[ASOIAF SI] The Gilded Stag: A Ruthless Joffrey Uplift | Chapter 54: CONNINGTON III (Locked) (Patreon)

Jon Connington sat upon a three-legged camp stool near the rear pole of his pavilion, the canvas flaps shut against the morning fog rolling off the Lower Rhoyne. Outside, the camps were waking. Grooms shouted as they hauled water from the ditches, while further, one of the great grey elephants trumpeted a long blast that vibrated through the dirt beneath Jon’s boots.

He worked the brass tongue of his right bracer free with his left thumb and forefinger. The stiff boiled leather came away with a wet sucking sound, leaving deep red creases in the pale skin below his elbow. Beneath the leather lay three layers of coarse linen, stained brown from dried sweat and the sharp vinegar he boiled over his brazier every night before sleep.

Jon unwound the cloth slowly. When the last turn peeled away from his wrist, the sour stench of the vinegar rose into his nostrils.

The grey patch had grown since the last turn of the moon. Where the Stone Man’s stiff fingers had clamped around his bare wrist during the slaughter under the Bridge of Dream, the flesh had turned the color of river slate. The surface was dry and cracked like old mud at the bottom of a pond in summer, creeping half an inch past the knuckle of his thumb and spreading upward along the outer bone of his forearm.

He reached to the chest beside his stool and picked up his dirk. The blade had been honed on a wet stone until the point could split a hair.

Jon rested his right arm flat across his thigh and drove the steel tip straight into the center of the grey scale above his wrist bone.

The point met a hard, chalky resistance, grating faintly as if he were scratching a piece of unglazed clay pot. No blood welled around the steel. He felt nothing at all.

He cleaned the blade with alcohol and boiling water, lifted the blade, moved it half a thumb’s breadth higher toward his elbow where the skin remained pale and unaffected, and pricked again.

A sharp sting bit into his arm. A single bead of bright crimson swelled around the iron point and trickled down until it hit the grey ridge of the scale, where it pooled and stopped.

Jon wiped the steel clean on his knee and reached for the basin of vinegar. He had seen enough greyscale along the docks of the Free Cities to know how the curse worked its way through a man. Years would pass before the calcification turned inward to stiffen his heart or rot his wits into the feral madness. The immediate rot was simpler and far crueler. Month by month, the dead scale would climb his arm, locking his wrist and freezing his fingers into crooked stone hooks until he could neither close his fist around a sword hilt nor hold the reins of a charger.

And if the serjeants in the camp caught sight of the grey crust upon his skin, they would demand he be bound in chains and thrown back into the Sorrows, leaving the boy alone.

He soaked a fresh strip of linen in the cold vinegar, his jaw tightening as the acid bit into the tiny pinprick of living blood. Above all else, one dread gnawed at him in the dark hours before dawn: dying before the work was finished, leaving Rhaegar’s son alone in a world of knives with only hired captains and foreign flatterers at his back.

The heavy leather flap at the front of the pavilion shifted, letting in a bar of dusty amber light.

Jon pulled the linen tight, wrapping the grey wrist from thumb-joint to mid-forearm in three swift turns before snatching up the boiled-leather bracer.

Aegon stepped inside, ducking his head beneath the cross-rope.

The boy had grown an inch since they crawled out of the reed marshes south of Volon Therys. His hair had grown back into a thick, pale bristle scarcely a finger’s breadth long. The short crop stripped away the soft beauty of his face, leaving his high cheekbones sharp and gaunt, his deep purple eyes stark against skin tanned brown by the Essosi sun.

He wore a quilted gambeson of black wool. Over his left arm—where the Volantene corsair’s bearded axe had sheared through bone at the gunwale of the Shy Maid—was strapped a molded socket of stiffened bull-hide lined with sheared sheepskin. Two thick leather belts crossed his shoulder and bicep to take the jar off the tender, puckered scar at the end of his stump. Bolted to the outer plate of the leather sleeve sat a curved iron bracket holding a small, steel-rimmed oak buckler.

Aegon stopped beside the tent pole, his gaze dropping to the basin of vinegar and the discarded rags on top of the chest.

Jon did not bother hiding the strap as he buckled the bracer down over his forearm. He had told the boy the truth three nights after they reached the company pickets, showing him the first thumb-sized smudge of grey so the prince would know how little time remained to them.

