Chapter 63

We stayed in Tyrosh only four more days, for which I was glad. Adarys's gift had more than soured me on the island. And of the three Free Cities we'd be visiting, Tyrosh was the least Valyrian one anyway, the least likely to have a bride of sufficiently pure blood to sate King Aerys's wishes. Lord Steffon's mission would carry us east regardless of how I felt about the place.

I made the deal with Adarys for Rona's freedom the very next day after meeting her and her mother. The magister was more than glad to sign too, eager to please a foreign lord. 

The price he asked for was generous, I was told, for a young girl. He never once questioned why I wanted to buy her. The bastard likely assumed I wanted her for the same reason men like him wanted girls like her, and it took every measure of self-control I had not to break his face when he gave me a knowing, conspiratorial smile after the deed was witnessed and stamped.

The actual handover was worse.

I could barely watch as Bryssa and Rona hugged each other for the last time. They held on as long as they were allowed, the mother whispering into her daughter's hair, the girl crying so hard she could not breathe. Eventually Adarys grew bored of the display. He gestured to one of his men, who walked over and pulled Bryssa back by the hair so that her daughter could be led away.

Perhaps it was seeing that separation that made me promise myself something on the carriage ride back to the Archon's palace.

I would try my hand at slavery before I died. I would do everything I could to end it.

Fuck myself for ever thinking Westeros was as bad as Essos. Yes, we were terrible in many ways. The smallfolk lived hard lives. Lords could be cruel. Justice was uneven and often absent. The strong abused the weak in a hundred ways that needed correcting.

But we were damned superior to these slaving fuckers in the east, and I would never let myself forget it again.

And even if I never managed to gather the political capital and the military strength to put a meaningful end to the slave trade—something easier said than done, given how deep its roots ran in every Essosi economy—I could still pull a Roddy the Ruin in my old age: gather a band of old men ready to die and launch a suicidal campaign against the slave cities just to give these fat magisters something to chew on. Tyrosh was certainly close enough to Tarth for a surprise assault to be possible.

Daydreaming about burning the place to the ground got me through the next few days.

By the time we were ready to set sail for Lys, I'd worked out the basics of what I would do for Rona's protection on the journey home. She would need a guard. Someone competent enough to defend her from any trouble, and patient enough to be kind to a traumatized child for the weeks she would spend at sea.

I considered Codin. He had grown into one of my most reliable men, and there was no doubt his sword was the best of those traveling with me. But I needed him with me. The voyage to Volantis was the most dangerous leg of our trip, and I trusted his blade at my back more than any other I had.

Arlan was the least martial of my three companions, and he had his own purpose with me. I had promised to show him the world, and the world we had been seeing was producing maps I could not afford to lose. He had already sketched the city and the island of Tyrosh during our brief week there. With the help of his bird, he had mapped out every inlet and peninsula of the island and produced street-level detail of the city itself.

When he showed me the drafts that night in my cabin, hours after Tyrosh had vanished behind us, I sat staring at them for a long time.

To my dismay, he went so far as apologizing for their roughness. He said it would take months to refine them into true masterworks. But even in this state, I knew he could sell them on the open market for a small fortune.

My mind raced through possibilities and the doors these maps could open, and we stayed up late talking about his future.

My plan was to set him up as the knight of House Lantry sworn to Tarth, where he’d make his coin not through vast lands he didn't want and couldn't manage, but by selling maps to lords, merchants, and magisters across the known world. 

With one condition. Every map he sold would have to be approved by House Tarth first. I would not give valuable military intelligence away for a bit of upfront gold. Nor did I want any rare maps he might possibly come to make in the future getting out from under my influence. 

Arlan certainly seemed to like the idea. The grandson of a minor castellan becoming a knight in his own right, building wealth and reputation through a craft he loved. We talked into the small hours about which cities and regions he could target first, which lords would pay the most, which kinds of maps would be worth the time to make.

That left Pate.

Pate, who was barely fifteen but already taller than most grown men. Pate, who was technically my squire and would have preferred to remain at my side for whatever adventures lay ahead. Pate, who was big and strong and skilled enough with a sword that I trusted him to protect a child for a few weeks.

He was sullen when I told him. "My lord, I want to come with you. And Volantis…"

"Will be there next time,” I told him back in my room in the palace. “This is more important."

