Power is Everything Chapter 3 — Aura Training (Rewrite) (Patreon)

(AN: for reference:

Mantle = Ten

Veil = Zetsu

Surge = Ren

Focus = Ko

Bastion = Ken

Current = Ryu

Sight = Gyo

Reach = En

Shroud = In

Temper = Shu

Expression = Hatsu)

The day had come and gone and now they all found themselves sitting around a fire. Daemon sat cross-legged on one side, while Jaime sat opposite him with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around them, his green eyes fixed on a point just past the flames to their third guest. 

"Pinch me," Jaime said.

Daemon looked at him, tilted his head slightly, and then leaned across and drove his fist into Jaime's cheekbone.

Jaime's head snapped sideways and he went sprawling onto his back in the moss, his legs kicking out and scattering embers from the edge of the fire. He lay there for a stunned moment, blinking at the canopy of red leaves overhead, and then he sat up with murder in his eyes.

"I SAID PINCH ME!"

"Oh I thought you said punch..."

"PUNCH?! DAEMON! A PUNCH! DO YOU NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PINCH AND A PUNCH?"

"They sound the same!"

"THEY DO NOT SOUND THE SAME!"

Jaime lunged at him across the fire and they went down together in a tangle of limb, rolling through the moss and dead leaves while each tried to get the other in a headlock. Daemon grabbed a fistful of Jaime's golden hair and Jaime responded by jamming his elbow into Daemon's ribs, they grappled and kicked and swore at each other for the better part of a minute before they separated, both of them breathing hard and sitting in the dirt on opposite sides of the now-scattered fire.

"You hit me in the face," Jaime said, touching his cheekbone gingerly.

"I thought you asked me to."

"I asked you to PINCH me."

"Why did you even want to be pinched?" Daemon asked, rubbing his ribs where Jaime's elbow had landed.

Jaime's hand dropped from his face and he gestured across the fire to where a rock jutted out of the moss near the base of a great weirwood. Sitting on the rock, cross-legged, with a freshly caught fish in one hand and a thin stone blade in the other, was the Child of the Forest. She was scaling the fish and had not looked up during any of the commotion.

"Because this cannot be real," Jaime said in a quiet voice. "She cannot be real, the Children of the Forest are extinct. They have been extinct for thousands of years and yet there she sits."

Daemon looked across at the Child, then back at Jaime with a confused expression. "Of course she is real. She fixed whatever you did wrong when you tried to open my aura, don't you remember?"

"You don't need to remind me of what I did wrong, Daemon. I am well aware!"

"You are both far too loud," the Child said from across the fireplace interrupting them. 

Daemon turned to Jaime and nodded, jerking a thumb in his direction. "See? Even she thinks so. You are being far too loud, Jaime."

Jaime's mouth fell open and a strangled sound of pure outrage came out of it, he looked as though he might spontaneously burst into flames, but before he could the Child set down her fish and fixed them both with a stare from her enormous golden eyes, and something in that stare made even Daemon go still.

"Both of you do not belong here. No man has set foot on this island in thousands of years, and no man should set foot upon it for thousands more. You washed up on my shore like driftwood and you have been quarreling and bleeding and shouting on sacred ground ever since, I have half a mind to put you both back in your broken little boat and push you out to the deep water and let the thing beneath the lake decide what to do with you."

Daemon tilted his head, and rather than being cowed he seemed puzzled, and he leaned forward slightly with his elbows on his knees. "But I thought this was the place where men and the Children became friends. The Pact, that's what it was called, wasn't it? The septon told us the First Men and the Children stopped fighting right here on this island, and swore peace, and that's why the men who worship the old gods still keep the weirwoods to this day. So really, if you think about it, this is the one place where a man being here should be all right."

The Child stared at him.

Then she began to laugh.

It started with a dry chuckle deep in her chest, and it built quickly into something wheezing that shook her whole small frame, she rocked back on the rock where she sat until she very nearly tipped off the edge of it, one hand slapping against the stone to catch herself while the other pressed to her belly. 

It went on long enough that Daemon and Jaime exchanged a look across the fire. When at last her laughter guttered down into occasional huffing breaths, Daemon ventured carefully, "Is that a no?"

Jaime shoved him hard in the shoulder. "Obviously that is a no, you great fool."

