Power is Everything Chapter 2 — The Isle of Faces (Patreon)

The Crossed Keys had stood at the junction of the Gold Road and the River Path for longer than anyone in the surrounding villages could remember. Its walls were thick fieldstone, its roof was good slate that only leaked in the hardest rains, and its common room was large enough to hold forty people comfortably and sixty if everyone was friendly about it.

Willen had owned the place for thirty-two years. He had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and the line went back far enough that the family had stopped counting. He was a broad man in his late fifties with a bald head and a grey beard that he kept trimmed close, he had the kind of face that looked stern until he smiled, at which point it became immediately clear that the sternness was just his resting state. 

He kept a clean house. The ale was good and fairly priced. The food was simple but honest. The rooms upstairs were small but the beds had real mattresses stuffed with straw and wool, and he changed the linens between guests, which was more than could be said for most establishments on the Gold Road. 

Travellers who stayed once tended to come back, and the locals who drank there in the evenings treated the place less like a tavern and more like an extension of their own homes.

His daughter Dalla was a significant part of the reason for that.

She was twenty-three and had been working the common room since she was old enough to carry a tray without dropping it. She had her mother's dark hair, which she wore in a thick braid that swung behind her as she moved between the tables, and her father's directness, which the regulars adored and the occasional fool mistook for flirtation. She could carry four tankards in each hand, remember a dozen orders without writing them down, and shut down a wandering hand. 

On this particular evening, the common room was comfortably full. A group of farmers occupied the long table near the hearth, arguing cheerfully about the best way to harvest barley, a debate that had been running for approximately eleven years without resolution. Two merchants sat in the corner comparing the prices they had gotten for wool in Lannisport, each one lying by roughly the same margin. A young couple shared a bench near the window. Old Harys, who had been drinking at the Crossed Keys every evening for as long as Willen could remember, sat on his usual stool at the end of the bar and nursed his ale.

Dalla moved through all of it like water through stones, refilling cups and delivering plates and trading barbs with the farmers. One of them, a ruddy-faced man named Tommen, made a comment about her braid that was probably intended as a compliment but came out sideways, and Dalla responded without breaking stride.

"Tommen, the last time you tried to compliment a woman, your wife hit you with a ladle. Drink your ale and leave my hair out of it." The table erupted in laughter and Tommen went red and buried his face in his cup. Old Harys chuckled into his ale.

Then the door opened.

Six men walked in, and the warmth of the room vanished.

They wore crimson cloaks over boiled leather, with golden lion clasps at their throats. They were Lannister men. Household guards, by the look of them.  The one in front was a square-jawed man with a scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth, pulling his lip into a permanent sneer. He strode into the centre of the common room without waiting to be seated or greeted, reached into his cloak, and pulled out a folded piece of parchment that he held up above his head.

"Listen well," he announced. "We are searching for this man on the orders of Lord Tywin Lannister, Warden of the West." He unfolded the parchment and turned it so the room could see. It was a charcoal sketch, skillfully done, of a young man with handsome features and hair that fell past his ears. "Sixteen years of age. Golden hair, green eyes, tall for his age and lean. He would be well-spoken and well-dressed, travelling alone. He carries a sword with a golden lion-head pommel. Anyone who has seen him or has information about his whereabouts will be rewarded."

He lowered the sketch and looked around the room with the expectation of immediate compliance.

He did not get it.

The farmers at the long table exchanged glances. The merchants in the corner went quiet. Dalla set down the tray she was carrying and crossed her arms. Old Harys did not look up from his ale.

"You're in my inn," Willen said from behind the bar, his voice level and unhurried. "If you'd like to ask questions, you can do it politely, same as everyone else. If you'd like a drink, you can sit down and order one. If you'd like to wave parchment around and shout, you can do it outside."

The scar-faced man's sneer deepened and he stepped closer to the bar, his hand resting on his sword hilt. "This is the business of Lord Tywin Lannister. I'd advise you to cooperate."

"And I'd advise you to mind your tone in my inn," Willen replied, not moving from behind the bar, not raising his voice. "Lord Tywin's business is his own. We serve Lord Footly in these lands."

The farmers were standing now, not aggressively but with enough to be intimidating. Tommen, who was the largest of them, folded his arms and stared at the Lannister men with the expression of a bull deciding. One of the merchants pushed his chair back from the table. Even Old Harys set down his ale. 

"Now hold on," the scar-faced man said, sensing the shift in the room. "We're not here for trouble. We just..."

"Then stop causing it," Dalla said from behind him, making the two Lannister men turn around. She stood with one hand on her hip and the other holding a clay pitcher. "You barge in here without so much as a good evening, you wave a picture in people's faces, and you throw around your lord's name like it means something to us. We don't know your missing boy. We don't care about your missing boy. Buy a drink or leave."

The scar-faced man's jaw tightened. His hand closed around his sword hilt, and for a moment the room balanced on a knife's edge, the farmers and patrons on one side, the Lannister guards on the other. 

Then the door opened again.

The sound it made was different this time. The floor groaned under a weight they were not designed to bear, and the ceiling above the door creaked as something scraped against it from below. Every head in the room turned toward the entrance, and every voice that had been raised in defiance went silent.

The man who entered had to duck so far to clear the doorframe that his back was nearly parallel with the floor. When he straightened to his full height inside the common room, his head was less than a foot from the ceiling beams, and the beams were nine feet off the ground. 

He was enormous in a way that went beyond mere tallness, a way that made the word "large" feel inadequate and the word "man" feel like a stretch. His shoulders were so wide that he had to angle himself sideways to fit through the door, and even then the frame groaned in protest. His arms were thicker than most men's thighs, and his hands, hanging at his sides like slabs of raw meat, looked capable of palming a man's skull the way a normal person might palm an apple.

He wore full plate armour, black from helm to greave, unadorne. No cloak. No ornamentation of any kind. The steel was scarred and dented from use. At his waist hung a greatsword in a plain black scabbard, the weapon was so long that its tip nearly brushed the floor despite being belted high on his hip. It was a sword made for a man his size, which meant it was a sword the size of a normal man.

His face was hidden behind the visor of his helm, but what was visible, the jaw, the mouth, a strip of shadowed flesh around the eyes, showed nothing that could be called an expression. There was no anger there, no cruelty, no pleasure. There was nothing.

The Lannister guards parted as he walked forward,

He walked to the scar-faced man and took the sketch from his hand. He did not ask for it. He simply reached out and closed his fingers around the parchment and pulled, and the scar-faced man released it without a word, his earlier bluster evaporating like morning dew on hot iron.

The armoured giant turned to the nearest patron, one of the merchants who had been sitting in the corner. The merchant was a man in his forties who had travelled the Gold Road for twenty years and had seen his share of hard men and bad situations, he had gone completely white.

The giant held up the sketch so the merchant could see it. "Where."

The merchant opened his mouth. No words came out. He tried again, his lips moving, but producing nothing but a thin, strangled sound that might have been the beginning of a syllable. "I... I d-d-d... I haven't... I d-don't..."

The giant's left hand moved. It was not fast. It was almost casual, the way a man might swat a fly. 

The merchant was hit so hard he was thrown from the chair, his body rotating sideways through the air with his arms trailing behind him, his feet leaving the ground entirely. He cleared the width of the table beside him, struck its surface with his back, and slid across it through plates and cups and the remains of someone's dinner before going over the far edge and hitting the floor. Several of his teeth preceded him, skittering across the tabletop like dice.

The room did not move. No one breathed. The farmers who had been standing moments ago were pressed back against the wall, their faces drained of colour.

The giant moved through the room the way a scythe moves through wheat. He walked from table to table, holding up the sketch, asking his single question, and each time the answer was too slow or too quiet or insufficiently useful, he expressed his dissatisfaction in ways that left the recipient bleeding on the floor. 

He threw one man through a chair. He broke another man's arm by bending it backward over the edge of a table with one hand, the bone snapping with a sound like a green stick breaking. A third man he simply lifted off the ground by his throat and held there, until the man's face went from red to purple to grey and the giant dropped him in a gasping, retching heap.