"Has it progressed further?" Aegon asked quietly.

"A hair," Jon grunted. "The vinegar works well enough. My fingers can still take the swords hilt well enough."

Aegon walked across the frayed Myrish rug and rested his right hand upon Jon’s shoulder. The boy’s palm was hard, ridged with thick yellow calluses from hours of practice at the wooden pell.

"When we take the Iron Throne, the Citadel will answer to me," Aegon said, his voice low and fierce. "The archmaesters have vaults of scrolls in Oldtown that no common healer ever sees. They cut the grey rot from children in the Cradle when it catches early. If their knowledge fail, Benerra says the priests in the great temple at Volantis have burned the corruption with the Lord’s fires. I will empty the Red Keep of every gold dragon the Usurper left behind before I let that stone take your arm, Jon."

Jon looked up into those dark violet eyes. For a heartbeat he saw Rhaegar standing in the yard of Dragonstone before the ride to the Trident—the same solemn certainty that the world could be bent to his will. Yet beneath the brow sat a hard, angry line that had never belonged to his father.

"Keep your gold for the realm, Your Grace," Jon said, rising from the stool and tossing the soiled linen onto the brazier coals, where it hissed and sent up a sour grey plume. "I am but one man. I will die peacefully when you take your father’s rightful throne."

"They will serve the dragon when my banners fly above the Honeywine," Aegon replied. "Benerra looked into the night fires before the third watch. She saw the black scales drinking flame beneath a red gash in the clouds. She says the blood I bled in the river paid the first measure. The stone will wake when we turn our faces west."

Jon felt his stomach sour at the woman’s name. He turned to his armor stand, lifting his heavy sword belt to hide the scowl twisting his mouth.

The red priestess had come up the river road from Volantis a sennight after Harry Strickland broke camp outside the town walls. She had arrived riding a white mule flanked by two temple guards with flames tattooed across their cheeks, carrying letters under the seal of Benerro, High Priest of the Red Temple. She was a gaunt woman with eyes like hot coals and robes the color of fresh arterial blood, claiming her god had shown her a maimed prince and a sleeping dragon in the heart of the smoke.

In the first weeks after the amputation, when the phantom fingers of Aegon’s missing hand still burned in the dark and the boy woke sweating from nightmares, Lemore’s prayers to the Mother had given him only tears. The Volantene woman had given him the way to vengeance. She had told him that the rusted axe on the Shy Maid was the hammer of the Lord of Light, burning away the soft boy of the poleboat so the promised king could be forged in iron. Now the black-and-scarlet dragon egg Jon had carried out of the marshes sat upon a brazier of warm coals in Aegon’s guarded pavilion while the red woman chanted in High Valyrian over the scales.

It was foreign sorcery, reeking of blood magic, and Jon hated every syllable of it. He had been raised in the stormlands, anointed with the seven oils in the sept at Griffin’s Roost, and he knew how the lords of Westeros looked upon red priests and their foreign ways.

Yet as he buckled his longsword around his hips and watched Aegon roll his right shoulder to loosen the sword-arm, Jon bit back the rebuke.

Two moons ago, when the boy lay raving with marsh fever in Harry Strickland’s chair, half the serjeants in the camp had muttered that Griff had lost his wits and dragged a dying cripple out of the fog.

Aegon had refused to stay behind with the baggage mules and the camp followers. He had ordered the company smiths to rivet the iron buckler-bracket to his leather sleeve, mounted a heavy bay stallion, and ridden directly into the center of the horse wedge between Franklyn Flowers and Laswell Peake.

Steering a warhorse with his knees and the shift of his hips over dry, stony scrub while taking a spear-point squarely upon a strapped forearm took an ugly, stubborn courage. At the toll-keep, when an enemy pikeman had lunged inside Peake’s guard to thrust at Aegon’s stirrup, the boy had slammed the rim of his oak buckler down across the man’s wrist, snapping the ash shaft, and split the soldier’s iron half-helm with a single downward chop of his right hand.

The red woman’s poison had given him the iron to sit that saddle without flinching. If a Volantene witch’s fires kept the boy’s chin high in front of ten thousand hard-bitten veterans, Jon would stomach her nonsense until they reached the shores of Westeros.

"Leave the red woman’s visions outside the command tent," Jon told him, checking the lace at the boy's collar. "Strickland and Edoryen know only silver, and Tristan Rivers has no love for red priests."