The Child wiped at the corner of one eye with a knuckle and shook her head slowly. "The Pact that was sealed on this island was no friendship, child. It was survival, and nothing more. A new enemy had come into the world, one that cared nothing for men or Children and would have unmade us both, and so two peoples who had spent a thousand years soaking the roots of these trees in each other's blood agreed to stop long enough to face it." 

She leaned forward, and the firelight caught the slit pupils of her eyes and made them gleam. "Do you truly believe that a single afternoon of oaths, no matter how solemn, could wash away thousands of years of war? That men and Children walked away from this place holding hands and singing?"

Daemon opened his mouth—

"No. It does not." She sat back and picked up her fish once more, working the blade of dark stone along its belly. "Men are a race of violent children. You are obsessed with power and with the shine of gold and the size of your holdings, and you tear the world apart to have more of it, and never once stop to notice the true richness that surrounds you on every side. The song in the earth. The memory in the trees. The life moving through all things and binding them together. You walk through such wonder every day of your short lives and you see nothing but timber to be cut and stone to be quarried and land to be owned."

Jaime bristled visibly at that, his spine straightening and his jaw tensing. "That is a convenient thing to say for a creature who lives in a tree and owns nothing," he said. "Power and wealth are not vices, they are the foundations upon which everything worth having is built. Roads and walls and granaries do not raise themselves out of your precious song. It is gold that feeds cities through hard winters, and it is power that keeps the strong from simply taking whatever they please from the weak. There is nothing shameful in building something that lasts."

The Child's eyes narrowed and opened her mouth with a retort clearly loaded, and Jaime leaned in to meet it, the two of them might have gone at each other across the fire for the better part of an hour had Daemon not raised both hands and spoken over them.

"Enough, both of you." He looked at Jaime with a stern expressioj. "Jaime, she is our host. This is her fire and her island, and she is the reason I am sitting here breathing instead of lying stiff in the leaves back in that clearing. You can think what you like about gold, but you will show her a little respect while we are guests on her ground."

Jaime held his glare for a moment longer, and then the fight went out of him. "You are right," he admitted and he inclined his head toward the Child in something close to a proper bow. "Forgive me. That was poorly done of me and ungrateful considering what you've done." He was quiet for a moment before he added, "The truth of it is that I am still having a great deal of difficulty believing that your people exist at all. It sits ill with everything I was ever taught, and I do not know quite what to do with it."

The Child regarded him for a moment. "There are not many of us left to believe in," she said at last. "We were never so numerous as your songs pretend, and we are fewer now than we have ever been. And fewer still this far south. Most of those who remain fled north long ago, beyond your Wall, into places where men do not go and cannot follow. You would have to walk to the end of the world to find another of my kind south of the Neck. I may well be the last."

Daemon, who had been listening with his chin propped on his fist asked, "Then why do you stay? If they've all gone north where it's safe, why stay down here all alone?"

The Child was silent for a while and simply watched the fire pop and settle, eventually she looked up. "Because if I go, this place is forgotten...."

She then looked up into the weirwoods. "So much of what we were has already been torn away and scattered, our groves felled, our carvings smashed, our names lost even to ourselves. Eventually men will come here and tear this place down without the knowledge that there was anything here to lose." Her clawed fingers tightened slightly around the fish. "I will not let this island become another empty word history... for as long as I have memory I will be here to sing its song."

Daemon looked at her for a moment ans then smiled "That's a good reason," he said. "Staying somewhere lonely just so a place you love won't be forgotten. I think that might be one of the most honourable things I've ever heard."

The Child made a humming sound that might have been acknowledgment and might have been dismissal, and she turned the fish on its skewer of green wood and set it to roast at the edge of the flames. "Honour is a man's word," she said. "But I will take it, since you mean it kindly." She was quiet a moment ghen looked up at them, "Tomorrow, when the light comes, you will leave. I will help you get your boat sound enough to reach the far shore after which you will go, and you will not speak of what you found here to anyone. That is the price of my kindness."

"Good," Jaime said immediately, with obvious relief. "That is more than fair, we have a place we need to be and little enough time to reach it, and I will confess this island unsettles me more with every hour. We accept, gladly."

"I don't," Daemon said.

Both of the others turned to look at him.

"I don't want to go yet," he went on, entirely unbothered by the two stares now fixed on him. "It's wonderful here. The trees, the quiet, that stone pool with the strange carvings. I've never seen anywhere like it in my whole life and I'll likely never see anywhere like it again. I'd like to stay a while longer, if we can."

