse."
"You might try landing without setting their homes on fire."
"No thanks."
The wind came off the sea and pushed through the pavilion and flapped the silk overhead. I took the cup Rhaelarr poured for me and drank. Arbor gold. He'd hauled a case of fine Westerosi wine halfway around the world so he could drink it on a volcanic rock while burning things. I had to respect the commitment to comfort, if nothing else.
"What are they worshipping?" I asked.
Rhaelarr settled back and drank and thought about it.
"Gods with fish heads," he said. "Squamous things, covered in scales and fins. The temples on the first two islands had idols carved from this green-black stone I couldn't identify, shaped into figures with human bodies and the heads of deep-water fish. The eyes were polished shell, and they caught the light and seemed to move. Unsettling. And the idols had offerings on them, seaweed draped over the shoulders and what I'm fairly certain were preserved human organs arranged at the feet."
"Preserved how?"
"That's the thing. I don't know. It wasn't blood sorcery, or if it was, it followed rules I've never encountered. The organs were cold and firm and showed no decay despite sitting in open salt air. The Sorcerers' College would tear itself apart trying to explain this place." He drank again. "My grandmother's archives had almost nothing on the Thousand Islands; one notation, two words. 'Avoid. Unclean.'"
"Lady Vhassana's archives are thorough on most subjects."
"My grandmother's archives are thorough on subjects she considers useful to Belaerys power. Green-skinned primitives praying to fish gods on rocks in the Shivering Sea didn't qualify." He paused and looked at me over the rim of his cup. "Until I started digging through her records looking for things she didn't want found."
I set my cup on the table and turned my chair to face him.
"Have you upheld your end of our arrangement, Rhaelarr?"
He went still. The cup came down slowly and settled on the armrest of his chair and his jaw worked and he sat there looking at me for a few seconds. He was scared, and he was trying to figure out how much of it to show.
He reached into his robe and pulled out a scroll case.
It was bone, lacquered dark, with brass fittings on both ends, and his hands shook when he held it out to me, the brass rattling against the bone. I took the case and turned it over. The symbols carved into the surface were Dragon Priest notation, the same script I'd studied in the oldest texts of the Haemonis Library, and the brass fittings carried the seal of the Archonate's inner chamber.
"That," Rhaelarr said, and his voice had gone rough, "was the most dangerous thing I've ever done."
"Tell me."
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and pressed his clasped hands against his forehead and breathed.
"The archive under the Hall of the Forty goes four levels deep. First two levels, any dragonlord can access with a standard working. Third level needs Archonate clearance and a blood match. Fourth level needs personal authorization from a sitting Archon." He pulled his hands apart and gripped his knees. "I went through Archon Vaelyros. He owed my grandmother a favor big enough that he was willing to bend, but he gave me a limit. Two hours."
"How long did it take you to find it?"
"Forty minutes. The Dragon Priests keep immaculate records. Everything indexed and cross-referenced, geological surveys and structural analyses and the maintenance protocols for the volcanic stabilization workings, all of it filed against a master codex sitting on a pedestal under glass in the center of the room. Forty minutes and I had what I came for."
"And the other eighty?"
His knuckles went white on his knees. "I spent them behind a shelf of core samples trying not to breathe while my grandmother walked the third level directly above me."
I held the scroll case against my lap and waited.
"She came to the archive." His voice had dropped. "Lady Vhassana Belaerys, who visits the Hall of the Forty maybe twice a year, decided that particular afternoon was the time to inspect the genealogical records on the third level. I was one floor below her holding a scroll case full of information she'd specifically forbidden anyone in the family from touching. I could hear her footsteps on the stone above me and feel her through the flow, and she stopped at one point and I knew she was reaching, scanning."
"But she didn't come down."
"Vaelyros intercepted her. He met her at the third level entrance and started talking about the Aurion territorial dispute, and she took the bait, and I went out through the heating tunnels under the Hall." He exhaled hard through his nose and sat back and crossed his arms. "I still don't entirely understand why you wanted this, Taela. The Fourteen Flames are the Dragon Priests' domain. The volcanic stabilization workings, the magma monitoring, the annual reinforcement rituals, that's their craft."
I held his gaze and smiled.
"Call it academic curiosity," I said.
He stared at me. His mouth opened and closed and opened again.
I put the scroll case in the inner pocket of my riding coat and buttoned it shut. The brass fittings pressed against my ribs through the silk. The structural maps of the Fourteen Flames, the volcanic stabilization protocols that kept the entire Freehold from cooking itself alive, and the whole thing weighed almost nothing.
"You've fulfilled your obligation, Rhaelarr. The workings I taught you are yours to keep, and House Haemonis will continue to back your position. We are even."
He uncrossed his arms and reached for the wine and filled both cups and raised his toward me.