"I know how to speak to sellswords, Jon," Aegon said, his purple eyes steady. "Come. They are waiting."

They stepped out into the pale glare of the morning. The great encampment sprawled across two leagues of dry yellow scrubland east of Volon Therys, where the flat plains met the ancient, rutted stone of the Valyrian dragonroad. In the wide avenues between the tents, pikemen in quilted jacks drilled in squares of a hundred, the iron points of their sixteen-foot ash shafts glinting like needles in the dusty air. Down by the mud wallows, handlers were scrubbing the hides of the elephants with stiff wire brushes.

As they walked toward the center of the camp, men paused by the cookfires to watch them pass. Nobody cheered—the Golden Company was not a mob—but two grizzled crossbowmen stood straighter and bowed slightly.

Outside the grand pavilion of cloth-of-gold stood a row of tall iron-shod pikes driven deep into the baked clay. Atop each pike grinned a human skull boiled clean and dipped in beaten gold. Aegor Rivers stared down from the center pole, Bittersteel himself, flanked by Maelys the Monstrous and the smaller, finer skull of Myles Toyne, whose crooked smile Jon still saw in his dreams when the nights were cold.

Ser Franklyn Flowers waited by the tent flap, leaning his broad shoulders against a support post while he chewed a crust of hard barley bread. The Bastard of Cider Hall had a face like a butcher’s block, seamed with white scars from eyebrow to chin, his coarse brown beard greased with fat. Beside him stood Ser Laswell Peake in a surcoat of faded orange wool bearing three black castles, his hand resting on the pommel of his longsword.

Both men dropped to one knee in the dust as Aegon approached, rising only when the boy motioned them up with his good hand.