Jaime laughed, short and disbelieving. "Stay for what, exactly? There is nothing here, Daemon. It is trees and rocks and bones and a person  who has told us plainly that we are not wanted. What could you possibly want to stay for?"

"For her," Daemon said, nodding across the fire. "We've found the only person in the whole world who could actually teach us how to use aura properly."

"What,"  said Jaime.

"What," said the Child, at the very same moment.

The Child set down her fish and rose smoothly to her feet, and for all that she stood no higher than a boy of ten, there was something in the way she did it that filled the space and made both of them sit up. "I will do no such thing," she said. "You may put that thought out of your head at once."

Daemon spread his hands out in mock surrdener. "Why not? You already taught me. When my aura went wrong you showed me how to open all the nodes and how to draw it in and hold it close so it doesn't leak away. You're clearly a wonderful teacher. So why not teach us a little more?"

"That was a matter of life and death, and I did what I did chiefly because I did not wish for your corpse to lie rotting on my island and foul the ground until it decomposed," she explained. 

"Ouch," Jaime muttered.

Daemon, undeterred, leaned forward with his hands clasped almost pleadingly. "Please. Just a little. Whatever you think we can manage. We're going into the Knight's Trials in a few months and Jaime says most who go in without proper training don't come out again, and you're the only one who could give us a real chance. I'll do whatever you say, exactly how you say it, I swear it. Please."

The Child shook her head firmly. "No! Men have taken the gift of aura and twisted it into something small and ugly. You have no true understanding of it, none of you, not even the ones you call masters. You think it begins and ends with your own bodies, a thing to be hoarded and spent like coin. You do not listen to the trees. You do not listen to the earth. You do not even listen to the life moving inside your own breast. To teach you would be like teaching a suckling babe how to run down a stag. There is no point in it, and I have no patience for it. You will leave tomorrow. That is the end of the matter."

Daemon opened his mouth to plead again, but it was Jaime who spoke, and something in his tone had changed and become a little sly. "We can't leave tomorrow, though."

The Child turned to him slowly.

Jaime spread his hands and adopted an expression of deep, regretful practicality. "It is not that we don't wish to. It is that we cannot. Our boat is broken, you'll recall. The hull is split in half a dozen places and one of the oars is snapped clean through. I have no notion how long a thing like that takes to mend, and neither does Daemon, and it may well be days before it can carry us anywhere at all." He gestured vaguely toward the dark water beyond the trees. "And we certainly cannot swim for it, on account of the monster in the lake that dragged us here in the first place. So it seems we are your guests for some little while yet, whether any of us likes it or not."

The Child's green eyes narrowed to slits, and she looked at Jaime with the recognition of someone who has just watched a trap close around their own ankle.

Daemon seized on the silence at once, his whole face lighting up. "Well then, that settles it. If we're going to be stuck here a few days anyway waiting on the boat, it would be a terrible waste not to use the time. You could teach us just a little. It's the perfect chance, really, when you look at it that way."

The Child's jaw almost broke she was clenching it so hard.  Daemon's earnest hopefulness on one side and Jaime's insufferably clever little smirk on the other seemed to grind against something in her that had run entirely out of patience, and at last she threw up her hands.

"Very well," she said, and there was a dangerous sweetness in it. "I will teach you. On one condition." She held up a fingerand her eyes glittered. "You will show me first that you are worth teaching. Before I waste a single breath on either of you, you will master containing your aura and closing it away entirely, both, on your own, with no help from me. When you can hold your aura like a second skin without thought, and when you can shut it away so completely that I cannot sense you at all, then I will consider teaching you something more. Until then, I will not lift a finger."

She sat back down and folded her arms, plainly certain she had just set them an impossible labor, one that would keep them harmlessly occupied and frustrated until the boat was mended and she could be rid of them with her word technically kept.

"Done," Daemon said instantly, before Jaime could get so much as a syllable out. He was grinning now, and he pointed at her across the fire. "You said it, we all heard it. If we master those two things, you have to teach us. You can't take it back now."

The Child's certainty flickered, just for an instant, at the sheer speed of his acceptance, but she recovered and smirked and rose once more to her feet, gathering her half-dressed fish and her stick. "I will not take it back," she said. "I never break my word. I will leave you to your task, then. I look forward to seeing how far you get." And with that she turned and walked into the dark between the trees.