He kept going or would've had Willen not have stepped out from behind the bar. "That's enough," he said. "You've hurt my people, you've broken my property and you've gotten your answer. No one here has seen the boy you're looking for. If you don't stop, I will go to the lord of these lands and tell him what you've done, and Lord Tywin's name won't protect you from the King's justice."

The giant stopped. 

He turned slowly and looked down at the innkeeper. Willen barely came up to the bottom of his breastplate. The difference in size between them was so extreme that it looked like a scene from a children's story.

The giant reached out and placed his hand on top of Willen's head. His fingers were so long that they wrapped around the innkeeper's skull from crown to jaw, his palm covering the top of the bald head entirely, his thumb resting against one temple and his little finger against the other. He did not grab. He simply placed his hand there, the way you might rest your hand on top of a fence post, and then he began to press.

The pressure from the giant's armored hand on top of Willen's head kept building, growing heavier and heavier with every passing second until the force felt like it would split his skull wide open. Willen opened his mouth and screamed at the top of his lungs, a high-pitched sound of pure agony that filled the room, his voice cracking and breaking while his body twisted and fought against the hand that refused to let go.

Willen threw both arms upward and grabbed the giant's thick wrist with both hands, wrapping his fingers around the black metal gauntlet and pulling with every ounce of strength. It made no difference at all, like a small child trying to bend an iron bar. His fingers clawed and scraped desperately over the  surface of the gauntlet, searching for any edge or seam they could grip, but they found nothing to hold onto and kept slipping uselessly across.

A cracking sound came from inside Willen's skull. It started as a creak, the kind a thick wooden beam makes right before it finally snaps, and it grew louder as the bones inside his head reached their breaking point. Willen kept screaming through the entire thing, his voice turning hoarse and ragged while the pressure kept mounting.

His eyes shot across the room and locked onto his daughter Dalla, who stood frozen behind the bar with both hands pressed hard over her mouth. Her face showed raw terror as she watched what was happening. 

Willen's hands fell away from the giant's wrist and hung limp at his sides. His body jerked hard once, then twice, his legs kicking out against the floor in uncontrolled spasms while thick dark blood poured from his nose, his ears, and the corners of his eyes. The giant kept squeezing until the head was no longer round, until the features were crushed flat and the blood mixed with grayish tissue leaked down the sides. Only then did the giant release his grip. 

Willen's body dropped straight to the floor and stayed there, completely still, with nothing left above his shoulders that looked like it had ever been a face.

Dalla screamed.

 She screamed and she screamed.  "FATHER," over and over, the word breaking apart in her throat. 

The giant wiped his hand on his cloak and turned to the scar-faced man and the other Lannister guards, who stood in a group near the door, their faces carefully blank, their eyes fixed on anything that was not the thing on the floor.

"Take the girl," the giant said." "She'll be coming with us, we'll need some entertainment."

Two of the men crossed the room toward the bar, and their faces shifted as they did, they smirked as their eyes moved over Dalla's body. They grabbed her arms, one on each side, she fought them, thrashing and screaming and clawing at their hands, but they were armoured and she was not, they dragged her from behind the bar and across the common room and out through the door into the night, her screams fading as the distance grew.

None of the patrons moved to help her. They looked at the thing on the floor that had been Willem and they did not move.

The giant ducked through the doorway and emerged into the night air. His horse was tethered nearby, a destrier so massive that it made other warhorses look like ponies. 

He had not gone three steps from the door when a figure appeared from the shadows beside the building. The man was thin and hunched, with lank hair and a face like a weasel's, all nose and chin and darting eyes. His clothes were road-worn and filthy, and he smelled strongly enough that the giant noticed it even through the blood that still clung to his gauntlet. The giant's hand moved to his sword considering whether he should simply kill him. 

"Begging your pardon, m'lord," the man said quickly. "I couldn't help but overhear about the young man you're looking for. The golden-haired lad."

The giant said nothing. His hand remained on his sword.

"I might have some information that could be of use to you. Of great use, in fact. Saw a boy matching that description not three days past, I had a little scuffle with him and his friend but they are both unharmed. Now, a man's time and memory are valuable things, and I was thinking that perhaps a small consideration might..."

The giant's hand left his sword and closed around the man's throat. He lifted him off the ground with one arm, the way a man might lift a cat by the scruff, and held him at eye level. The weasel-faced man's feet dangled and kicked, his hands clawing uselessly at the gauntlet, his face darkening as the pressure on his windpipe increased.

"I... gkk... I'm sorry... I'll tell you... everything... no charge... please..."

The giant held him for a moment longer, long enough for the man's eyes to bulge and his lips to turn blue, and then he set him down. The man collapsed to his knees, gasping and coughing, his hands at his throat.

"Show me," the giant said.

The man nodded frantically, still coughing, and scrambled to his feet. "This way, m'lord. Three days into the wood. I'll show you exactly where I saw them, I swear it on my mother's grave, I swear it."

The giant turned to the scar-faced man, who had emerged from the inn behind him. "We ride east. Now."

_____________________________________

"I cannot believe we are doing this," Jaime said, swatting a branch out of his way. "We have a road waiting for us. King's Landing waits for us. Yet here we are, marching west, away from both."

Daemon walked ahead of him with his hands clasped behind his head and his pack swinging on his shoulders. "We have months," Daemon said over his shoulder. "A few days won't kill us."

"That remains to be seen."

"You worry too much."

"And you worry too little."

Daemon laughed and ducked under a fallen tree without breaking stride. Jaime had to scramble over it and he landed on the other side with a small grunt and brushed bark from his sleeves.

"Why this lake?" Jaime asked. "You've been bursting to talk about it since dawn. I'd like to hear the reasoning, since I'm clearly going there whether I like it or not."

Daemon walked a few paces without answering, his eyes on the patches of sky between the leaves. "You're going to unlock my aura soon and you said yourself it might kill me."

"I said it could go badly. There is a difference."

"Not so much of one." Daemon glanced back, and his expression was so easy, so untroubled, that it took Jaime a moment to register what he had just said. "If I'm going to die, I'd like to see the lake first. Plus it seems like it would be a nice place to die if it happens."

Jaime stopped walking. Daemon went on for several paces before he noticed and turned back.

"What?"

"You can't speak of dying like that," Jaime said. "As though you were ordering supper."

Daemon shrugged, a loose roll of his shoulders that took in his whole body. "It's true, isn't it? You said it yourself. It's a hard thing, what you're going to do. If the worst occurs then I want to have at least one more adventure." He started walking again, and after a moment Jaime fell into step beside him.

"The septon had a saying for this," Daemon said. "The Stranger comes for every man, no matter what we do. Best to spend our days with open hands, and let him find us living rather than waiting."

Jaime walked in silence for several paces.

"That's not a bad saying."

"He had a great many of them. He had one for every kind of trouble a child could think up."

"He sounds like a wise man."

"He was." Daemon's voice softened. "He is."

They walked on and the trees thinned out until they opened entirely. The two of them came out of the wood onto a grassy bank, and they both stopped at the same time.

The Gods Eye spread before them.

It was so vast that Daemon needed a moment to make sense of what he was looking at. The water reached away to the horizon and beyond it, going further than his eyes could follow, like they were looking at an ocean. There was no opposite shore. There was only water, blue and grey and silver and gold where the sun struck it.

In the distance, perhaps five miles out, a single island rose from the water. Its trees were thickly packed, and even from here Daemon could see that they were not the same colour as the wood behind him. 

The unmistakable white of weirwood.

The Isle of Faces.

"Gods," Daemon breathed.

He stood with his pack still on his shoulders and his mouth a little open, and he did not move for some time. The wind off the water tugged at his hair and at the loose ends of his cloak.

"Jaime. Look at it."

"I am looking."

"Have you ever seen anything like it?"

"Once or twice."

Daemon turned to him with such genuine outrage that Jaime almost laughed.

"What do you mean, once or twice?"

