Chapter 68

After my misadventures with Elyssa, I decided not to leave the palace until the destination was the ships that’d take us back home to Westeros. My resolve was tested on it too.

Elyssa herself came to my door later on the same day Lord Steffon confirmed she was to be queen, but I had Codin send her away with a promise to speak some other time. And when Oberyn came to my door a couple of days later to invite me on what he described as a farewell tour of certain establishments he had discovered in the harbor district, insisting several times he’d not take no for an answer, I had to invent something about food poisoning and an explosive date with my chamber pot to send him away. 

He’d even somehow talked Gerion into coming as well. After a few laughs and Gerion’s heartening sympathies for what I was about to go through, the two of them wished me a swift recovery and left me to my dignified suffering.

That story was sure to make its way along the palace and the rest of our Westerosi company, but a man had to do what a man had to do when a demon-god of fire was hunting him. Standing in the middle of a Volantene brothel with wine in one hand and gold in the other did not seem the moment to test whether R'hllor's reach extended as far as the whorehouse.

There was another reason too. Quaithe had told me back in King's Landing to come east if I wanted answers. Now I was as far east as I would come on this voyage, and she had already stepped out of a shadow to save my life once this week. Surely she would come again. Surely she would find some way to reach me with whatever it was she thought I needed to know.

She did not.

Two days passed, and then a third, and no word came from her. No knock at the door. No candle-call. No mysterious cloaked figure standing at the far end of a corridor when I turned a corner. Nothing.

The truth was I did not fully trust her. She tried to steer Daenerys Targaryen with cryptic warnings and prophetic riddles about greed and dragons and incoming dangers. Some of those warnings proved to be quite truthful and poignant, for which I gave her credit for. But I always thought she did all of it as a way to draw the young queen east to Asshai. That much I remembered from the version of events I knew. Whatever Quaithe's game was, it was long and it was deep, and I did not intend to become a game piece if I could avoid it.

But she had saved me from R'hllor—and from Bloodraven, if that counted. And she had saved Malora Hightower before that too. Simply put, she knew things I did not, about matters I could not afford to remain ignorant of.

I might not have tried to reach her at all, dangerous or not, if it had not been for the dreams.

They had begun the night after the plaza. I could not remember most of what happened in them. Only fire. Hot and scorching and very much alive. Every night I woke sweating through the sheets, my skin flushed as though I had just come off the oven. And every night the dreams got worse. Hotter. Longer. Closer.

The first night had been bad. The night after that had been worse. And this morning I had woken screaming as though I were being burned alive on a pyre, my body arched off the mattress and my throat raw from a cry I did not remember starting.

I could tell myself the dreams would pass. That once I was gone from Volantis, gone from the reach of that temple and the demon-god that lived in it, I would sleep normally again. But I could not be sure. And I did not want to carry whatever this was back home to Tarth. Not to my mother in her recovery, not to Arianne with her aura sight, not to little Brienne who had barely learned to roll over. Not to any of them.

So tonight, with one day left in Volantis, I decided to reach out instead.

xxx

Sending Codin and Arlan to guard the door, I closed off the rest of the room, shuttering the windows and drawing the curtains tight. Considering nights in Volantis were already hot and humid, I only kept a small brazier in the corner going for light, but the room still grew suffocatingly warm quick enough.

Five minutes later, the glass candle stood on the small writing desk, and I sat across from it, watching it as one would a snake. The dark rod of glass looked like it’d been sculpted by a sadist, tall and twisted and stricken by sharp edges. No flame burned at its tip. No sign of the pale fire that had blinked out at me when Malora reached across the sea to find me.

That was fine. The plan today was different, if not entirely sane. Malora had called me exactly once, and I had answered once. Whether I could initiate the call from my end was another matter entirely. And I had to do it to a person I did not entirely trust, whose real self I had never seen, whose intentions I could only guess at. I did not know if I could even do it.

But I was determined to try anyway. 

Breathing in and closing my eyes, I settled myself the way Arlan had taught me to do it before trying to skinwalk into an animal. I let my thoughts come to a stop, one by one, until what remained was a quiet inside my head, a deep quiet that allowed one to peek through doors once closed.

Then, with one hand around the candle, I reached for Quaithe.

I did not know how else to describe what I did. I thought of the woman in the red lacquered mask. I thought of her voice in the alley. Her invitation to meet her in the east back in King’s Landing. I held her image in my mind as clearly as I could, and I pushed outward from my chest as though I were calling across a great empty space.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not so, the glass candle answered.