Daemon pumped his fist in the air and let out a whoop that echoed off the trees. "Did you hear that? She has to teach us now. We did it, Jaime. We got a Child of the Forest to agree to train us. Do you know how amazing that is? Nobody in the whole world has this chance."

Jaime, who had put his face in his hands somewhere in the last several seconds, dragged his palms slowly down and looked at his friend with the flat despair of a man watching a shipwreck he had personally steered into the rocks. "You absolute idiot."

Daemon's celebration faltered and he turned, blinking. "What? Why? We won. She has to teach us now, you heard her say it yourself."

"We did not win, Daemon, we lost, we lost completely, we simply lost slowly enough that you mistook it for winning." Jaime scrubbed a hand back through his golden hair. "Training the basic applications of aura takes months. Months, do you understand? Mantle alone is the labor of a season for most students, and here you have promised her that we will master both Mantle and Veil on our own, with no instruction, in the handful of days it takes to patch a rowboat. She played you. She played us. She knows perfectly well that we will never manage it in the time we have, and so she gets to keep her precious word and be rid of us all the same, and she never has to teach us a single thing."

Daemon fell quiet at that, and he sat back down slowly by the fire, and for a long moment he stared into the flames while he turned the whole thing over in his mind, his brow creased in concentration. And then, gradually, his face cleared, and the familiar untroubled smile returned to it, and he reached over and clapped Jaime on the back hard enough to make him lurch forward.

"Then I suppose we'll just have to do it in a few days anyway."

Jaime turned and stared at him. "That is not.... I cannot stress this enough.... You cannot simply decide to do the impossible because it would be convenient. It cannot be done, Daemon."

"Why not?"

"Because that is not how it is done. There is a process. There is a proper span of time. It is like asking a seed to become an oak by tomorrow morning."

Daemon shrugged, entirely unmoved, and there was a glint of something in his purple eyes now, a teasing spark. "You sound like a baby."

Jaime blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"A baby," Daemon said again. "Someone tells you that you have to wait a long time before you're allowed to be good at something, and you just fold your hands and say oh yes, of course, I'll wait, that's how it's done. If you want to fall behind me just because a maester once told you there's a proper order to everything, that's your choice. I won't wait around. I'm going to master it now, and if you'd rather sit and tell me it can't be done, that's fine, you can catch up whenever you finish being told what to do."

Jaime's eyes narrowed, he knew with perfect clarity, exactly what Daemon was doing. He could see the shape of the bait as plainly as if it had been laid out on a plate before him. He knew that the sensible thing, the only sensible thing, was to laugh it off and let it lie.

He got to his feet.

"Fine," he said tightly, and his aura came up around him in a smooth flare and then settled, drawing in close to his body until it hugged him like a second skin. "But when we fail, and we will fail, I want it clearly understood that I said so, at length, and that this was entirely your doing."

Daemon grinned and closed his eyes and reached for his own aura the way the Child had shown him, it came up rougher than Jaime's and for a few seconds it drifted loose and wandered from his skin, guttering like a candle in a draft, but he frowned and breathed slowly and drew it inward the way she had taught him, gathering it back against his body and pressing it until it lay across him in a layer that did not waver.

He opened his eyes and looked at Jaime. "So. What do you actually know about aura?"

Jaime lowered himself back down onto the log and let out a breath while he kept his own Mantle running. "I was never much of a student, if I am honest. My father set a maester to teach me the theory of it and I sat through the lessons because I had to, but I always would rather have been in the yard with a sword in my hand than in a solar listening to an old man talk about the flow of life energy." 

He picked up a twig and began turning it over in his fingers. "But I know the basics of it. There are four basic applications that everything else is built upon, and every trained aura user learns these before anything else, because without them you are nothing."

He held up one finger. "The first is Mantle. What we are both doing now where you hold your aura close about your body and you do not let it leak away. This is the root of everything. It keeps you from bleeding your life out into the air, and it hardens you, toughens your body so that a blow that would break an ordinary man leaves a trained one barely bruised. A knight can take a mace to the ribs and keep his feet because of Mantle. It should, they say, become as natural as breathing, so that you hold it always without ever thinking of it."