"Casterly Rock," Jaime said, and a quiet pride entered his voice. "Irs two thousand and a hundred feet from base to summit. The keep is carved into the mountain itself. From the top, on a clear day, you can see the curve of the Sunset Sea. You can see ships like specks of dust on the water." He paused. "It is very beautiful. When you can be there alone."

Daemon had turned to face him fully, his eyes shining. "I want to see it."

"Then come and see it."

"Truly?"

"After the Trials. If we both pass. I'll show you the Rock, and the caves beneath it. They're said to go down for miles. No one has ever mapped them all. Though I'm guessing you'd want to."

Daemon nodded vigorously, but a thought crossed his face and his brow furrowed. "That's strange of you, though. To want to go back. You've gone through alll this effort to run away."

Jaime looked at him with something between amusement and exasperation. "Daemon. Once I'm a knight, my father can't make me do anything. That is the point of all of this."

"Why not?"

Jaime stared at him for a moment. "Tell me what you actually know about knights."

Daemon scratched the back of his neck. "Well. They're warriors. They go on adventures. They fight bandits and the like. They have nice swords, with sigils on the shields. They go to tourneys. And they're paid by the king, I think."

Jaime sighed and sat down on a flat rock at the edge of the bluff and patted the stone beside him.

"You have the broad strokes," Jaime said. "But you're missing the part that matters. When a man passes the Trials and is anointed, he doesn't simply become a warrior. He becomes a sworn man of the Crown. Every knight in the Seven Kingdoms, no matter where he was born or who his lord was, serves the King from the moment the steel touches his shoulder. That is why the King sponsors the Trials. He is essentially gains his own warriors."

"His own men," Daemon repeated. "But there must be thousands of knights, plus don't most of them wonder around as hedge knights."

"He doesn't have to know them personally. They're his all the same. And in exchange for that loyalty, every knight receives a stipend from the Crown, paid out twice a year by the Master of Coin. It is not a fortune. It is enough to live comfortably on. Beyond that, there are privileges a Knight enjoys. A knight may take a night's lodging at any inn or tavern in the realm without paying. He may travel on any Westerosi-flagged ship without paying his passage. He has the right to wear and carry steel in any city, even those that forbid weapons to the smallfolk. He has the right to be tried by another knight rather than at a lord's pleasure. He's exempt from most of the road tolls and bridge fees. He may ride into any keep in the Seven Kingdoms and ask for hospitality, and the lord must grant it for at least three days. He has standing to bring his complaints directly to the King's justice. And in war, a knight in the King's host takes a share of any spoils and ransoms."

Daemon listened with growing astonishment, his eyes widening. "That's a great deal."

"It is. Enough that knighthood is one of the most valuable things a man can hold in this kingdom. More valuable than land in many cases, land can be lost but a knighthood cannot be taken back save for treason or the worst kind of oathbreaking."

Daemon tapped his finger against his chin.

"Why would noble men give up their families for it, then? They already have most of what you said."

"They do. But you don't have to stay in the King's service. Once you've been knighted, you can go back to your own house, or take service with another lord. The only cost is the stipend. The Crown stops paying you the moment you leave its service. But everything else stays. The lodgings, the passage, the legal protections, the right to bear arms. They belong to the knighthood, not to the service."

"So why have the system at all?"

"It was made in the days of Jaehaerys. He and his Hand reformed the chivalric code together. The thinking was twofold. First, it gave third and fourth sons of noble houses a way to make their own way in life, which kept them from idling and from making trouble. Second, it cut down on the number of aura users turning bandit or sellsword. Before the Trials, there were dozens of bands of dangerous, unemployed aura users riding the kingdom causing chaos. Jaehaerys reckoned it cheaper to pay them himself than to fight them every other generation. He was right. The bandit problem grew smaller, and the Crown ended up with an army of men loyal to the throne rather than to any house."

"That's clever." Daemon nodded. 

"My father considers it one of the worst political decisions in the history of the realm. He'd never say so where anyone could hear it, but he resents the entire arrangement. It's one of the reasons I'm doing this."

Daemon laughed. "So when you're a knight, you serve the King, and your father can't drag you back to be his heir."

"Just so."

"Even if he tries to put you out of the family, the stipend and the rest are still yours."

"Just so."

Daemon clapped his hands together. "It's a good plan."

"Thank you I put—"

"Unless you die in the Trials, of course."

Jaime turned his head slowly. "Why must you always—"

"I'm only saying."

The sun had moved across the sky while they spoke, and when Daemon looked up he saw that it had dropped lower than he had realised.

"We should make camp," Daemon said, rising and dusting off his breeches. "It's later than I thought. But there's still light enough to teach you a few things."

They moved back from the shore into a sheltered hollow just within the trees, where a ring of large stones made a natural windbreak and the ground was filled with old pine needles. Daemon dropped his pack and began moving "First thing," he said, walking the perimeter. "Always check the ground before you settle. Ant nests, snake holes, anything that'll wreck your night. And look up. Dead branches are called widow-makers for a reason. If a wind comes through and one drops on you while you sleep, well let's just say you won't be waking up."

He pointed at a thick branch hanging directly over what had seemed a fine spot.

"See that? Dead since last season at least, so I wouldn't sleep under it. Move ten paces that way and you're good."

Jaime nodded and made a small effort to look like he had known this all along.

"Second. Sleeping on bare ground steals your warmth all night. You can build the biggest fire in the world and still wake cold, so it's always best to try and make yourself a bed."

He gathered an armful of long grass from the edge of the hollow, then small leafy branches, then more pine needles, and layered them together until he had a thick mound the length of his body.

"Springy. Warm. Doesn't matter how rough the ground is beneath if you've got six inches of this between you and it. Try it."

Jaime sat on the mound. He lay back. His face shifted in a way that suggested genuine surprise.

"This is better than I expected."

Daemon showed him several more things in the fading light. How to find good water by following the plants that only grew where the soil was wet. How to set a snare for small game with the cord in his pack. How to read the weather by the way the clouds moved and the way certain birds flew. How to bury the embers of a fire so that you could revive it in the morning rather than starting over.

Jaime watched all of it asking questions when he didn't understand and absorbing the answers. By the time the fire crackled and the sun was gone, the camp was made, and Jaime had at least the bones of it in his head. They ate from Daemon's travel rations. Hard cheese, dried fruit, and the last of Masha's bread.

"Right," Jaime said when they were done, brushing crumbs off his lap and standing. "Your turn. Let's see what we can do about that swordwork of yours."

He drew his blade and Daemon drew his own.

"First. Your stance. Show me how you'd stand if you meant to fight a man."

Daemon planted his feet shoulder-width apart, raised his sword in front of him with both hands, and looked at Jaime.

Jaime said nothing for a long moment.

"It's bad, isn't it?"

"It is remarkable. Truly. I have never seen so many wrong things in one place. Your weight is on the wrong foot. Your shoulders are square to me, so I can hit any part of you I please. Your elbows are locked, so your blade cannot move quickly. You hold the sword too high, so your forearms will be tired in the time it takes to count to thirty. Your head is forward, so any man who steps inside your guard will simply walk into you."

"You said one thing was right. Tell me what it was."

"You held the sword by the grip and not by the blade. That was the one thing."

Daemon laughed; Jaime stepped behind him and began to move him into the proper shape of it. The back foot turned out. The shoulders angled. The elbows softened. The point of the sword brought down to where it could threaten an opponent's eyes rather than reaching above them. He explained each adjustment as he made it, and Daemon listened and corrected and listened again, and within ten minutes his stance had gone from a poor copy of a stance into something that, while still untrained, no longer made him weaker than he already was.

"Now," Jaime said, stepping back into his own guard. "We do this slowly. I will swing. You will parry."

He swung. Daemon parried. Jaime adjusted his grip. Jaime swung. Daemon parried. Jaime adjusted his footwork.

By the twentieth, Jaime had stopped adjusting between swings. By the fortieth, the parries were taking on a real rhythm. By the sixtieth, the footwork had begun to move with the bladework. By the eightieth, Jaime had quietly increased his speed without telling Daemon, and Daemon was still making the parries.