Something pulsed outward from it. I could feel it. Like a wave of intent, moving outward from the candle as if it knew what I wanted from it, and it was doing the work I had asked.

I opened my eyes. Watched the tip of the glass rod expectantly like a child watching the clock turn twelve on their birthday.

A minute. Two. 

Nothing.

The candle remained dark. Sighing, I closed my eyes again, let myself fall into the same state of focus as before, and tried a second time. Then a third. Each time I felt the pulse go out. Each time nothing came back.

Frustration rose in me. The room felt smaller than it had been. Warmer. The air had grown thick in a way I could not entirely explain, as though the candle itself was drawing in the heat from the walls around me. I loosened the collar of my tunic. Sweat had beaded on my forehead.

I tried once more, almost to spite it more than actually believing I’d succeed. 

Then the tip of the glass candle flickered.

My eyes widened. The flame was pale, and small, and it burned quietly above the dark rod. A call back. Someone had answered.

Holding on to it tightly with one hand, I didn’t answer it yet, didn’t let myself be taken into the candle world the way I had when Malora called. Had she meant me harm back then, I realized, she could’ve easily done so with how I stumbled blindly into it. Considering I was dealing with Quaithe here, I had to be more careful.

Instead of diving in, I felt for the presence on the other side, the way Arlan had taught me to feel for the mind of a bird before slipping inside it. A tentative glance. A knock on the door before pushing inside.

Fire hit me like a wall. I felt it like a scalding breath washing over me, hot and screaming and alive, and with it a spike of terror so raw that I jerked my hand away on pure reflex.

The candle clattered on the desk as I gasped. 

Turning over my hand, I saw the skin on my palm had gone red. It was warm to the touch. Not burned, thankfully, but hot enough it felt as though I had held it too close to a stove and pulled it back just before the burn set in.

I cursed under my breath, running over to the basin to quickly soak it in water.

Meanwhile, the glass candle kept pulsing on the desk. I could feel the alarm radiating from it even across the room. Whoever was on the other end of the call was in pain and afraid and reaching out to someone.

But that was the problem. I could not be sure it was Quaithe.

After I made sure my palm did not actually need any more attention, I went back across the room to stare suspiciously at the flickering candle toppled on the desk. I did not dare touch it again. Much less properly answer the call. The pulse continued for what might have been a minute or two, then began to weaken. Ten seconds later the tip of the rod faded entirely, until only the dim light of the brazier remained. 

It was only light, but it seemed as though the room had gone silent too. The room felt heavy with it.

I tried to gather my thoughts in that quiet. Tried to reason through whether that call had been a trap of some kind, a red priest's game to draw me in through the candle and then take me the way they had almost taken Malora. It seemed possible enough. But seeming possible did not mean it was real. Some of R'hllor's servants could produce fire on command, I knew. Producing the feeling of fear along with it would not be beyond them, if they were talented enough with the arts they served.

I was still trying to decide when the glass candle pulsed again.

I looked up.

The tip flickered, the same pale flame. But even without holding it in hand I could feel the difference. Not terror this time. Not the animal panic of the first call. Something else. Concern. Urgency. And a sense of familiarity I had felt before.

I approached the candle slowly, half expecting it to lunge at me like a cornered animal. It just blinked at me, the light dimming and . A call to be answered. With one finger, I poked the base of the rod first, and the terrible heat from before was gone. The glass was cool against my fingertip.

Picking it up, I felt for the presence on the other end, and I knew who it was clear as day.

Malora.

The same feeling I had felt in the cabin of the galleas the night she had called me. The same texture of thought behind the reach. She was on the far side of it.

I looked into the flame.

xxx

Malora’s room in the Hightower shaped itself around me in the blink of an eye. I recognized it quickly, the bookshelves, the circular chamber, the window looking out over Oldtown. The ethereal quality that came with the candle world hung over everything, the light never quite reaching far enough, the colors too dull, as though someone had taken a memory of a room and scrubbed the life out of it.

Malora Hightower was already there.

Or the specter of Malora was, at least. She had put her monstrous form back on. Ten feet tall, distortion crawling across her limbs, shadows squirming at her feet. But the effect was ruined by the fact that she was pacing, the great fearsome specter walking anxiously back and forth across the tower floor, hands—if you could call them hands—clenching and unclenching at her sides.

I smiled despite myself.

"Lady Malora," I said.

She whipped around. The specter form shifted and crackled as she moved, like a glitch in the visible world. 

"This again?" I said. "You really must stop trying to scare me every time we meet."