He made a face. "Babysitting a girl?"

I sighed. I had withheld Rona’s exact circumstances from everyone but Lord and Lady Baratheon, both to protect my own reputation in case things got misconstrued, but also for the girl’s future. Even in Tarth she could have a difficult time growing up with the shadow of her past hanging over her. Prejudices ran deep back home as much as anywhere else, and being known as the daughter of a bed slave wouldn’t help.

"Protecting an innocent child," I told him instead, "who has been through more than you and I combined will likely ever know. A child whose mother gave her up so she would not become what her mother became. A child who has lost everything she ever knew and is sailing to a country she has never seen, where she will not speak the language and where she will know no one. A child whose only protection on the journey will be you."

I held his eyes.

"That is a knightly duty, Pate. The most knightly of duties. The strong protect the weak. That is the whole of it. Everything else—the tourneys, the songs, the glory—everything else is decoration. This is what knights are actually for."

Pate's expression shifted as I spoke. The sullen anger drained out of him by the end. He stood straighter. "I understand, my lord.” He nodded seriously. “I will see her safely home."

"You will. And when you arrive at Tarth, you will deliver her to my mother personally. You will explain what I have written in the letter you'll carry. You will see her settled in the household, and you will visit her often after you return to your training. I want her to have a familiar face for as long as it takes her to feel safe."

"Yes, my lord."

I clasped his shoulder. "Good lad."

I sent them off the morning we sailed. Oberyn had arranged passage on a Martell ship that was loading goods in Tyrosh, bound for Sunspear with a cargo of Tyroshi wine and dyed silks. From Sunspear, Pate and Rona would find further passage to Tarth, which should not be difficult given the increase in trade between the two ports since I had begun building Dawnrest into something proper.

Rona did not cry when she boarded. She had run out of tears, I think. She just held Pate's enormous hand in both of her tiny ones and walked up the gangplank without looking back. Pate looked down at her with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Something fierce and protective. Something approaching the knight he was going to become.

I watched them sail until I couldn't anymore.

xxx

Our small fleet sailed without incident through the Stepstones.

The war galleys Lord Steffon had brought were enough to discourage even the most ambitious of the pirates who infested those waters. We saw sails on the horizon a few times, distant and watchful, but no one approached. The reputation of the Baratheon stag flying above two galleys with their full complement of marines was enough.

We rounded the southern arm of the Stepstones and turned east, and within three days the green hills of Lys rose out of the morning haze ahead of us.

Lys the Lovely.

The island lived up to its name, to be sure. A sunny paradise as fertile as its women were rumored to be, green and lush and covered in palm trees and fruit groves and flowering vines. The waters around the island were clear blue and warm, with reefs visible through the surface and small bright fish darting beneath the keels. It reminded me of Tarth in some ways. The same sapphire color of the sea. The same fragrance of growing things drifting on the breeze.

The similarities ended mostly there.

Lys was a true hive of degeneracy when it came to its dangerous mixture of slavery and pleasure houses. It might have reminded me of a resort town from my old life if all the staff hadn't been collared and most of them hadn't looked like Targaryens.

The Lyseni had cultivated Valyrian features in their slave population for centuries. The pleasure slaves of Lys were famous across the known world for their silver hair and lilac eyes and pale-as-milk skin. They had been bred for it the way you might breed horses for speed or dogs for size. The result was an island where, on any given day, you could see fifty people who looked like they should be sitting on the Iron Throne, all of them wearing collars.

Aerys’ obsession with a foreign queen for his son suddenly made a great deal more sense, considering his hard-on for all things Valyrian.

There were plenty of potential brides here for Prince Rhaegar. Half the freeborn population had traces of Old Valyria in their blood, and many of the magisters could trace their lineages back to the Freehold itself, though not to dragonlord families. 

I disliked the place from the moment we docked. 

We got as warm a reception as we had in Tyrosh. The First Magister of Lys himself came to greet us at the harbor, a tall man with silver-blond hair and pale violet eyes who looked so much like a Targaryen that I had to remind myself he wasn't one. 

He hosted us in his palace, an opulent marble compound on a hill overlooking the harbor. There were tours of the city and the surrounding countryside, too, and endless meetings with magisters who wanted to discuss trade, alliance, and—not always subtly—the possibility of their daughters being considered for the crown prince.