By the hundredth, Jaime stopped.

He stepped back. He lowered his sword.

He looked at Daemon for a long time.

"Was that wrong?" Daemon asked. "Was I doing it wrong?"

"No. You were not."

He raised his sword again.

"Another hundred. A little faster."

They did another hundred. Then another. By the time the fire had burned almost completely out and Daemon's arms shook with fatigue, they had been at it for the better part of three hours, and Jaime's expression had grown more thoughtful with every round. He stopped them at last, sheathed his blade, and stood looking at Daemon in a way Daemon could not read.

"That's enough for tonight."

"Was I doing well?" Daemon asked, sinking down onto his grass mound and rubbing his shoulder.

"You were doing well enough."

"Just well enough?"

Jaime did not answer. He sat on his own mound and stretched out his legs, and stared into the embers of the dying fire.

'He should not be able to movr like that,' Jaime thought. 'I have watched a hundred boys train at the Rock. Sons of bannermen. Sons of household knights. Lads who have been swinging swords since they could walk. None of them moved like he is moving. I have been at this for thirteen years. He has been at it less than a fortnight. And he was parrying me at half speed without breaking the form. If I went faster, would he keep up? How much faster could I go before he failed to?'

He shook the thought off, frowning at himself.

'Foolishness. I am the best of my generation. He is a peasant boy with a borrowed sword. He is doing well for a beginner because he is clever and quick. That is all this is. He is not anywhere near my level. He cannot be.'

He pushed it down and turned over onto his back, pulling his cloak around his shoulders.

"Sleep," he said. "More tomorrow."

"Goodnight, Jaime."

"Goodnight."

...

The next several days unfolded in a way that Jaime would later, much later, look back on as one of the happiest stretches of his life, though at the time he complained about every part of it.

Daemon insisted on walking the shore of the Gods Eye rather than cutting back through the woods to the road. 

Exploring, he said, was how a man found things worth finding, and there was no point in going somewhere new if you weren't going to actually explore it in its entirety. 

Jaime argued. 

Daemon walked. 

Jaime followed... while complaining.

The shoreline was beautiful in a way Jaime could not bring himself to deny once he had stopped arguing about being there. Long stretches of pale, smooth pebbles gave way to grassy shores, then to small inlets where reeds grew tall and waterbirds nested in the morning mist. The lake itself shifted with the time of day and the angle of the sun, silver-grey at dawn, deep blue at noon, gold and copper at sunset.

They trained every evening. Daemon picked up the basics with a speed that continued to bother Jaime. By the third day, his stance was solid. By the fifth day, he was parrying at three-quarters speed without much trouble. By the seventh, Jaime was bringing simple counter-strikes into the drills, and Daemon was making them with a rough fluidity that improved by the hour.

Daemon tried to teach Jaime to fish on the third morning. Jaime declined. Daemon shrugged and offered, in exchange, to teach him to forage for wild food, which was a skill any man might one day need regardless of his station, even a great lord could become lost in the woods. 

Jaime, after some consideration, accepted this. Over the days that followed, Daemon taught him to know wild garlic, edible mushrooms (and the deadly ones that looked very like them), nettle leaves you could boil into soup, the blackberries and raspberries that grew in thickets along the lakeshore, and a particular wild root that tasted like a worse sort of carrot but was filling and plentiful.

Jaime took to foraging better than Daemon had expected. He had an eye for detail and a methodical mind, and identifying plants suited him better than fishing.

Daemon told him about the Spawn of Vhagar on the second day.

"You can't be serious," Jaime said, standing knee-deep in a tide pool.

"I am very serious. There's a fish in this lake the size of a horse, with scales as hard as iron and eyes that glow in the dark. I'm going to catch it."

"That is the most absurd thing I have ever heard."

"My thanks."

"It was not a compliment."

"Are you sure?"

Jaime stared at him. "There is no such fish, Daemon. Vhagar did fall into the Gods Eye, true enough, but she fell in dead. Dead dragons do not produce mystical offspring. This is a children's tale. The smallfolk tell it because they like a good story."

"Can you prove it."

"Why would... I don't... why should I prove... UGH!"Jaime threw up his hands and went back to looking for crayfish in the rocks.

Several days passed in this way, and despite his complaining Jaime found that he was sleeping better than he had in years.

On the morning of what Daemon reckoned was their fifth day along the shore, Jaime finally cracked.

"How much longer are we doing this?" he asked, sitting on a rock and watching Daemon turn over stones in a shallow tide pool. "We've walked. We've seen the lake. We've eaten a great deal of wild garlic. I think we have done what we came to do, Daemon. Can we go now?"

Daemon did not answer at first. He was crouched over the tide pool with his head tilted, peering past it. "Mm. Maybe we should. I was hoping to find—"

He stopped talking. His head came up wuickly. He looked past the tide pool, into the dense undergrowth beyond it, and something had frozen him in place.

He stood, slowly, his eyes fixed on the green tangle.

"Daemon?"

"Don't move."

"What is it?"

Daemon caught Jaime by the arm without looking at him and pulled. Jaime stumbled and protested and was dragged anyway, Daemon's grip stronger than expected, and the two of them crashed through a wall of ferns and brambles and came out into a small clearing on the other side, where Daemon was already brushing aside loose moss and dead leaves and a tangle of old vines that had grown over something dark and curved beneath them.

It was a boat.

A small wooden rowboat, perhaps eight feet long, with two rough-cut oars stowed inside. It had lain hidden under the foliage for what looked like a long time, but the wood beneath the moss was sound, and a quick look inside showed only a little standing water and no real rot.

Daemon stood and turned to Jaime with the look of a child on his nameday.

The look on Jaime's face was very different.

"No," Jaime said.

"Yes."

"Daemon. No."

"Jaime. Yes."

"I see what you are thinking, and I am telling you no."

Daemon was already pulling more vines off the boat, his hands moving with delight, his grin widening with every foot of revealed wood.

"Daemon. Listen to me. Do you understand what this boat is? It is an abandoned boat. Boats are abandoned for reasons. There is every chance the last man to use it died horribly, possibly while trying to cross. Possibly being eaten by your imaginary fish."

"He wouldn't eat the boat. He'd just eat the men in it."

"That is not reassuring."

"And the hull is sound. Look. We could absolutely take it out."

"I am telling you, that I am not getting in that boat."

"Jaime. Do you understand what this means?"

Jaime closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked at Daemon with a resigned face.

"I know what it means."

"It means we can get out on the lake."

"I know."

"To the Isle of Faces, even."

"I know, Daemon."

"Help me drag it down."

"Daemon, I am asking you, just once, to listen to reason. You don't know how to handle a boat. I don't know how to handle a boat. The Gods Eye is wide and dark, and we have no chart, no map, no—"

...

They were on the lake.

Jaime sat at the stern with his arms crossed and his lips pressed into a thin line of disapproval. Daemon sat at the bow with his rod cast over the side and his face turned to the sun. The boat rocked gently on the small waves, and the breeze off the water was warm, and in the middle distance the green shape of the Isle of Faces drew a little nearer with every minute.

Daemon had been trying for some while to get a reaction out of Jaime that was not a sigh.

"Look at that gull."

Jaime did not look at the gull.

"Jaime. There. Look. It's a fine gull."

Jaime did not look.

"Look at the way the sun is striking the water. The septon used to call those the Maiden's coins. Said she scatters them on the lakes and streams to remind us beauty is a gift."

Jaime's mouth twitched. He did not turn his head.

Daemon sighed grandly and reeled in his line a little.

"You ought to stop being so glum about this. Think on it, Jaime. When you've sons of your own, you can tell them you fished in the Gods Eye."

"I will tell them no such thing, Daemon, because I do not mean to admit to any living soul that I climbed willingly into this boat, when this goes wrong I'll tell them I was adamantly against it."

Daemon let out a long breath and turned in his seat to face him. The boat rocked at the shift in weight, and Jaime gripped both gunwales and gave him a look that could have stopped a charging bull.