She looked at me for half a second before she seemed to remember what she was. The writhing shadows retreated from the specter's face, and Malora's lilac eyes stared back at me. Panicked.

"We have no time for your jokes, Galladon Tarth," she said. "The masked woman. Quaithe. She is in danger."

That stopped me. Was that what I had felt from the glass candle? Not a trap. Not R'hllor reaching for me. But Quaithe herself, calling for help through the candle-network with the last of what she could reach? She certainly didn’t seem the type.

"How are you so sure?" I asked.

"Because she asked for my help not a minute ago. Then she stopped answering."

"She may have asked for mine too,” I told her. “I tried to contact her through the candle. All I felt from it was terror and pain and fire."

Malora hissed. The specter form flickered around her in something that might have been rage.

"The red priests," she said. "They have found her. We need to go. Now."

"Wait," I said, raising both my hands up. "Wait a minute. Look. I am not against helping Quaithe. She herself saved me just a few days ago. But I am reasonably certain she is a shadowbinder from Asshai. If anyone can take care of herself, it is her."

"I know she saved you a few days back," she said, frustrated. "I was the one to warn her when that Valyrian harlot you were with had been bewitched."

"Valyrian harlot," I repeated slowly. 

Clearly, Malora didn’t know she was referring to the future bride of the Crown Prince. But she knew enough. Too much. 

"And how do you know that?” I asked. “Have you been spying on me?"

"I was not!" she snapped. 

And as if realizing her reaction sold her out, she flushed, cheeks darkening. The specter form around her went a shade brighter for a moment as the color spread beneath the illusion.

Oh. 

A smile appeared on my face. “Are you sure about that, my lady?”

She groaned in frustration. "It does not matter. Listen to me. After Quaithe dragged you out of the plaza, the red priests didn’t just give up. They followed after you, and she left to fight them off. She has been doing so for the last few days, successfully as far as I know. But I lost contact with her tonight."

I frowned. "I think I would’ve heard if a bunch of fire priests and a shadowbinder had battled in the streets of Volantis."

"Not in Volantis," Malora said. "Here. In the candle world. They have been hunting her like hounds and she has eluded them so far, but I fear she has been cornered. If they take her back to their temple…"

She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.

My mind raced. So many questions came to me at once. About how Malora had been watching me. About Quaithe and the red priests and how I had ended up in the middle of them in the first place. About the candle world and its rules and how much of what happened in it bled through into the flesh-and-blood world outside.

But Malora was right. There was no time for jokes, and there was no time for questions.

Dangerous and out of my depth or not, I could not turn my back on someone like Quaithe. Whatever her long-term motives might be, she had saved me twice already, first from Bloodraven then the red priest. I could settle my doubts later.

"We will help her," I said. "But know that I do not think I will be much use in a fight here."

"Do you believe in yourself, ser?"

"I do." 

The answer came quick. I would not have gotten this far otherwise.

"Then you can help." Malora took a step closer. "I could give you an entire lecture on it, but for now, all you need to know is this. This place, this world, is malleable. It’s a world where all possible things converge. I appear as a specter because I will it so, to protect my identity. Will is all that matters here. Think hard enough that a house exists on an empty field, and it will appear. But only as long as you believe it to be real. No—not believe. You must know that it is."

It tried to make sense of it all, but she was already stepping closer still. She took hold of my arm.

"Ready?"

I looked at her like she was insane. "Of course I am not. Let’s just do this."

She gave me a tight nod. But for the briefest of seconds, I thought I saw a smirk curl the edge of her mouth beneath the shifting specter mask.

Then the world flickered, and we were suddenly flying, high up in the air. 

Above the clouds. Above Oldtown. Above the Hightower itself, which stood below us like a spike of pale stone rising out of the harbor mist. From this height I could see the entire city laid out below me—the Honeywine winding through it, the harbor beyond, the sprawl of streets and shops and the pale marble of the Starry Sept and the great weight of the Citadel on its island. All of it perfectly orderly. All of it perfectly quiet.

And all of it empty.

Not a single figure moved in the streets. Not a boat in the harbor. Not a curl of smoke from any chimney. It was Oldtown as though someone had drawn Oldtown and then removed all the people from it.

Very few could reach this world, I remembered. Very few had the gift. Or a glass candle. 

I did not have time to think about it further.

Malora did not give me any. Suddenly we were moving. Fast. Faster. Faster still. The land below us began to blur. The Reach passed beneath me in streaks of green and gold. I saw castles go by in a flash below me, rivers and fields blurring together. My vision began to smear at the edges. The wind cut at me like knives, cold and sharp, though I could not tell if the wind was real or my mind's insistence that flying at this speed should feel like something.