A second finger rose. "The second is Veil. The opposite of Mantle. Instead of holding your aura in, you close it away entirely, shut the nodes, and give off nothing at all. A man in Veil is invisible to another aura user's senses, which makes it the tool of scouts and hunters and, less honourably, assassins. It is also how one recovers spent aura quickly, for when the nodes are closed the energy pools inside and refills you faster. But it leaves you utterly defenceless. A man in full Veil can be killed by a kitchen knife as easily as any farmer, so you do not use it in a fight unless you have run entirely mad."

The third finger. "The third is Surge. This is the one you would recognise from every song about knights and heroes. You push your aura outward, flare it, thicken it far past the resting layer of Mantle, and it makes you stronger and faster and tougher all at once, by however much you can manage to summon. It is what lets a man leap further than a horse can jump, or split a shield with his fist, or shrug off a wound that ought to have felled him. It is also what makes the pressure, the weight you feel in the air near a powerful lord, the dread that turns a peasant's knees to water. But it drinks your reserves like a man dying of thirst, and no one can hold a full Surge for long. When two aura users fight to the death, more often than not it is the one who runs dry first who dies."

The fourth finger. "And the fourth is Focus. Instead of spreading your aura evenly across the whole of yourself the way Mantle does, you gather the greater part of it into a single place. Your fist, your blade, your shin, wherever you need it. That part of you becomes terribly strong, strong enough to shatter stone or cut through another man's Mantle like cloth, but everywhere else is left thin and weak and open."

He turned the twig over one last time and tossed it into the fire. "Beyond those four there are more advanced applications and a another kind of art that they call Aura Expression, where a man shapes his own aura into something wholly his own, a power that belongs to no one else in the world. But that is far past us, and no maester I ever met could explain it in a way that made much sense."

Daemon had listened to all of it his eyes fixed on Jaime's face even as some part of his attention stayed on the aura he was holding close about himself not letting it drift. When Jaime finished, Daemon nodded slowly and rolled his shoulders, and the smile crept back across his face.

"So we just have to be able to do the first two without thinking. Hold it close, and shut it away. That doesn't sound so hard."

Jaime gave him a long, weary look. "You are going to be the death of me, Daemon Rivers."

"How hard can it be?"

...

It was, as it turned out, very hard.

Six hours later the two of them were still at it, and the confidence with which Daemon had waved the whole thing away had long since curdled into gritted teeth and burning muscles and just pure exhaustion. 

They had settled on sparring as their method, because it was Jaime who pointed out that the true test of Mantle was not holding it while sitting still and comfortable by a fire but holding it while the body was under strain and the mind was busy elsewhere, and so they had cut themselves fresh practice sticks from a fallen branch and squared off in the clearing beneath the great weirwood, and they had been going at each other ever since.

Daemon came in with a rising cut and Jaime turned it aside almost lazily and rapped him across the knuckles, Daemon hissed and shook his hand but kept his Mantle stable even through the flash of pain. 

They broke apart, both of them breathing hard, sweat sheening their faces and darkening the collars of their tunics, and for a moment they simply stood and heaved air and glared at one another across the small clearing.

"You dropped it," Jaime panted, wiping his brow with the back of his forearm. "Just then, when I struck your hand... for half a heartbeat your Mantle guttered, I felt it go thin."

"It came back," Daemon shot back, rolling his aching wrist, his own chest working like a bellows. "That's the point, isn't it? It slips, you catch it, you hold it again. It's holding on longer each time. I can feel it. An hour ago I couldn't have taken that rap without losing it completely."

"An hour ago you were losing it every time you so much as swung the stick," Jaime allowed grudgingly, and then he raised his practice blade again. "Again. Come on. Again."

They came together once more, sticks clacking in the dark, neither of them noticed the small figure that had climbed into the crook of a high weirwood branch to watch them.

The Child sat with her back against the trunk and one leg dangling and her green eyes fixed on the two boys sparring below, and the amusement she had worn all evening had drained out of her face entirely. 

She had set them the task certain that it was beyond them, certain she had bought herself a few days of watching two frustrated children flail and fail and then sail away none the wiser. 

She had seen men during the age of heroes who practiced aura. 

She knew exactly how long it took the quickest of them to make Mantle a thing of habit rather than effort, and it was not measured in hours.

