I spread the scrolls across the grass of Annette's Haven with stones at the corners to keep the sea wind from taking them, and I sat cross-legged in the afternoon sun and started reading.
The Dragon Priests had been thorough. Every volcanic shaft, every magma chamber, every fissure and vent and subterranean channel in the entire chain had been surveyed and catalogued. Temperature gradients, pressure differentials, mineral compositions, flow densities at varying depths. The maps covered four thousand years of continuous observation, updated annually by priests who descended into the volcanic tunnels with glass candles and measuring instruments and came back up with data that they fed into models so complex the mathematical notation alone filled three of the seven scrolls.
But the stabilization protocols were what I needed, and they occupied the fourth scroll in its entirety.
The Fourteen Flames were not naturally stable. That was the thing. The chain sat on a convergence of tectonic forces that should've produced catastrophic eruptions every few centuries, burying the entire peninsula under ash and pyroclastic flow and resetting the geological clock. The reason it hadn't, the reason the Valyrian Freehold had built a civilization on top of an active volcanic chain and kept it standing for five thousand years, was sorcery.
The stabilization workings were a network. Hundreds of individual rituals, performed at specific locations along the chain at specific intervals, channeling the flow through the volcanic rock to reinforce the natural geological structures that kept the magma contained. The priests maintained pressure valves in the form of controlled venting sites, managed thermal gradients through targeted applications of sorcerous cooling, and monitored the tectonic stresses with an array of glass candles embedded in the deep rock that worked as a primitive seismological network. The whole system ran on a continuous input of sorcerous energy drawn from two sources: the priests themselves and the volcanic heat of the Flames.
The workings were brilliant. They were also fragile, and the Dragon Priests knew it, because they'd documented every failure mode in detail. Each ritual in the network depended on the others, and the failure of any single node could cascade through the system in ways the models predicted with alarming specificity. The priests had contingency protocols for partial failures, backup rituals that could compensate for the loss of individual nodes, and emergency procedures for scenarios where multiple nodes failed simultaneously.
And if more than thirty percent of the stabilization network failed at once, the emergency procedures just said to evacuate.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the sky.
The slave collars ran on glass candle frequencies. The stabilization network ran on glass candle frequencies. The entire sorcerous infrastructure of the Valyrian Freehold, from the collars around five million necks to the workings that kept the ground from swallowing the civilization whole, operated on a shared substrate of glass candle communication. Of course it did. Integration was efficient, and efficiency was what you optimized for when you were running a continent-spanning empire powered by magic and volcanic heat. Which meant that if one part of the system broke, everything connected to it felt it.
I sat up and pulled the fourth scroll closer and traced the frequency diagrams with my fingertip, following the resonant patterns through the network and mapping the connections between the stabilization nodes and the broader glass candle infrastructure. The collar frequencies sat in a narrow band at the low end of the spectrum, deliberately separated from the critical infrastructure frequencies to prevent interference. The stabilization workings occupied the middle and upper bands. And between them sat a gap, a dead zone in the frequency spectrum where nothing operated, because the Dragon Priests had specifically reserved it as a buffer against crosstalk.
I stared at that gap for a long time.
If I could generate a pulse of sorcerous energy at the buffer frequency, tuned to resonate with both the collar band and the stabilization band simultaneously, the pulse would propagate through the entire glass candle network and interact with every working connected to it. The collar bindings would receive a burst of energy at a frequency their anchor points weren't designed to handle, and the binding structure would shatter under the harmonic stress. Every collar in the Freehold would go inert at the same moment.
The stabilization workings would also receive the pulse. And that was where the math got complicated.
I spent the next three hours running calculations, working through the resonance models and the energy requirements and the predicted effects on the volcanic network. The numbers were large and uncertain and concerning. A pulse strong enough to break every collar binding in the Freehold would carry enough energy to disrupt the stabilization workings at their weakest nodes. How many nodes would fail depended on variables I couldn't control: the current state of the workings, the priests' maintenance schedule, the ambient tectonic stress on the day the pulse was fired.
The best case was ten to fifteen percent of nodes temporarily knocked offline, and increased volcanic activity across the chain for weeks or months before the priests could repair the damage. Increased venting, minor tremors, elevated temperatures in the tunnels and passages beneath the city. Uncomfortable and alarming, but survivable. The absolute worst case was a cascade failure that took out thirty percent or more of the network, and multiple simultaneous eruptions, and the end of the Freehold as a functional civilization.