"The paymaster is already inside, Your Grace," Flowers rumbled, wiping crumbs from his beard with the back of a scarred fist. "Whining over the shoeing bills for the cavalry like an old wife whose hen stopped laying."

~~~

The interior of the pavilion was dim and hot.

Harry Strickland sat in the high camp chair with his breeches rolled to the knee, his pale, plump calves descending into the steaming water as a camp boy rubbed coarse salt over his blistered toes. The Captain-General had thinning white hair that clung to his scalp and the round, anxious face of a bailiff who had somehow inherited a warlord's tent.

To Strickland’s left sat Gorys Edoryen, tall and gaunt in a velvet tunic. Opposite them sat Ser Tristan Rivers, and Ser Marq Mandrake, whose left cheek was a hairless puckered pit where a Myrish slaver’s branding iron had burned away the meat. Near the rear pole, draped in a magnificent mantle of emerald and tangerine parrot feathers, Black Balaq sat cross-legged upon a chest of bowstrings, running a lump of beeswax down a stave of goldenheart wood without looking up.

At the foot of the oak trestle stood Lysono Maar. The spymaster looked enough like a Valyrian maid—silver-gold hair tumbling past his shoulders and full, painted lips—until he turned his sharp, mocking face to the light, showing amethyst drops dangling from his ears and nails lacquered the same dark lilac as his eyes.

"You are late, Jon," Strickland said mildly, wincing as the servant boy pressed a thumb against a water-blister on his heel. "Gorys was just reading the fodder tallies from the Selhorys raid. We lost four pack mules, and two destriers on the dragonroad."

"We also took twelve hundred Volantene honours in silver and four barges of seasoned cedar from the river pirates, Harry," Jon said, taking his seat beside Aegon while Flowers and Peake took up their posts behind the prince’s chair. "The mules are paid for thrice over. Why have you called us before the morning exercise?"

Strickland sighed, waving the servant boy away and reaching for a linen towel to pat his wet ankles before sliding his feet into a pair of soft slippers. "Lysono returned from the river wharves at Volantis an hour before dawn. Two deep-sea cogs out of Myr dropped anchor on the night tide, carrying wool and amber from the Narrow Sea. Tell them, Maar."

The Lyseni spymaster tapped a roll of salt-stained parchment against his purple fingernails. "We are blind in the Sunset Kingdoms, my lords, as you know well enough. Whatever little mice the eunuch kept in the walls of the Red Keep have either been fed to the cats or bought by the new masters. What comes across the water now comes in the mouths of drunken sailors."

"And what do the sailors say?" Tristan Rivers asked.

"They say the eunuch did not lie to us," Lysono Maar purred, his lilac eyes sliding toward Jon and Aegon. "Petyr Baelish was indeed strung up by his own cloak in the dungeons, and the Arryn widow was dragged before the Iron Throne in chains for poisoning the old Hand. The Vale lords bent the knee in the Great Hall, bethrothing the new heir to the Vale to the Usurper's daughter."

"Old news," Franklyn Flowers spat onto the carpet. "We heard that when the Griffin walked out of the reeds. What of the Northman?"

"Lord Eddard Stark took up the badge of the Hand," Maar continued smoothly. "The fat King has proclaimed a grand tournament to celebrate the Wolf’s arrival. Ninety thousand dragons in prizes, the sailors claim, though the cogs weighed anchor while the carpenters were still driving the list posts into the mud, so we have no word of who broke the most ash."

"Ninety thousand dragons," Gorys Edoryen murmured, his long fingers clicking two ivory beads across his frame. "A realm preparing for war does not throw ninety thousand pieces of gold down the river for knights to play at horses."

"The realm is not preparing for war," Strickland said heavily, leaning his elbows on the oak table. "That is the point of it, Jon. When the eunuch sent word to Myles Toyne years ago, the promise was that the Seven Kingdoms would be tearing each other’s throats out by the time the boy came of age. Instead, Stark and Baratheon are together in the Red Keep, the Vale is bound by marriage, and while the fat King hunts in the woods, his fifteen-year-old son holds the city by the throat. The sailors call the boy the Golden Stag."

At the name, Aegon’s right hand closed into a tight fist against the oak board. The leather straps of his buckler creaked in the quiet tent.

"The tattooed dog who took my hand in the fog spoke that name before he gutted Varys," Aegon said, his voice flat and cold. "He said the Golden Stag remembered the purple seeds."

"Then the boy has longer arms than his father ever had," Marq Mandrake rasped, touching the scarred hollow of his cheek. "Robert Baratheon never looked past the rim of his wine cup once he won the crown. If the whelp reached all the way into the Sorrows to hire Volantene river-scum, he knew where to look."

"Which is why we must strike the head from the snake before its scales harden!" Laswell Peake slammed his palm down upon the map table, leaning between Jon and the prince. His lean face was flushed dark red above his orange surcoat. "You speak of Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark, Harry, as if they are of any danger, are what keep us in the dirt! Robert is a drunken boar rotting in his own fat. It is the boy! The Usurper’s cub murdered the Cheesemaker, broke the eunuch’s web, stole our green dragon egg, and took the King’s left arm on the river! While he sits in King's Landing, the lords have a banner to rally behind!"