And yet the pale-haired one had gone from spilling his aura across the ground with every movement to holding it through a rap on the knuckles in the space of a single evening. And the golden one was pushing himself far past where his pride alone should have carried him, matching the other stride for stride, because it was plain even from up here that the thought of the peasant boy surpassing him was more than the young lord could stomach.

She frowned down at them, and her tail of green and red hair stirred. 

She thought, with something that was not quite worry but was leaning toward it, that these were not ordinary children at all.

Below her, Jaime himself was astonished, though he would have bitten out his own tongue before he admitted it aloud. They had been at this for hours doing the sort of grinding work that his old master-at-arms would have called a proper session and then some, and he had fully expected Daemon to flag long ago, to lose his Mantle for good and slump down by the fire beaten. Instead the fool was still on his feet, still holding it, still grinning through the sweat and the split knuckles as though this were the finest sport he had ever taken part in.

'He should not still be standing,' Jaime thought, catching another of Daemon's clumsy swings and turning it wide. 'He unlocked his aura this very afternoon and he is holding Mantle through a spar six hours later, that is not possible. That is not how any of this is supposed to work.'

The only reason Jaime himself was still going, he told himself was that letting Daemon outlast him was simply and absolutely unacceptable. It had nothing to do with the task itself and everything to do with the fact that he was Jaime Lannister, the finest young blade in the Westerlands, and he would sooner drop dead in these leaves than let a fisherman's foundling hold his aura longer than he could.

So he raised his stick again. 

And again. 

And again.

...

The night wore on, and the two boys refused to stop.

When sparring grew too dangerous in the dark, with both of them stumbling on roots and swinging half-blind, they abandoned the sticks and turned to other trials of the same principle. Daemon suggested they climb, and so they went up into the lower branches of the great weirwoods and picked their way along the limbs in the blackness, forcing themselves to hold Mantle even as a slip might mean a fall. 

Jaime found, to his irritation, that Daemon climbed like something born in the trees, like a damn monkey or something, while he himself clung and edged and cursed under his breath, but in the end they both held their aura.

When the cold of the morning hours crept in, they hauled stones from the shoreline back up to the clearing, one after another, and passed them between them and lifted them overhead and held them there while keeping Mantle on. Jaime's arms burned and Daemon's hands were raw, and still neither would be the first to call a halt.

As the sky beyond the canopy began to pale toward the grey that came before dawn, they tried at last to hold Mantle while resting, which Jaime insisted was the true test, since a knight who could only keep his aura while awake and moving was no knight at all. They lay on their backs in the leaves a few feet apart, arms trembling, chests still heaving from the long night's labour, and they each fought to keep the thin bright layer of aura clinging to their skin even as exhaustion pressed down on them.

They talked for a while to keep themselves awake, Daemon telling some rambling story about the goat at the orphanage and the wheel of cheese, Jaime interjecting the occasional dry remark, both of them slurring now. And then somewhere in the middle of a sentence neither of them would afterward remember, they simply stopped.

They had passed out, the both of them, dropping into sleep like stones into a pond after a full day and a full night without rest.

But their Mantle stayed across their bodies.

High above, the Child came down out of her tree.

She dropped from branch to branch in near silence and landed in a crouch on the leaves of the clearing, she then straightened slowly and stood looking down at the two sleeping boys with an expression that was equal parts disbelief and dismay. 

She had thought herself so clever. 

She had set them a task fit to occupy them harmlessly for days, and instead they had gone and forced it open in a single night through nothing but stubbornness and each refusing to be bettered by the other, and now she was bound by her own word to teach them something more.

"What are the chances," she muttered under her breath, in the old tongue that no living man could understand, "that two such creatures should wash up together on my shore in the same season? Two prodigies of aura, in one broken little boat. The world is playing at something." She shook her head slowly.

She moved to step past them, meaning to return to her own place among the roots and think on what she had gotten herself into, but as she passed close by the pale-haired one she paused.

Something about him snagged at her senses, some faint wrongness or rightness she could not name, and she stopped and looked down at his sleeping face, at the silver hair matted to his brow and the aura still glowing across his skin, and after a moment she let her own awareness widen and sink, opening herself to the song of the world the way her people had done since before men had names.

The clearing came alive to her deeper sight. 

She felt the slow red pulse of the great weirwoods drinking from the earth, felt the threads of life running through root and soil and stone, felt the vast quiet current of the song moving through everything and binding it into one.