"Right. Listen. Since you are doing this for me, and since you're being a good sport about it—"

"I am not being a good sport about it."

"—you can choose what we do next. After the lake. Whatever you want."

Jaime sat up a little.

"Whatever I want?"

"Whatever."

"That. That is acceptable. Good."

Daemon turned back to the bow and looked across the water at the Isle of Faces, which was perhaps a mile off now and growing more distinct. The trees on it were certainly weirwoods, every one, their pale bark and red leaves unmistakable now at closer range.

"What do you actually know about the isle?" he asked over his shoulder.

"What the maester taught me when I was small. In the Dawn Age, the Children of the Forest and the First Men warred over Westeros. The First Men were felling the weirwood groves. The Children retaliated. There were many battles and many dead. At last the two sides made peace, and the agreement was sealed on that island. The Pact, they called it. That is why the Children allowed the First Men to live in Westeros, and why the First Men took up the Old Gods. That is the tale."

"Do you think the Children are still there?"

Jaime laughed. 

"No, Daemon. The Children of the Forest have been gone for thousands of years. Some maesters say they never were at all. They are a story now. A very old one."

Daemon looked at the island. He was not as sure as Jaime sounded.

"I think we should make certain."

"Make certain of what?"

"Whether they're still there."

"Daemon."

"Hold this a moment."

Daemon held out the rod toward Jaime. Jaime stared at it.

"I would rather row," he said, with such firm dignity that Daemon almost laughed.

"Fine. Row us to the isle, then."

Jaime opened his mouth to object and stopped. Rowing was, after all, not the same as fishing. Rowing was a thing noblemen did, in a manner of speaking, when they captained their own pleasure boats, which was a wholly different sort of work from sitting on a riverbank with a stick. He squinted. The distinction mattered, and he was visibly working to convince himself it held.

"Very well," he said at last. "I will row. Because that is acceptable. As a noble pursuit."

He took up the oars and slotted them into the locks while Daemon turned back to his line. Jaime began to row, and the boat moved forward in long, smooth strokes. He was not bad at it, Daemon noted. The motion came naturally to him. They picked up speed.

The Isle of Faces drew closer. The weirwoods became distinct trees rather than a green mass, and Daemon could see the carved faces clearly now, hollow eyes and downturned mouths watching as the boat approached.

The line jerked.

Daemon felt it before he saw it, a hard tug that nearly tore the rod from his hands. He gripped it with both hands and felt the next pull, and his eyes went wide with absolute, unfiltered delight.

"Jaime. Jaime, I have something. He's big. He is big."

Jaime stopped rowing.

"How big?"

The line went taut so suddenly and with such force that the bow of the boat lurched downward. Water sprayed over the edge. Daemon was yanked forward, his whole body lifting off the bench, his feet leaving the floor of the boat, and he was pulled halfway over the side before he could stop himself. The rod bent into a near-perfect arc, and the line, somehow, did not break.

"DAEMON—"

Jaime lunged forward, dropping the oars, and caught Daemon by the back of his belt before he went over. Daemon's upper body hung over the water, his hands locked around the rod, his legs kicking in the air. Jaime hauled back with all he had, and they both crashed down into the boat in a tangle.

The boat began to move.

It was being pulled. Whatever was on the other end of the line was moving fast, and the line was tied to the rod, and the rod was clutched in Daemon's hands, and Daemon was clutched by Jaime, and through this chain of grips the entire boat was now being towed across the surface of the Gods Eye at a speed no small wooden vessel had any business achieving.

"LET GO OF THE ROD!" Jaime shouted.

"I CAN'T!"

"DAEMON—"

"IT'S HIM! IT'S THE SPAWN!"

"I DO NOT CARE WHAT IT IS! LET GO OF THE BLOODY ROD!"

"HE'S REAL, JAIME! I TOLD YOU HE WAS REAL!"

The boat slewed sideways as the thing on the line changed direction. Water came over the edge in a wave and drenched both of them. Jaime was thrown against the side. Daemon was lifted half off his seat for a second time and dragged forward, and Jaime caught his belt again and pulled him back down.

"DAEMON, FOR THE LOVE OF THE SEVEN—"

"BUT JAIME—IF I LET GO—I'LL LOSE HIM—"

"YOU WERE NEVER GOING TO HAVE HIM! YOU ARE IN A WOODEN ROWBOAT!"

The thing pulled harder. The boat surged forward, the wake spreading behind them across the surface of the lake. Daemon was laughing now, a wild delighted laugh that sat somewhere between joy and disbelief. Water streamed down his face. His silver hair was plastered to his head. He had never looked happier.

"JAIME! ARE YOU SEEING THIS?"

"I AM EXPERIENCING IT, DAEMON!"

The boat hit something below the surface, and tilted hard. Jaime, who had been half on his feet, lost his footing entirely and went over the side with a shout that ended in a splash.

"JAIME!"

Daemon did not let go of the rod. He could not bring himself to let go of the rod. But he flung himself sideways and reached down with his other hand, and caught his wrist.

Jaime was now being dragged through the water alongside the boat. He was getting hit in the face with spray every other heartbeat. He kept trying to speak, and every time he opened his mouth more water filled it, and he would cough and gag and try again.

"DAE—" splash "—MON—" splash "—LET—" splash "—GO—"

"HE'S REAL!" Daemon was shouting. "JAIME, HE IS REAL! WAIT TILL I TELL THEM AT THE ORPHANAGE—"

"DAE—" splash "—MON—" splash "—I—" splash "—AM—" splash "—DROWNING—"

"YOU'RE NOT DROWNING! YOUR HEAD'S OUT OF THE WATER!"

"NOT—" splash "—FOR—" splash "—LONG—"

The thing on the line changed direction again, sharply, and the boat slewed in a wide arc that took it directly toward the Isle of Faces. Daemon, still gripping both rod and Jaime, felt his arms threatening to come out of their sockets. The shore rushed at them. The trees grew rapidly larger. The rocky beach along the eastern edge became very visible in alarming detail. The boat was moving far too fast to stop in time.

"JAIME—"

"I SEE IT—"

"BRACE!"

"I AM IN THE WATER, DAEMON!"

The line snapped.

It snapped so suddenly that Daemon, pulling against it with all his weight, was flung backward into the bottom of the boat. The boat, freed, did not slow. Momentum carried it on in a long skid, and Jaime was hauled up over the edge by Daemon's grip on his wrist as the vessel came in toward the shore. 

The hull struck the shingle.

The bow went up. 

The stern slid sideways. 

The whole boat plowed onto the beach in a grinding crunch, ploughing through wet stones and sand and finally coming to rest against the trunk of a fallen tree, tilted at a poor angle, half on land and half in the shallows at the island's edge.

Daemon and Jaime were thrown forward.

They came down hard on the rocky beach, rolling several feet through wet shingle before settling in a tangled heap of soaked clothes and bruised limbs and shocked silence. The fishing rod, somehow, was still gripped in Daemon's hand. The line dangled from the broken end, ragged and limp.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

Then Daemon began to laugh.

It started as a wheeze and built into a real laugh, and then into something almost helpless, his whole body shaking with it as he lay on the wet stones looking up at the sky. Jaime sat up slowly beside him, water streaming from his hair, his fine clothes ruined, his green eyes blinking in the afternoon light.

He looked at Daemon.

He looked at the boat, half-beached, broken.

He looked at the weirwood trees rising above the shore. 

He looked back at Daemon, and then he laughed too. A real laugh, as he lay back on the wet stones and laughed at the sky until his sides ached.

_____________________________________

The Mountain rode east through the Thornwood with his men strung out behind him and the tall bandit walking ahead of his horse on a length of rope. The rope was tied to the bandit's wrists. The other end was looped around the horn of Gregor's saddle. The bandit had not been allowed to ride. He had been walking for two days now, and his feet were bloody inside his boots. He was on the brink of exhaustion, but kept moving because the alternative was being dragged.