Peake turned his fierce eyes onto Jon. "You took the leather pouch from the eunuch’s robes, Griff. Uncut rubies out of Mopatis’s vaults. Give them to Lysono. Let him take a ship for Braavos or send word to the Sorrowful Men of Qarth. Buy a shadow to slip into Maegor’s Holdfast and open the throats of the fat King and his golden whelp in the same night!"

"Aye!" Franklyn Flowers barked, his scarred face splitting in a savage grin. "Put the father and the bastard in the ground together! Who sits the iron chair then? The little brother—a seven-year-old babe whining for his wet nurse behind the Lannister bitch’s skirts! The realm would split into four pieces overnight, and we would pay the stag back in blood for Chroyane!"

A low murmur of approval came from the back of the tent where Tristan Rivers sat. Even Marq Mandrake gave a slow, grim nod at the arithmetic of a boy-regency.

Harry Strickland looked as though his stomach had turned sour. He glanced at Gorys Edoryen, who clicked his beads with a sharp snap.

"You speak like a man who has never priced a life in the Free Cities, Ser Laswell," Edoryen said, his voice dry as blown sand. "Lord Connington gave one stone to a carter at the south gate to pass the pickets. Eleven stones remain in the iron box. They are fine rubies, true enough—worth perhaps four thousand Volantene honours. Do you know how much four thousand honours buys in this camp? "

"And what do you imagine the House of Black and White asks for the blood of an anointed King and a Crown Prince inside a guarded keep?" Lysono Maar added, a mocking smile curving his painted lips. "The Faceless Men do not haggle like fishwives. They take what is dearest to a man. Eleven pebbles would not buy the death of a petty lordling in Pentos. To buy the Golden Stag and his sire, Braavos would demand every coin in our chests, the gold off our skulls, and that pretty black stone the King keeps warm in his tent."

"Then hire Myrish poisoners!" Flowers snarled, his hand dropping to his mace. "Or any hired knife willing to take the contract!"

"Listen to yourselves," Jon said, his pale blue eyes sweeping from Peake to Mandrake. "You talk of creeping into Maegor’s Holdfast as if the Red Keep were a magister’s manse. I was Hand of the King inside those walls. I know the dry moat and the iron spikes; I know the drawbridges and the serpents in the stone. Varys spent twenty years learning every secret passageway beneath Aegon’s Hill, and the Usurper’s son dropped thirty tons of masonry on Illyrio Mopatis in the dark and sealed the tunnels!"

Jon tapped the table hard with a calloused knuckle. "We have no eyes in that castle. If we send hired daggers into King’s Landing, they will be taken at the River Gate. And when the boy’s torturers peel the skin from their feet in the black cells, they will sing of of the Golden Company, and the Golden Stag will know that Rhaegar’s son walked out of the Sorrows alive! Right now, the boy in King’s Landing thinks the river swallowed us or that we are broken beggars hiding in the Free Cities. Our lives hang upon that ignorance until we have keels beneath our boots!"

"And even if a poisoner succeeded," Jon added, his voice dropping lower as the memory of Stoney Sept rang cold behind his ears, "what lord in Westeros will open his gates to a prince who hides behind Essosi cutthroats? Robert Baratheon took the throne with a warhammer in the waters of the Trident. If we come back across the sea like so, every bannerman from the Neck to the Red Mountains will call us Blackfyre murderers come again. When King Aegon takes the head off the Usurper’s whelp, he will do it under open sky with ten thousand lances at his back, so every high lord in the realm sees who holds the sword!"

Peake’s jaw worked, the pride in his eyes warring with the hard truth, before he slowly inclined his head and stepped back a pace.

"Then we sit still?" Tristan Rivers asked bitterly, driving the point of his knife half an inch into the edge of the oak table. "Strickland says the realm is whole. You say the keep is barred. The Triarchs want us to march down to the mouth of the Rhoyne next moon to guard their spice plantations. My father died looking across the Narrow Sea, Griff. I did not swear my sword to a boy with no hand just to die as an exile!"

"We will not march south for the Triarchs," Aegon said.

The boy stepped forward to the edge of the trestle table, resting the iron rim of his strapped buckler directly over the painted parchment map of Essos. His short, pale hair caught the candlelight, and his voice carried the crisp, schooled cadence Haldon had drilled into him for ten years, hardened now by the rasp of camp smoke.

"The contract with the Elephants ended when we burned the river-forts above Selhorys," Aegon declared. "Sitting on the banks of the Rhoyne waiting for Robert Baratheon to choke on a bone is a slow death. We are five hundred leagues from Westeros here. Every cog that brings us news is a moon old before it passes the Long Bridge. Tomorrow we march the company west, into the Disputed Lands."