We stayed for all of ten days.

I got even more business done than I had in Tyrosh, and I felt just as dirty after every deal. Dyes, spices, perfumes, wines. The Lyseni produced excellent versions of all of them. They were happy to trade for all I had to offer, even if I knew some of them were humoring me more than anything.

For now, the volume of trade Tarth could offer was insignificant to these men whose wealth surpassed that of most lords in Westeros. It was more about establishing relationships with a famous young knight who clearly had the ear and the backing of his direct liege lord and that of the king himself, if he was being allowed to join in such diplomatic missions.

Still, I didn’t mind being treated like a little finish just testing the waters off his pond. The deals I signed would bring substantial gold to Dawnrest's harbor in the years to come and that’s what mattered.

I was also glad I got no gifts sent to my chambers this time. 

There were plenty of offers, though. The First Magister himself extended the hospitality of his finest pleasure house on three separate occasions. Other magisters made similar suggestions, willing to give up their favorite slaves for our enjoyment. 

In all honesty, the temptation was real, especially when the ‘goods’ on offer could be of age, highly trained in their craft, and looking like every fantasy a Westerosi knight was supposed to have. Most of the pleasure slaves they paraded in front of us were goddesses made flesh.

Then I would remind myself that none of them were free to choose like I was. That they had been bred and trained for exactly this purpose, sold and traded and rented for the pleasure of men they did not know and would never see again. Then whatever lust had begun to stir inside me would wither into callous rancor.

With a very rigid smile on my face to keep the magisters off my case, I declined every offer. Gerion, by my side through most of it, declined as well. He cited his ongoing illness from Tyrosh as the excuse, though we both knew the real reason. A certain princess waited for him in Sunspear, and he had no interest in tarnishing what he had with her for the sake of a night with a slave.

Oberyn made no such restraint. The Red Viper threw himself into Lyseni hospitality with the same enthusiasm he had brought to every other temptation of his life. I lost count of the women I saw him with. Some nights he didn't return to the palace until well past dawn. 

Oberyn had his own views on slavery, I found. He despised it, as most Dornish did, but he made the mental gymnastics that the slaves in the pleasure houses would be much happier with him occupying their time than with some other fat merchant rutting away at them.

It made some twisted logical sense, I had to agree, though only when you had an ego as massive as Oberyn’s regarding his bedtime prowess.

The most curious behavior, though, came from Lord Baratheon himself. We were feasted every night in Lys, and at each feast, Steffon looked more and more weary. Dark bags formed under his eyes. His usual robust appetite diminished. And the bottle that sat beside him at every meal, which I had never seen him touch with any frequency in Storm’s End or in King’s Landing, began to run dry with increasing dedication.

I didn't think the temptations of Lys were the reason. Lady Cassandra sat by his side every day, and he certainly had not visited the pleasure houses. As far as I could tell, he had not come close to breaking his marital vows even once.

Something else was eating at him.

I tried to speak with him about it once, on our fourth night in Lys, when I caught him alone on a terrace overlooking the city. Ser Oswell had shadowed Lord Steffon for most of the journey, to the point I had started to wonder if the man was there not to protect him as a dignitary of the Iron Throne, but for something else entirely. It was one of the few moments I saw him without the white cloak at his side.

Lord Steffon had been drinking, I could tell. He was not drunk, but he was getting there.

"My lord. Are you well?"

He was silent for a long moment, and when he answered, he didn’t even bother turning toward me.

"Tired, Galladon,” he said, staring out into the darkness. “Only tired."

"This mission…"

"Is what it is." His eyes were heavy. "We will find the king his bride. We will sail home. The realm will continue. That is all that matters."

He did not invite further conversation. I left him with his wine and his view and his unspoken weight.

When he deemed our stay there long enough, he gave the order to set sail. Within hours our fleet was provisioned and ready, and we put out from the harbor of Lys on a morning so beautiful it seemed an insult.

Ahead of us, three days' sail across the Summer Sea, lay the final destination of our journey.

Volantis. The First Daughter of Valyria. The oldest and proudest of the Free Cities, and ruler of trade across most of the eastern world.

I stood at the rail of the galleas with Oberyn and Gerion as Lys faded behind us. None of us spoke for a long time.

Finally Oberyn broke the silence. "Have either of you been to Volantis?"

Gerion shook his head. I shook mine.