I stared at the numbers and thought about probabilities.
The Fourteen Flames had existed for millions of years before the Valyrians built their first shepherd's hut on their slopes. The volcanic chain was a geological feature, and the stabilization workings were just a management system imposed on top of natural processes. Disrupting the workings wouldn't create new volcanic forces; it would temporarily remove the controls that kept existing forces in check. The magma chambers beneath the Flames held the same pressures they'd always held, and the tectonic stresses followed the same patterns they'd followed for millennia. Without the stabilization workings, those pressures would release on their own schedule instead of the priests' schedule, and that schedule might be tomorrow or it might be ten thousand years from now.
The probability of a catastrophic eruption in the narrow window between the pulse and the priests' repair efforts was low. Low enough, at least, that I could live with it. Because five million people were wearing collars that would kill them if they tried to leave, and the alternative was leaving those collars in place while I searched for a method that carried no risk at all. That method didn't exist. Every path I'd mapped over fifteen years carried risk, and this path carried less than most and accomplished more than all of them.
The pulse would break the collars. The freed slaves would need somewhere to go. And that brought me back to the island beneath my feet.
Annette's Haven was dirt and grass and goats. Harren's family and their little stone buildings and their kitchen garden were a homestead. To shelter even a fraction of five million freed slaves, I needed a settlement with a harbor deep enough for transport ships, warehouses for supplies, housing for thousands, freshwater infrastructure, defensive fortifications, and the administrative capacity to receive and organize a population larger than most cities in the known world. I needed to build Dragonstone from scratch on an uninhabited island forty miles off a foreign coast.
Building it required resources I didn't have. Stone, timber, iron, skilled labor, food stores, ships, tools. I needed House Haemonis to build this for me, and House Haemonis would build it only if my parents saw sufficient reason to invest.
What reason would satisfy Volaena Haemonis and Maerion Haemonis? I didn't know yet. I rolled up the scrolls and tucked them into the waterproof tube and strapped the tube to the inside of my riding coat and stood and brushed the grass from my leathers and walked down the hill toward the settlement.
Harren's homestead had grown in the month since my first visit. A second family had arrived from the Dornish mainland, a fisherman named Gareth and his wife and their three sons, and they'd built a shelter near the southern harbor and started pulling fish from the bay in quantities that had Harren talking about a smokehouse. A third family was expected within the week.
Torrhen sat on his stone beside the fire pit with his cup and his staff, and he watched me come down the slope.
"You've been reading scrolls on the hilltop all afternoon," he said.
"Well, the light up there is good."
"Sit," Torrhen said, and gestured to the stone across the fire pit. "Dalla made broth. You look like you need it."
I sat. Dalla appeared from the largest building with a clay bowl of something that steamed and smelled of salt and onion and goat, and she pressed it into my hands and went back inside. The broth was thin and savory and it warmed me from the chest outward.
"Torrhen," I said. "How much do you know about the lords of Dorne?"
He sipped his own cup and looked at me over the rim.
"Well, not much. In case you forgot, I’m not actually in Dorne. I know they bow to a Princess." He lowered his cup. "And I know her name is Nymara Martell, and she sits in Sunspear with a court of minor lords and landed knights and more spears than any army between the Wall and the Summer Sea. And I know that she hates dragonlords."
"Hates them specifically, or just the idea of them?"
"Both, as I understand it, though I think most people outside of Valyria would share her sentiments."
"Then she and I should have a great deal in common." I said. “I suppose I’ll have to pay her a visit.”
Torrhen's cup paused. He looked at me for a long time, and then he set the cup down on his knee.
"Girl," he said. "You are talking about walking into Sunspear, the seat of a woman who has made it her life's work to resist Valyrian influence in her territory. You. On a dragon. Did you forget that you are also a Dragonlord?"
"Well, no, but I was going to leave the dragon outside the city, actually."
"Yeah, that doesn't really help."
"I'm aware of the difficulty. But Annette's Haven sits forty miles off the Dornish coast, which makes Princess Nymara my closest neighbor with a standing army and a fleet and the political infrastructure to either support what I'm building here or attempt to destroy it before I finish the first warehouse. I'd much rather she be the former."
Torrhen picked up his cup again and drank and stared at the fire.