The forest had grown denser the further east they rode. The Lannister men had been forced to dismount more than once to lead their horses through tangled stretches. The Mountain had not dismounted. His destrier was bred to carry his weight in armour, and he simply rode through whatever he could not ride around, ducking his helmeted head when he had to and breaking through branches when ducking was not enough.

It was past midday on the third day when the bandit stopped walking and pointed.

"There," he said in a horse voice as he had not been given much water. "That's the place. Where I saw the lad with the gold hair. Hanging from that branch there, by his ankle. Plain as day. Four or five days back."

The Mountain reined in his horse and swung down from the saddle with a thud that made the ground vibrate, he walked forward into the small clearing the bandit had indicated.

It was clearly a place where something had happened. The undergrowth at the centre was flattened and torn up. A trap mechanism had been disturbed. There were spots on the ground that might have been old blood, dried to a rust colour and half-covered in fallen leaves.

The scar-faced lieutenant dismounted and walked the perimeter, his eyes on the ground. After a moment, he turned back.

"There's been a fight here. Several men, by the prints. But it's not recent. Days old, like he said." He toed a clump of dirt with his boot. "And no one's been back since. No fresh tracks at all."

The other guards spread out, walking the clearing, examining the ground, looking up into the branches. One of them found a snapped sapling near the western edge. Another found a torn scrap of crimson cloth caught in a bramble, the same crimson as Lannister livery, which suggested at least one of the men in the fight had been wearing house colours.

"They've been gone for days," the scar-faced lieutenant said, turning back to the bandit. "Fucking useless."

The lieutenant backhanded him.

The bandit went down hard and hit the ground with a yelp of pain. Two of the other guards stepped forward and started kicking him where he lay.

"Stop," the Mountain said.

The kicking stopped almost immediately and the guards stepped back from the bandit, who lay curled on his side with blood running from his nose into the leaves.

The Mountain had not turned around. He was still facing the centre of the clearing, looking down at the disturbed earth. "Tracks," he called out in a deep voice.

The scar-faced lieutenant straightened. "Find the tracks. Spread out. East, west, all directions. He left this clearing alive, which means he left footprints somewhere. Find them."

The men were some of the best trackers that were in service to Tywin Lannister and within a quarter hour, one of them whistled from the eastern edge of the clearing.

"Two sets," he called. "Heading east, into the deeper wood."

The Mountain mounted his horse and the column moved east. The tracks were old, but they were readable. 

Two people, walking together, taking their time. They had stopped at one point to set up a small camp and built a fire, then doused it carefully and moved on. The tracks continued east, then turned slightly north. The trees changed, oaks giving way to willows and silver birches, and the smell of the wood changed too, taking on a damp green quality.

"Water ahead," one of them said.

They reached the edge of the wood near sunset on the second day after they had picked up the trail and the Gods Eye opened before them.

The Mountain reined in his horse at the treeline and his men gathered behind him. The trackers spread out along the shore, looking for where the trail led next. After several minutes, one of them called out from a fifty paces north. "They came down here. Walked the shore, by the look of it. Northeast along the water.

The Mountain dismounted and turned towards the bandit and walked back to him. The bandit looked up at him, and whatever he saw behind the visor of that black helm made his face go slack.

"M'lord," he said. "M'lord, I led you here just as I said I would. I led you right to where those boys came through. The trail is good and your men found it clear as day. You've got everything you need now, m'lord, you've got—"

The Mountain reached down with his right hand and closed his thick fingers hard around the bandit's jaw, squeezing until the jaw bone cracked under the pressure and the man's teeth broke inside his mouth.

The bandit went completely still,  his eyes opened in terror while hot piss ran down his legs and soaked his pants and the grass under him.

"Mmeeehh llhord," he tried to say again but the grip twisted his face so the words came out all broken. 

The Mountain brought his left hand down and wrapped it around the back of the bandit's skull so his fingers and thumb covered the whole width of the man's neck. He did not strain at all. He did not pause even for a breath. He pulled both hands apart with one hard yank the way a man tears apart a loaf of bread and the bandit's head ripped away from his shoulders with a wet tearing sound.

Thick blood shot out from the torn neck and sprayed across the grass and the Mountain's armor while the headless body jerked and kicked hard on the ground with its legs still trying to run. Shit and more piss leaked out of it and mixed with the spreading pool of blood that smelled foul.

The Mountain dropped the severed head into the grass right beside the twitching body and turned away from the mess without looking at it again and walked straight to his horse. He swung his big body up into the saddle and turned to look at the scar-faced lieutenant who had watched the whole killing with a blank face.

"North," the Mountain said.

The column turned their horses and started riding north along the shore of the Gods Eye following the trail of the two boys.

In the three years Gregor Clegane had been in service to Tywin Lannister, he had never once failed a task. He would drag him the Lannister brat kicking and screaming if he had too. After he tore his friend in half and fucked his entrails. 

_____________________________________

Jaime lay on his back on the wet beach for a long moment after the laughter finally died away, while the afternoon sun beat down on his soaked clothes and made the fine crimson leather of his doublet cling uncomfortably to his skin, then he finally pushed himself up with both hands, brushing the sand and bits of shell from his palms as he rose to his full height and looked around at the line of pale weirwood trees that stood along the edge of the beach.

Daemon was already on his feet as well, still grinning that same untroubled grin he seemed to wear constantly, and he walked a few steps toward the boat before stopping to study where the hull had been damaged. "There are some spare clothes in my pack if you need them," he called out without turning. 

Only then did Jaime glance down at himself and make a face at the state of his garments, the expensive wool and leather was now soaked with lake water and streaked with sand, without another word he began to undress right there on the open beach, his fingers working the laces of his doublet as he pulled the wet fabric up and over his head, letting it drop onto a flat rock before he reached down to unfasten his belt and slide his breeches and smallclothes down the long lines of his legs.

He stood completely naked in the warm air for a moment, his lean and well-muscled body still glistening with droplets of water. He bent at the waist to gather his discarded clothes and carried the bundle over to a low-hanging branch of the nearest weirwood, draping each piece carefully across the pale wood so the sun and breeze could reach them fully while he worked the fabric with his hands to wring out as much water as he could, and only then did he turn back toward his pack and pull out the spare set of clothes Daemon had offered.

He stepped into the rough-spun breeches first, then he tugged the simple woolen tunic over his head, and looked at himself with clear distaste. "These are scratchy as a horse blanket and twice as poorly made," Jaime said, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "I can already feel them rubbing everywhere, how do you even wear this without wanting to tear it off after an hour?"

Daemon glanced over from where he had been crouched beside the boat, and straightened up with an indignant expression. "Those are my finest clothes, Jaime. I wore that tunic to the nameday feast last year and the septas all said I looked like a proper young man in it. You are just used to everything being stitched from silk and gold thread."

Jaime stared at him for a moment, the corner of his mouth twitching, and then he let out a genuine laugh. "Your finest. Seven hells, Daemon, I have seen better cloth on the backs of beggars outside the Rock. But I suppose I should be grateful you did not make me walk around naked while my own things dried." Still chuckling under his breath, Jaime finished settling the borrowed clothes on his body as best he could and then walked across the beach toward Daemon.

Daemon had turned his full attention back to the boat by then, running his hands along the cracked hull and testing the broken planks where the impact had splintered the wood, and his expression had grown more thoughtful as he crouched lower to peer underneath the tilted vessel.

Jaime stopped beside him and crossed his arms over his chest, looking from the damaged boat to the stretch of the Gods Eye beyond it. "This is exactly what I was afraid of when you dragged me into that cursed thing in the first place. Look at it, Daemon. The hull is split in half a dozen places and one of the oars is snapped clean through like kindling. How in the seven hells are we supposed to get back to the shore now? We cannot very well row across the lake in a wreck like this."

Daemon stood up slowly from his inspection of the boat, wiping his hands on the front of his own tunic as he turned to face Jaime fully and shrugged. "We could always swim if it comes to that. The shore is not so far, and the water looked calm enough once that big fellow stopped towing us."