Oberyn smiled. It was not entirely a pleasant smile.

"It is something to see, the First Daughter. They will treat us better than the Tyroshi and the Lyseni combined. They have not forgotten their pride." He paused. "And they will be the most dangerous of them. Remember that. Tyrosh and Lys are mercenaries with cities. Volantis is something else. Be careful in Volantis."

I nodded, my jaw set. I planned to be as careful as a dove. The only things I wanted out of this voyage were lucrative deals and to stop Lord Steffon and Lady Cassandra from getting their pre-reserved watery graves at the bottom of Shipbreaker Bay.

Three days at sea, then I would find out exactly what Oberyn meant.

xxx

The second night brought me all the trouble I was trying to avoid. 

Rain pattered against the cabin window in thin sheets, and the galleas rolled gently beneath me as I sat at my small writing desk, revising a marble contract with a Lyseni merchant that had been drafted in three different languages. 

I wanted to make sure nothing had slipped through in Lysene or the High Valyrian versions before the first shipload left Tarth in a few month’s time, which would seal the deal for the next two years.

Two candles burned at my elbow. The warm yellow light pooled across the parchment and made my eyes ache. Outside, the wind sang through the rigging in a low, mournful note.

I rubbed my eyes and was reaching for my cup when I saw the light.

A pale white flicker at my chest.

For a moment I thought I was seeing things. My vision had been forced for too many hours and the candlelight had grown smoky. I blinked and the flicker came again. Steady. Pulsing. Faint, but unmistakable. It was not the warm yellow of my candles.

A cold finger dragged down my spine.

The glass candle.

I swallowed, suddenly sitting very still.

The candle was in the false bottom of my chest at the foot of the cot. It was sealed inside a wooden box, padded with cloth, hidden beneath a layer of clothing I almost never touched. And yet I could see its light through the chest wall, through the layered hiding, through my own tunic. A pulse of white, repeating slowly, like a heartbeat.

I should ignore it. That was my first thought. Whatever the candle wanted, it would mean trouble. Magic always meant trouble.

But the second thought followed immediately: there was no point bringing the glass candle on this voyage if I was not going to use it when it literally called to me. I had hidden it among my things for exactly this kind of moment. I had already gotten a warning from it once, all the way back before we were attacked by pirates after leaving Oldtown. 

To say no now was to ignore potential life-saving information because I was to scared to look into the abyss.

I weighed the choice for what felt like a long time and was probably only seconds. In the end, it was no choice at all.

But first, precautions. Setting the marble contract aside, I went to the cabin door and pulled it open just enough to find Codin standing in the narrow passage outside, where I had stationed him for the night watch. His head turned at once.

"M’lord?" He blinked.

"I'm going to be working through something for the next hour or so. No one comes through this door.” I gave him a look. “No one at all. Do you understand me?"

His brow furrowed. "Lord Baratheon, my lord?"

"You’ll tell him I’m sick with the plague if you must, but you mustn’t let him in," I said. “Or Gerion or Prince Oberyn. Anyone.”

Codin's expression turned solemn, as if he knew he was being trusted with something he didn't fully understand but was prepared to do anyway. He nodded once. "Aye, my lord."

"One more thing. If you hear nothing from me for an hour—nothing at all, no movement, no voice—come inside and slap me awake. Do not be gentle about it. Slap me until I open my eyes."

That earned me a sideways look. But he nodded again. "An hour, my lord."

"An hour."

I shut the door and turned back to the chest at the foot of my cot. 

The candle pulsed steadily through the wood. Kneeling, I opened the lid and dug through the folded clothes until I could press the false bottom in the particular pattern that released the catch. The hidden compartment opened. The wooden box inside was warm to the touch, warmer than it should have been, like something fresh out of an oven.

I lifted the lid.

The glass candle blinked up at me with that strange pale white light. Not as bright as it had been the first times I'd used it. Back then, the flame had been almost too much to look at, sharp enough to make my eyes water. Now it seemed dimmer. Manageable. Almost gentle.

Whether the candle was getting weaker or I was simply becoming used to it, I could not say.

I took it out and sat back on my cot with the candle in my hands, feeling for a second like a man holding a ticking time bomb in his hand without a target in sight. I only hoped it wouldn’t explode on me. 