Was I screaming a little?

No. Absolutely not.

I certainly was not screaming when we shot past what I was certain were the Red Mountains and the Dornish Marches, its maroon heights zooming past below like a small ant hills and then gone. I was not screaming when the Rainwood came into view for barely a second, and when I the coast of Tarth glimpsing somewhere far off to the side, I most certainly did not bet Malora to end the torture and let me go home. 

The Narrow Sea was next, and we crossed it in the time it’d take me to defeat one of my sisters in a swordfight. Little Brienne included.

It was madness. Mind bending, impossible madness. But we did it, and once we had land below us again, Malora brought us down in what must’ve been some kind of teleportation. 

In a moment we were high above the clouds and in the next we were at eye level with a field of tall grass, all momentum of flying across the world gone in an instant. My legs failed under me and I fell forward onto my knees.

"Fuck," I said. My stomach heaved. I felt very much like I had not lied to Oberyn and Gerion and was indeed about to projectile vomit onto the ground. "Fucking hell."

The whole world was still spinning when I sat back on my heels, pressed both hands against my knees.

"What was that?” My voice came out a whine. “The flying. Couldn't you have just blinked us across to Essos like you did just now?"

Malora shrugged. She was standing over me, arms crossed. When the shifting shadows retreated to show her face beneath, she did not entirely hide the satisfaction at having gotten one up on me at last.

"Trust me," she said. "For long distances, that would be a lot more disorienting than flying. Now get yourself together, Ser Galladon. We have more ground to cover."

"Gods," I said.

I tried to stand. I stumbled. My vision was still blurring past me even though I was sitting still. My inner ear was insisting we were still traveling.

"Give me a second," I said.

She clicked her tongue. "Just will it away."

I shot her a look. Will it away? Right, she had told me that. Will is all that matters here, though that was easier said than done.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to give it a go. 

I started by getting my breathing in control. My gut was killing me, so I tried to settle it the same way I would before a joust when anxiety hit, when the fear of the crowd and the awareness of the crossed lance ahead of me had to be laid aside for the calm that could actually win the pass. 

I thought of myself as tall and steady as an oak. Rooted to the ground. Sturdy. My body knew what to do without my mind interfering. I held both those things at once, and I let them fill me.

The blurring at the edges of my vision cleared. 

The knot in my stomach unwound.

In a second, I sprang back up.

I looked over at Malora. The satisfied smirk was gone from her face. What replaced it was something closer to surprise.

"That is..." I searched for the word. "That is frightening."

I looked around at the grass and the sky and thought about a world where thinking something into being could make it be. Where someone with a stronger will could simply decide that another person was no longer alive.

"Could someone just wish you dead in this world?" I asked. "And that be the end of it?"

"They could try," Malora said. "But as long as you believe you are alive, if you know you are real and exist as most people inherently do, then their will and yours come into conflict."

"A battle of the minds," I said.

She nodded. “In a manner, yes.”

"I am a knight, my lady," I said. "I will help if I can. Though I am not sure how useful I am going to be in a battle of the mind when I am new to the mind's ways."

"You are better than you would think, ser." She paused. "It took me days before I had the right mindset to do what you just did."

She said it reluctantly. As though the admission cost her.

I turned away from her for a second, looking around at where we had landed. A random patch of ground in the middle of a vast valley. Endless grass fields swept away to the horizon in every direction. A dark line of forest rose to the north. Nothing marked the landscape as anywhere I recognized.

"Where are we?"

"West of the Rhoyne," Malora said. "This is where Quaithe was leading them on a merry chase when she and I last spoke."

I raised an eyebrow. "Are we supposed to look for her across the entirety of Essos?"

"No. She told me she would go east, past Volantis, if she could not lose them."

"Past Volantis?"

Malora hesitated. She looked at me.

"She told me..." She swallowed. "She told me if the worst happened, she would flee to a ruined city called Oros. She said she might be able to fight them off for a while there."

I frowned.

"Oros?" My geography was decent, but it got spottier the further east one traveled. "How far east is that?"

"Not too far. A ruined city on the northern shore of the Smoking Sea. On the Lands of the Long Summer."

I stopped when she said that. I turned to her. "You mean..."

Malora only nodded. 

“Valyria.”

My stomach suddenly twisted itself into knots again. I didn’t know if I had the will to settle it this time.