Jaime's eyes widened and he took a half-step back as though the suggestion itself had pushed him. "Swim? Have you lost whatever sense the gods gave you? You cannot possibly have forgotten the thing that dragged us all the way here in the first place, the one you insisted was the Spawn of Vhagar or some other nonsense. It is still out there somewhere beneath all that water, and if it decides it wants another go at us while we are flailing about like fools with nothing but our arms and legs to keep us afloat, I do not fancy ending up as fish food before we even reach the Trials."

Daemon waved the concern away with a casual flick of his hand as he turned his gaze back toward the weirwood trees, his expression remaining as untroubled as ever. "We will figure something out. The boat can still be patched well enough for a short trip if we take our time with it, or maybe we can find another way once we have had a proper look around this place. For now though, let us just enjoy our time here. We have the whole island to ourselves and the sun is still high, after everything that has happened today it would be a shame to spend the rest of the afternoon worrying about how we get back."

Jaime opened his mouth to argue further, then closed it again as he followed Daemon's gaze toward the pale trunks and red leaves, and though the complaint still sat on the tip of his tongue he found himself letting out a long breath instead. 

They left the boat where it lay and walked up the beach toward the treeline. The wood that rose before them was unlike anything either of them had walked through in their lives. Every tree was a weirwood. Every trunk was bone-white. Every leaf was a deep crimson.

Daemon walked ahead with his head tilted back, looking up into the branches with open-mouthed wonder. Jaime followed a few paces behind, his hand resting lightly on the lion pommel of his sword, feeling a little more uneased by the sight experience. 

"Have you ever seen so many in one place?" Daemon asked, not looking back. "There must be hundreds of them. The septon told us there was a weirwood in the godswood at Riverrun once, and the way he spoke about it, you'd have thought it was the only one left in the south."

"Quite a few houses south of the neck have them, but they are certainly rare," Jaime said. "Everything below the Trident, the Andals cut down centuries ago. They burned them, mostly. Some they hung men from before the burning. The Faith called it cleansing the land of the old gods." He looked up into the canopy as he walked. "I don't know how this place was spared. Maybe no one ever wanted to come out here badly enough."

"Or maybe someone made sure they couldn't."

Jaime glanced sideways at him. "What do you mean?"

"The septon used to tell us about the Pact. About how the men who signed it were sworn never to harm the weirwoods, and how the magic of the agreement bound their sons and their sons' sons. Maybe the Pact still holds. Maybe that's why the Andals never burned this place. Maybe they couldn't get here when they tried."

"That's a children's story, Daemon."

"All the best stories are children's stories, doesn't mean there is any less truth to them."

They walked deeper into the woods, the island wasn't massive but it was large enough they couldn't see shore to shore. In fact, if someone wanted to they could easily construct a keep and still have room for a small village by the shore. 

"Do you really believe they were here?" Jaime asked after a while. "The Children. Truly?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

"Because they're a tale. The maesters are split on whether they ever existed at all. Half of them say the Children were just a name the First Men gave to small folk who lived in the deep wood, foragers and hermits who knew the land well. The other half say they were always a myth. There's no proof."

"There's this island."

"This island is rocks and trees. That isn't proof of anything except... rocks and trees."

Daemon turned around to walk backwards for a few paces, grinning at him. "You sound just like my friend Tomard at the orphanage. Whenever someone told a story he didn't like, he'd cross his arms and say that didn't happen. I think he just hated being wrong."

"I am not hating being wrong. I am simply pointing out that there is no evidence."

"There's a whole island of weirwood trees in the middle of a lake, with carved faces watching us, and you're telling me there's no evidence."

"The faces were carved by men. By the First Men who worshipped here. Not by Children."

Daemon shrugged and turned forward again. "I think they're real. I think they might even still be here. Hiding."

"They are not still here."

"You don't know that."

"I know that ten thousand years is a long time for a people to hide from the rest of the world without anyone ever finding them."

"Maybe they're good at hiding."

"Or Maybe," Jaime said, "you are very, very stubborn."

Daemon laughed and kept walking.

The path widened as they climbed, opening into a small area surrounded by older, larger weirwoods whose carved faces were so deeply weathered that their features had begun to blur back into the bark. In the centre of the area, half-buried in fallen leaves and moss, was a scattering of dark stones that looked like glass. 

Daemon stopped and stooped to pick one up. It was the size of a chicken's egg, smooth on most of its surface and sharp on one edge where it had broken from a larger piece. It was so black it seemed to drink the light around it.

"What is this stuff?" he said. "It's all over here, look. There must be a hundred pieces of it scattered around."

Jaime, who had been a few paces behind, came up alongside him and saw what he was holding. His expression changed.

"Put it down."

Daemon glanced at him. "Why?"

"Daemon. Put it down. Now."

"Why? It's just a rock."

Jaime took two quick steps forward and reached as if to take it from him, then stopped himself, frowning. "It is not just a rock... that is dragonglass."

"Oh." Daemon looked at the stone in his palm with renewed interest. "I've heard of that, they used to make weapons of it thousands of years ago, apparently it's pretty sharp."

"That is the least of what it is. Listen to me carefully, Daemon. Dragonglass is dangerous. There are laws about who is allowed to have it, and that list is very short. Some lords will hang men just for having it. The Crown keeps very close watch on the stuff."

"Why? It's just a rock."

"It severs aura."

Daemon paused and looked down at the stone in his palm. "Severs?"

"Cuts through it like it isn't there. A common knife would break on trained Aura users skin, but a dragonglass knife goes through his Aura like a blade through wet paper. It bypasses every reinforcement we can put on our bodies. The strongest aura user in the realm, the King himself, could be killed by a peasant with a chip of dragonglass if the peasant got lucky and made the cut deep enough. That is what it does."

Daemon turned the stone slowly between his thumb and forefinger, watching the light play along the broken edge.

"Why?"

"No one knows for certain."

Daemon hefted the stone in his palm, then drew his thumb along the broken edge. He cut himself before he realised he was going to. A bright bead of blood welled up on the pad of his thumb. He hissed and shook his hand, and Jaime caught his wrist before he could touch the stone again.

"You see? It is not a toy. Put it down."

Daemon set the stone back down and glanced around at the wrea at the dozens of dark glints scattered among the leaves.

"Why is there so much of it here, though? Look at it. It's everywhere. If it's so rare and dangerous, why is it just lying around on the ground in the middle of an island?"

"I do not know."

"Should we take some?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Daemon. I am sure. We do not need to walk into King's Landing carrying contraband on the eve of the Trials. The Master of Laws would have you hung and me flogged before they even let us into the registration tent."

Daemon looked at the scattered glints and pouted slightly before they walked on. Just past the hollow, where the path went around the base of a great old weirwood Daemon stopped again. This time it was Jaime who almost walked into him.

"What now?"

Daemon was looking at something on the ground.

A skeleton lay against the base of the weirwood, half-covered in moss and fallen leaves. The bones had gone the colour of old ivory. The skull was tipped back against the trunk, the jaw fallen open, and what remained of the body was curled on its side as though the man had laid down to rest and never gotten up. Beside him, slightly further into the leaves, was another. And beyond that, partly hidden by a knot of roots, was a third.

Daemon stood very still for a long moment.

"They've just been left here," he said quietly. "How long do you think they've been lying here?"

"I can't tell. The bones are very dry. Hundreds of years. Maybe longer. There are no clothes left, so they died long enough ago that the cloth has all rotted away."

"That's a long time to lie here alone."

He knelt down beside the nearest skeleton and after a moment, he closed his eyes and bowed his head, and moved his lips silently for several breaths. When he opened his eyes again, he reached out and gently moved a strand of moss away from the skull's eye socket.

"What was that?" Jaime asked.

"A prayer. Just a small one asking the stranger to reunite them with the ones they hold close."

"They probably worshipped the old gods, Daemon. The Seven mean nothing to them."

"It doesn't matter. Old gods or New they'll feel the meaning I have in my heart." He stood up and brushed his hands off, and they kept walking.

The path led them around a ridge and into another, a larger clearing, where a dozen weirwoods grew in a circle around a stone basin set into the ground. The basin was old, very old, the carved edges worn nearly smooth, and there was no water in it now, but it had clearly once held water. Around its rim were carvings that did not look like anything either of them recognised.