Before I dove into it, I gave myself a few minutes to go through the breathing exercises Arlan had been teaching me as preparation for skinchanging. In my mind, it made sense that it could help with the glass candle too. In their own way, they both required reaching outside yourself and into something other—something that required opening doors in your mind that were normally kept locked. 

Slow breaths. Long exhalations. Letting the tightness in your chest unwind. Letting the thoughts that crowded your head drift away one by one until what remained was a kind of empty, patient attention.

When I felt ready, I opened my eyes and looked into the flame.

In a blink, I was no longer in my cabin. I stood at the edge of a cliff.

Massive waves crashed against the rocks far below. The sound was thunderous—real-sounding, real-feeling, in a way that the candle's visions had not been before. Salt spray rose up the cliff face and brushed my skin. The wind howled across the edge with enough force that I had to brace my feet against being pushed back.

The sky overhead was black. Not the black of night, but something older and emptier, as if the stars had never been hung there at all.

And in front of me, perhaps ten paces away, stood the thing.

It was huge. Ten feet tall, at least. Shaped vaguely like a man, but only vaguely. It was more a distortion than a form, as though something in the air had been twisted into a roughly humanoid shape and then the twisting itself had been left alive. Shadows squirmed around it like worms. Parts of it flickered in and out of existence, leaving my eyes unable to settle on any one feature. Looking directly at it made my head ache.

For an instant my heart stopped. It was that primeval fear, the one men felt when something genuinely wrong stood in front of them. The fear that had kept our ancestors out of dark caves and away from things in the deep forest. My body wanted to run before my mind caught up.

Then my mind did catch up.

I had heard this described before.

Arianne. The day we’d gotten the letter from Lord Leyton, she had spoken about the specter she had met in the candle world during our little jaunt around the Weeping Town. A blurry, shifting figure that had helped her, had spoken to her, had guided her through the candle world.

A specter that, as my sister and I had worked out together not long before I left Tarth, almost certainly had a name and a face.

A face, in fact, that was rather lovely when not hidden behind ten feet of writhing shadow.

The specter drew itself up to its full height. The shadows around it deepened. When it spoke, its voice came out in a low, grating sound like nails dragged across slate.

"GALLADON OF TARTH! HEAR MY WORDS IF YOU WISH TO LIVE, PUNY MAN!"

It loomed over me menacingly. I could see the way it was angled, the careful posture of something that expected the man before it to scream and fall to his knees.

I did not scream. I did not fall to my knees.

Instead, I put on my most charming smile, stepped one foot back, and sketched a perfect courtly bow that had made plenty a maiden blush up to their foreheads.

"My lady," I said, straightening from the bow with a small flourish. "You look a great deal less lovely than I recall from our last meeting."

The specter sputtered.

There was no other word for it. The low, grating voice cracked, lost its menace, and broke into something that sounded almost like a cough.

"How—I—you—who do you think you speak to in such a manner, human?"

"Come now.” I let my smile widen. “Your grand-uncle nearly betrothed us by mistake. I do believe we are acquainted enough for a conversation that doesn't involve giant monstrosities, no, Lady Malora?"

The specter froze completely.

For a moment nothing moved. The wind died. The waves continued to crash, but they did so as background to a vast and absolute stillness in the figure before me. The squirming shadows that had crawled around it began to retreat, scuttling back into the shape like frightened ants returning to a hill. The unstable, flickering parts of its form steadied. The distortion that had made it uncomfortable to look at softened, became less violent, then faded entirely.

It was like watching a glamour break in front of me.

And the whole towering illusion, with all its shadows and shifting and dread, finally cracked like glass and shattered. The cliffside, the black sky, the howling wind—all of it broke apart into pieces and dissolved.

I found myself sitting in a small room.

The change was so sudden it took me a moment to register what I was looking at. A circular chamber, high in a tower, lit by candles on iron stands and a single brazier that gave off a faint warm light. Bookshelves lined every curved wall, packed so tightly with volumes that the books seemed to hold the structure up by themselves. A heavy wooden desk sat in the center of the room, scattered with parchments and quills and astronomical instruments. A round window looked out on a city of pale stone and many spires, with a sea beyond it.

Oldtown. The Hightower. 

And across the desk from me sat Malora Hightower herself, blushing red from her neckline all the way up the tips of her ears. 

My smile did not shrink even a little.