"You'll need a gift," he said. "The Dornish value courtesy, and showing up at a foreign court without something in your hands is an insult in just about every culture I've ever heard of."
"What kind of gift?"
"I don’t know." Torrhen shrugged. “I’m not exactly a lord.”
I finished the broth and set the bowl beside my feet and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees.
"I suppose that makes sense," I said. "I can give her a sword of Blessed Steel, I suppose; I’ve got plenty to spare."
"Valyrian Steel? Don’t those things cost as much as whole army?"
"Is that what everyone thinks? No, not really–at least, not in Valyria. It’s not terribly difficult to make for a Dragonlord. Most of our things are made from it."
Torrhen's eyebrows went up. "Well, it seems you’ll be giving her a mighty gift."
He drank his cup dry and held it out toward the building where Dalla had gone, and she appeared and refilled it and disappeared again, and the old man drank again and shook his head.
"Still,” Torrhen continued. “You shouldn’t expect any warmth from them. The Dornish, after all, carry the memory and the rage of Princess Nymeria. Don’t drink anything too if you don’t want to shit your guts out in the morning.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I took notes.
The next morning I saddled Zathisrax and left Annette's Haven in the grey light before dawn, flying northeast along the Dornish coast toward Sunspear. I left Thalassa in the bay with instructions to stay submerged and avoid fishing boats, and the sea dragon settled into the deep water near the harbor mouth and vanished beneath the surface.
The Dornish coast unrolled beneath me in red and gold, sandstone cliffs giving way to desert and dry scrubland. The land was sun-blasted and empty and beautiful.
Sunspear appeared after two hours of flight, rising from the coast where the peninsula narrowed to a point. The city sprawled across the headland in tiers of sandstone and mudbrick, low and broad, built to shed heat. The towers of the Old Palace stood at the city's heart, three spires of pale stone joined by arched walkways, and the sun-and-spear banner of House Martell snapped in the constant wind off the Narrow Sea.
I brought Zathisrax down five miles south of the city walls, on a stretch of empty beach where the sand was hard-packed and the dunes provided a natural windbreak. He settled onto the sand and folded his wings and turned his starlit eyes toward the city.
"Stay," I told him through the bond. "Hunt fish if you need to eat. Do not approach the city, and do not eat anything that has a saddle on it."
Zathisrax's inner eyelids slid halfway closed.
I walked five miles of coastal sand in riding leathers and a plain traveling cloak. The sun climbed higher and the heat pressed down and the sand shifted under my boots, and by the time I reached the outskirts of Sunspear I was sweating through my leathers and my silver hair was plastered to the back of my neck.
The gate guards stopped me at the entrance to the shadow city, the sprawling market district that surrounded the Old Palace. Two men in orange cloaks with spears, and they saw my silver hair and their grips tightened.
"State your name and your business," the taller one said.
"My name is Taela Haemonis of House Haemonis of the Valyrian Freehold," I said. "And I request an audience with Princess Nymara Martell."
The guards looked at each other.
"Wait here," the taller one said. The shorter one stayed, his spear angled across my path.
Twenty minutes later, a woman in flowing silks of deep orange appeared at the gate, flanked by two additional guards and a scribe carrying a tablet. She was perhaps forty, lean and brown-skinned, with black hair pulled back under a jeweled headband and sharp eyes. She barely hid her disdain, which – given the history between Dorne and the Freehold – I suppose made some sense.
"I am Mellaria Sand, seneschal to Princess Nymara," she said. "You claim to be of House Haemonis?"
"I am Taela Haemonis, daughter of Lord Maerion and Lady Volaena."
“A Dragonlord Princess of the House of the Blood Sorcerers and Flesh Shapers, all the way out here. I do believe this is the first.” The corner of Mellaria's mouth twitched. “Nymara will be pleased. She likes new things.”
"The Princess will see you," she said. "Follow me."
—
Volaena, who had been watching Taela from a Glass Candle, raised a brow. “Dorne?”
Truly, her daughter’s machinations knew no bounds. Now, she was involving the sand barbarians in her schemes. Her daughter had grown to be patient, skilled, and utterly cold. Taela was the perfect Haemonis. How utterly delightful.
But there was something that’d been nagging at the back of Volaena’s head, something that constantly distracted her as of late, a single word – a name, really – she heard from Taela. Her daughter found an island in the middle of nowhere and called it Annette’s Haven.
That name.
Annette…