"Look at this." Daemon walked the perimeter of the basin with his head down. "A maester I met at the crossroads told me about the godswoods, how they have these, I think he said they're called heart pools."

Jaime did not answer, so Daemon glanced back at him. He saw that Jaime had stopped at the edge of the clearing and was looking, very intently, at a group of trees off to the south. His hand had drifted to the pommel of his sword.

"What is it?"

"I thought I saw..." Jaime trailed off. He kept staring at the trees.

Daemon walked back toward him. "What did you see?"

"Movement in one of the trees, it's probably just a bird."

"There aren't any birds in here. I haven't heard a single one since we landed."

"That doesn't make me feel any better, Daemon."

"I'm just pointing it out."

Jaime kept watching the trees. After a moment he shook his head and let his hand drop. "It was nothing. The trees are strange, that's all. The leaves keep moving in the breeze and the red leaves makes everything look like it's shifting."

They returned to the basin. Daemon crouched beside it and traced one of the carvings with his finger. Jaime drifted toward the southern edge of the clearing, his eyes still on the place where he thought he had seen something, and after a moment he stepped past the trees and into a smaller space beyond, where the trees was thicker and less light poured through. 

As he looked around he once again saw something flicker in the corner of his vision. He drew his sword immediately and held it out, while letting his aura flow out of his body. "Show yourself now!" He called out, only to hear nothing in return. He backed up out of the small grove he entered and went back to Daemon who was still messing around like a child.  "There's something here," he called out to him. 

Daemon stood. "What?"

"There is something here Daemon, it wasn't a bird it wasn't the leaves... I saw something move I am sure of it," Jaime held his sword up while he looked around cautiously. 

Daemon looked around the clearing, at the 

M  weirwoods, at the basin, at the carved faces watching from a dozen trunks. There was no movement. The leaves stirred faintly in a breeze that seemed not to come from any particular direction.

"I don't see anything."

"It's small and it's fast, it moved between the trees like a damn shadow cat."

Daemon walked over and patted his shoulder gently. "Maybe you should sit down for a bit. The sun was hot earlier and you spent a while being dragged through the lake by your collar."

Jaime turned his head in annoyance. "I am not seeing things, Daemon."

"I'm not saying you are. I'm saying maybe—"

"I am telling you, something is here!!!"

Daemon held his hands up. "All right, all right. Who would be here, though? It's an island in the middle of the largest lake in Westeros?"

Jaime opened his mouth and then closed it again. He could not, in fact, answer that.

"The Children of the Forest?" Daemon asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Don't."

"Are the maesters wrong, then?"

"Daemon."

"All I'm saying is, you were the one telling me they were just stories an hour ago, and now you've drawn your sword because you saw a leaf move."

"It was not a leaf."

"All right. It was not a leaf. Whatever it was, it isn't here now."

Jaime stared at the trees for another long moment, then slowly he sheathed it, his shoulders dropped, and he let out a long breath. "Fine... maybe I was just seeing things,"

"Happens to the best of us," Daemon said as he patted his back. 

"Fuck off..." Jaime replied. 

They stood together in the clearing for a while longer before Daemon let out a long sigh and made a popping sound with his mouth. "We should get the unlocking over with."

Jaime turned to look at him sharply. "What? Now?"

"Why not now? It's a nice place. Quiet. Lots of trees. If something goes wrong, this would be a fine spot to die in, I'd even have some company," he said gesturing over to the three corpses. 

"Stop talking like that."

"I'm only being practical. We've put it off for days. We're going to have to do it eventually, and you keep saying I need time to recover before the Trials in case it goes badly. The longer we wait, the less time I have to learn anything you can teach me. May as well do it here."

Jaime sighed deeply and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You are altogether too calm about the possibility of dying, Daemon."

"You'll get used to it."

"I doubt it."

"Are you ready?"

"Are 'you' ready?"

"Yes."

Jaime exhaled through his nose and drew himself up, settling his stance the way he had taught Daemon to settle his, he reached for his aura and let it form around him in a faint shimmering pressure that made the air feel heavier between them, he then gestured with one hand. "Turn around, then. Face away from me. It will be easier if you are not looking."

Daemon turned.

There was a long silence.

"Daemon."

"Yes?"

"Are you sure this is what you want?"

"I'm sure."

"Daemon, I am only going to ask—"

"Jaime. Do it."

Jaime placed his palm flat against the center of Daemon's back, closed his eyes, and pushed his aura forward in a rush, sending the energy surging into the other boy's body to try and break open the sealed nodes that held his life force trapped.

It went wrong almost at once. Daemon's whole frame jerked violently as though lightning had struck him, his back arching hard while only half the nodes flared open in bursts that left the rest of his aura unbalanced, he convulsed with a scream that tore out of his throat while pain ripped through every nerve in his body.

Jaime's eyes snapped open in panic and he kept his hand pressed there, his own aura flaring brighter around him as he tried desperately to pull the energy back or push it forward, anything to stop what was happening. "Daemon! Tell me what to do! I do not know how to fix this! Daemon!"

But Daemon could not answer, his screams rising and falling as his body shook and his knees threatened to buckle under him, the half-unlocked aura twisting outside him like a living storm.

"Foolish boys. Both of you."

Jaime looked up and there, standing between two weirwoods no more than ten paces away, was a Child, small and slender with skin like pale bark and large dark eyes that seemed far older than the face they sat in, her hair a tangle of leaves and vines and her hands resting lightly on a simple wooden stick.

Jaime almost fell backward in shock, his aura surging wildly around him as he yanked his hand from Daemon's back and drew his sword in one frantic motion.

The Child of the Forest moved faster than anything that small should have been able to, lifting her stick in a casual swipe that met Jaime's sword with a soft wooden clack and then tapped him lightly in the stomach with the other end. The touch sent a wave of something cold and twisting through his body that doubled him over, his sword dropping as he fell to his knees and vomited violently onto the moss between his hands.

"Stay there, boy, while I fix your mess," she said, stepping past him without another glance as though he were no more threat than a stumbling child.

She moved to Daemon's side and placed one small hand on his convulsing back, while the other rested on his shoulde. "Breathe, child. Feel the flow as it should be, not as it is breaking. Let it settle where it belongs. I will help you open the rest slowly, one by one, like opening shutters to let in the morning light."

Daemon's screams eased into harsh gasps as her guidance took hold, the wild aura inside him gradually smoothing and strengthening under her direction while she helped the remaining nodes unlock in proper sequence, teaching him how to contain and channel the power now flooding through his body.

The Child of the Forest sat back on her heels with a small sound that might have been satisfaction.

"There," she said. "Now hold it. Bring it close. Do not let it out into the world. Wear it like a cloak. That is the first thing you must do. Do you feel it?"

"Yes," Daemon said very softly before he opened his eyes "I feel it."

"Pull it in around your skin and no further."

He did. The flood receded, drawing back toward his body, settling into a smooth bright layer that hugged his frame from head to foot. 

Mantle. 

The Child watched him with her head tilted slightly, there was something on her face that might have been amusement and might have been something else. "Very good," she said

Jaime, still on his knees, tried to speak and found that his tongue was not quite working yet. He managed a hoarse sound.

She glanced over at him. "You will be all right, lion-blood. The sickness will pass. I only wished to disarm you. You should be grateful I did not strike harder. You drew steel before even trying to speak, that was foolish, but the fault is not entirely yours. Your kind is bred to draw steel before it thinks." She looked back at Daemon. 

Daemon turned his head on the moss. His silver hair was matted with sweat and his purple eyes found her face, and even now, with his body still trembling and his nodes only just opened, he managed to smile at her.

"Hello," he said.

She looked at him for a long moment, and the corner of her mouth lifted very slightly.

"Hello."

(AN: So Daemon has his Aura unlocked and is now being chased by the Mountain. That won't be good. But they've also discovered an old Child of the Forest I wonder what wisdom shell have.)