"There is war between Myr and Tyrosh," Aegon measured. "Which means both cities will pay in clean gold for ten thousand veterans, and our men will stay sharp instead of growing fat on wine. More than that, the Disputed Lands put us on the shores of the Narrow Sea, three days' sail from the Stepstones. From those ports, Lysono can put discreet men aboard the wool cogs bound for Maidenpool and Duskendale."

Aegon looked around the ring of weathered faces. "The Usurper did not win every heart at the Trident. Half the houses south of the Neck bled for my father and grandfather. House Darry lost three sons, and half their lands. House Mooton watched their banners trampled in the mud of the bells. They bend the knee because they see no dragon. When our agents whisper in their halls that Rhaegar’s son is camped across the Narrow Sea with Bittersteel’s army at his back, the old embers will catch."

Laswell Peake’s eyes gleamed with sudden hunger. "And the Reach, Your Grace! My cousins still hold Starpike, and the Rowans of Goldengrove and the Merryweathers of Longtable have chafed under the fat rose of Highgarden since the Rebellion! Let me send my brother Pykewood up the Mander in a merchantman's wool coat—!"

"Send a Peake up the Mander and Mathis Rowan will hang him from an apple tree and ride straight to King's Landing to warn the Stag," Tristan Rivers barked, letting out a harsh, barking laugh. "Use your wits, Laswell! Where do you think Goldengrove got the northern meadows they graze their cattle on? They took them from Dunstonbury after your grandfather rose for Daemon Blackfyre! If the lords of the Reach hear that a Peake is coming across the water with the Golden Company to claim their old castles, every knight from Oldtown to the Red Lake will ride for the Baratheons!"

Peake’s hand gripped his hilt until his knuckles went white, his nostrils flaring as he glared across the table at the Riverlands bastard.

"Tristan speaks true, Ser Laswell," Jon said firmly, cutting off the quarrel before blades could clear leather. "We are not marching to fight the Blackfyre wars over again. Any envoy who speaks to the Reach lords goes in the name of House Targaryen, promising the King’s peace. You will get your castles back from the carcasses of the traitors who fight us, not by frightening potential allies into the enemy's camp."

Peake swallowed hard, his chest heaving beneath his orange wool, before he gave a stiff nod. "As the Prince commands."

"The Disputed Lands put us on the coast, aye," Gorys Edoryen said, tapping his abacus frame. "And perhaps the Darrys and the Mootons weep into their ale for the old days. That still leaves thirty leagues of water between the Stepstones and Cape Wrath. We have ten thousand men, two thousand horses, and four-and-twenty elephants. That requires two hundred deep-sea hulls at the least. Without Illyrio Mopatis and his Pentoshi friends, we lack the gold to buy a fleet of that size."

"Then we do not pay in gold," Aegon said.

The boy leaned over the map, sliding his right forefinger up the western coast of the continent until the nail rested upon the jagged black ink of Ironman's Bay.

"We pay in iron and plunder," Aegon said, his purple eyes bright with the boldness of a young commander who thought he had found an open gate. "Lord Balon Greyjoy sits on Pyke nursing the ruin of his rebellion and the death of his eldest sons. The Ironborn have the  longships, and they hate the Baratheons and the Starks with every breath. If we send a swift galley around Dorne to Pyke, we can offer Greyjoy the sack of Lannisport and every ounce of gold he can tear out of the Westerlands! Let the Iron Fleet sail south, sweep the Narrow Sea clear, and ferry our ten thousand spears across the water while the lions burn in their own dens!"

For a heartbeat, Franklyn Flowers grinned, seduced by the vision of Lannisport in flames.

In the next breath, a roar tore up from Jon’s chest.

He slammed his left fist down upon the oak table with enough force to make the tallow candles jump in their iron saucers and send Gorys Edoryen’s abacus skittering across the parchment.

"Never!" Jon thundered, rising to his feet and leaning across the maps until his face was two spans from the boy’s. "By the Seven, Aegon, put that madness out of your head before another man hears it!"

Aegon stiffened, the blood rushing hot and dark into his pale cheeks as his purple eyes flashed with sudden, violent fury at being shouted down before his captains.

Jon did not give an inch. The phantom ache beneath his leather bracer pulsed like a hot coal, driving the words from his mouth with brutal honesty.

"Balon Greyjoy is a rabid dog who knows neither oath nor honor!" Jon barked, his finger stabbing down onto the painted islands. "You think the reavers would sail halfway around the continent to play ferrymen for a dragon? What do you think happens the day a Targaryen prince steps onto the shores of Westeros carried on the reaver ships of Ironborn thrall-takers?"

Jon swept his hand across the map of the Seven Kingdoms. "Every coast from the Arbor to Seagard has bled under their axes for a thousand years! The moment you set loose the squids upon the mainland, every lord in the Reach, the Riverlands, and the West will forget their grudges and lock their shields behind the Iron Throne to save their wives and septs from the reavers! You would hand the Golden Stag the loyalty of the entire continent on a silver platter!"