"To even footing," he said. "The most comfortable distance a Haemonis and a Belaerys have ever managed."
I raised my cup and drank. The wine was good. It was always good when Rhaelarr was paying.
Taerenis roared somewhere over the southern canopy and the pavilion silk snapped in the backwash, and then the sound faded and the wind came back and the grey sea stretched out in front of us and neither of us said anything for a while. The tension had drained out of the scroll exchange and what was left between us felt almost ordinary, two people who'd known each other for ten years and who didn't entirely trust each other sharing a bottle of wine.
"I heard something about Zaeen," I said, turning my cup in my fingers. "From the Velaryon representative, last month. He launched another expedition?"
Rhaelarr's eyebrows went up. "You keep tabs on Zaeen?"
"I keep track of everyone who has saved my life. It is a short list and the entries do not expire. What has he been doing?"
Rhaelarr softened. His jaw unclenched and his shoulders dropped and he looked, for a second, like the boy from the sky ship.
"House Belaerys has been funding his work for years now," he said. "After we came back from Sothoryos, the Archonate offered him a commendation and a pension and a seat at the Sorcerers' College, and he turned down every bit of it. He wanted a ship and thirty volunteers and a year's worth of supplies for the deep interior. My grandmother called it a waste. I overruled her."
"You overruled Lady Vhassana?"
"I know, it sounds crazy, but being the sole surviving heir has its perks, Taela. I framed it as a prestige investment, which she accepted because prestige is a language she speaks fluently. The truth is that Zaeen kept me alive in the Sothoryi jungle and I owed him considerably more than a pension."
I waited and drank my wine.
"He sailed three months ago," Rhaelarr said. "Left from Gogossos, went up the Zamoyos, then overland through the deep jungle, further south than any Valyrian has ever pushed. His last report was six weeks old when it reached me, passed hand to hand through a chain of coastal trading posts, and it described something that made the Water Wyrms look ordinary."
"What did he find?"
Rhaelarr leaned forward and the eagerness in his eyes was real and bright and had nothing political in it at all.
"A civilization. Deep in the interior, past the Brindled Men, past the central basin, on a highland plateau ringed by mountains that nobody in the Freehold has ever mapped. Zaeen found a civilization of lizardmen."
"Lizardmen."
"His word. Bipedal reptilians, four to five feet tall, scaled skin, crested skulls, hands fine enough to work stone. Stone structures in concentric rings around temple complexes, and the temples hold idols of what he described as, and I'm quoting from his report, 'bulbous, toad-like gods of considerable girth and uncertain temperament, rendered in a green stone that appears to fluoresce under certain light conditions.'"
"Toad gods."
"Right? Ya learn something new every once in a while."
"And Zaeen walked into the middle of this."
"He did and would have, even if he was told no."
I pressed my fingers against my mouth and breathed through them. The laugh was right there and I couldn't let it through, not in front of Rhaelarr. “Fair enough.”
"I am pleased to know that he is well," I said, and meant it. "Despite the dangers he seems determined to throw himself into."
"His next report is due within the month. It'll either contain something extraordinary or news that they've found his bones."
"I would bet on the extraordinary," I said. "Zaeen has survived everything Sothoryos has thrown at him for forty years. I doubt toad-worshipping lizardmen are going to be the thing that gets him."
Rhaelarr smiled. A quick and genuine one, and then it was gone.
Taerenis roared again, closer this time, and firelight flickered above the southern canopy. The screaming had started up again, thin and distant.
"I should bring him back before he burns the whole island," Rhaelarr said, glancing south. "The priests here have been slightly more cooperative than the previous batch, and I'd rather keep enough of the temple intact to tell whether any of their ritual objects count as artifacts."
He turned back to me. "Which reminds me. You've been flying the western reaches for the better part of a month and you've told me exactly nothing about your own progress. The Ritual of Balerios requires an artifact of magical significance. Have you actually found one?"
I set my cup on the table and stood and walked to the edge of the pavilion where the rock shelf ended and the grey ocean began. The wind pulled at my hair and my coat and the cold pressed against my face and I looked south, past the islands and the channels between them, toward the open water and the warmer currents beyond.
Thalassa was there, at the far edge of my awareness. Forty miles off the Dornish coast, resting in a bay on an island with green grass and dark volcanic soil, and the bond between us pulsed steady and slow and enormous. And closer, beneath the surface of the Shivering Sea where the shelf dropped into deep water, my power caught the edges of things moving in the cold and the dark, old presences with heavy minds, and I filed them away for later. The world below the waterline was vast and full of creatures that the Freehold had never catalogued because nobody with a dragon had ever bothered to look down.
Something passed through the deep water beyond the island chain, ancient and large and patient, and my power brushed the shape of its mind and found the architecture I'd felt in every wyrm I'd ever touched.
"Of a sort," I said.