"We need ships, Jon!" Aegon snapped back, his voice ringing sharp and high in the tent. "Would you have us swim the Narrow Sea?"

"I would rather charter sellships or pay double to Salladhor Saan and every Lyseni pirate in the Stepstones than tie your crown to the Greyjoys!" Jon growled, holding the boy’s blazing gaze without blinking. "A pirate sails for silver and drops anchor where he is told. A reaver burns the house you mean to rule!"

The pavilion was dead still.

Aegon stood rigid, his chest heaving beneath his greasy gambeson, his right hand white-knuckled on the edge of the oak table. The purple eyes burned with the old, dangerous heat of his bloodline—the fierce pride that hated a leash.

For three long heartbeats they stared at one another across the painted sea.

Then, slowly, Aegon’s fingers uncurled from the wood. He drew a long breath through his nose, forcing the heat down behind his teeth, and gave a single, sharp nod.

"No Ironborn," Aegon said, his voice dropping back to a cold, level baritone. "We leave the squids on their rocks. If we require hulls in the Stepstones, we buy the Lyseni sellsail or the pirates with gold."

Jon let out a slow breath, the tension easing from his shoulders as he sank back onto his camp stool.

"Even if we hire the Stepstones pirates to carry us across," Harry Strickland said cautiously, dabbing at his brow with his sleeve, "a fleet of sell-sails cannot fight its way into Blackwater Bay or storm the cliffs of the Stormlands against royal galleys. We would be butchered. We have no port in Westeros to drop anchor."

"We will have a port," Jon said.

Every eye in the pavilion turned toward him. Even Lysono Maar lost his mocking smile, his head tilting slightly as he studied Jon’s weathered face.

"What have you done, Griff?" Strickland asked, his voice rising with sudden anxiety.

"Six weeks ago, before we marched, I took three hundred honours from my own chest and sent Ser Ormund Wylde downriver to the coast. He boarded a spice galley bound for the Planky Town."

A sharp silence fell over the table.

"Dorne," Laswell Peake breathed.

"Dorne," Jon confirmed. "For fifteen years, Robert Baratheon has sat on the Iron Throne while Tywin Lannister’s beasts walked the halls of the Red Keep. Who bled deepest when the city fell? Not the Reach. Not the Riverlands. House Martell."

Jon looked at Aegon, whose face had gone still as carved bone.

"Princess Elia was your mother, Your Grace," Jon said softly. "Prince Doran Martell has sat in his Water Gardens for fifteen summers with twenty-five thousand spears behind the Red Mountains, nursing his gout and the memory of his sister’s blood on Gregor Clegane’s gauntlets. He has stayed his hand because Viserys was a mad beggar in Pentos with no army at his back, and Doran would not burn his principality for a memory."

"And what did Ser Ormund carry to Sunspear?" Lysono Maar asked, his lilac eyes narrowing with professional calculation.

"A lock of silver hair, the signet ring Rhaegar gave me the day he named me Hand, and a formal offer," Jon answered. "His Grace is unwed. Prince Doran’s eldest child and lawful heir under Dornish law is Princess Arianne. I have offered Doran a marriage pact: the hand of King Aegon the Sixth for his daughter, placing Elia’s trueborn son upon the Iron Throne."

Franklyn Flowers slapped his thigh with a sound like a whip, letting out a barking laugh. "By the gods! Thirty thousand Dornishmen waiting with fresh horses!"

"More than that, open gates," Tristan Rivers said, leaning forward as his cold eyes traced the southern coastline on the map. "The Planky Town sits at the mouth of the Greenblood. Our cogs could slip out of the Stepstones on an autumn gale, unload every horse and elephant at the Dornish wharves in three days without losing a single hoof to the surf, and march straight up the Boneway and the Prince’s Pass before the Usurper’s whelp in King's Landing even hears our sails have crossed the water!"

Gorys Edoryen’s fingers moved silently over his ivory beads, his gaunt face smoothing as the numbers fell into place. "If Sunspear opens its granaries and provides the baggage wains for the mountain passes, the crossing costs drop by half. We would need only short-haul transports from the Disputed Lands to the mouth of the Greenblood."

Harry Strickland stared down at the map, rubbing his velvet-clad toes together as he searched for a flaw in the arithmetic. Finding none that would not make him look an outright coward before eight captains, the Captain-General let out a long, weary wheeze.

"Doran Martell is a cautious man, Jon," Strickland muttered.

The boy looked down the table at Strickland, his purple eyes cold and unblinking. There was no question in his voice now.

"Write the march orders, Captain-General," Aegon commanded. "Send word to the Volantene Triarchs that our service on the river is concluded. "

Strickland hesitated half a heartbeat, looked at the scarred faces of Peake, Flowers, and Mandrake ranged behind the maimed boy, and reached slowly for his goose-quill. He dipped the nib into the horn of black ink and scrawled his signature across the bottom of the parchment roll.

Fin