And she felt it move, very slightly, toward the boy.

She went very still.

It was the smallest thing, so faint that she had to hold herself utterly quiet to be certain of it, but it was there and it was unmistakable. The aura in the earth beneath him, the life humming up through the roots and the soil, was bleaning toward him, and he was drinking it in. Not the way she drank from the song, but minutely, unconsciously, a thin thread of the world's life trickling up into his sleeping body and adding itself to the aura that already lay upon him. 

He was feeding and he did not even know he was doing it.

'That is not possible,' she thought, and for the first time in a very long while something like awe stirred in her. 'Men do not do this. Men cannot do this. They are closed to the song, every one of them, sealed off in their own small selves, taking nothing from the world but timber and stone. They cannot hear it and they cannot touch it and they most certainly cannot draw of it in their sleep.'

Slowly she crouched down beside him and reached out one hand and laid it against his chest and she let her senses pour down through the point of contact and into him, following his aura down to its root to learn the shape and depth of it.

What she found there stopped her breath.

Magic.

Old magic. 

Though its source she did not know... what she did know is that the source of his magic did not come from the same as hers. 

In fact... it felt 

"Aaah!" She hissed as she drew her hand back as though the skin had burned her, and she rocked back on her heels and stared at his sleeping face with entirely new eyes.

She had never felt the magic of the Valyrians in depth, only when the two monstrous dragons had fought about the Gods Eye had she felt it. But it was clear to her that he was dragon kin. 

That combined with him being a prodigious user of aura... he would either be a monster or a saviour. 

For a long moment she simply looked at him, and at the lion's cub sleeping beside him, and all her earlier annoyance and all her clever plans for being rid of them quietly dissolved and blew away like smoke.

Then, silently, she rose and slipped back across the clearing and swarmed up the pale trunk of the great weirwood to her perch among the high branches, and settled there with her back against the bark and her golden eyes fixed on the pale-haired boy far below.

"Why has the song sent them here..."

"For me to show them the way of our ancestors..."

"Or so I may kill them before they become like the rest of their race..."

_____________________________________

Daemon was having the best dream of his life. He was back at the lake behind the orphanage, sitting on the bank with his fishing rod in his hands and the sun on his face, and on the end of his line was something enormous, something that pulled and tugged and fought, he was laughing because he knew, he just knew, that when he finally hauled it in it would be the biggest fish anyone had ever seen. 

When he finally caught it everyone would celebrate and they'd hoist him up into the air and—

Cold water hit him in the face.

He sucked in a breath so quickly it felt like swallowing a knife, his eyes flew open and his arms flailed and the dream broke apart like wet paper and was gone. 

He rolled sideways, coughing and sputtering, lake water running down his nose and into his mouth and soaking the front of his tunic, through the blur of it he could hear Jaime making almost the exact same sounds beside him, a choking gasp followed by a strangled yell.

The child stood over them both with an empty clay jug in her hands and an expression that suggested she had enjoyed that more than she was willing to admit.

Jaime was on his feet first, wringing water from his golden hair with both hands, his face twisted in outrage. "Have you gone mad? Have you completely and utterly lost your mind? I am a son of House Lannister, I am the firstborn of Tywin Lannister himself, you cannot simply pour water over a nobleman while he sleeps like he is some dog, this is an outrage, this is a violation of every standard of hospitality that has ever existed in any civilised—"

Daemon, still on his back in the wet leaves, started laughing so hard he could not breathe. He curled up on his side and clutched his stomach and howled while Jaime stood there dripping and sputtering.

"What are you laughing at?"

"You," Daemon wheezed. "You should hear yourself, 'I am a son of House Lannister'," he mocked doing his best impression of him. 

"She poured water directly on my face."

"I know, I got it too. You don't see me giving a speech about it."

"That is because you have no dignity to lose."

Daemon's laughing stopped and he sat up with a look of mock offence and threw a clump of wet leaves at Jaime's chest, and Jaime swatted them away and grabbed Daemon by the collar and they went down together into the mud for the second time in as many days, rolling and shoving and swearing, Jaime trying to get Daemon's arm behind his back and Daemon trying to stuff leaves into Jaime's mouth.

"Stop," Clover said.

They did not stop.

"STOP!"

They stopped. 

Mostly. 

Daemon got one last open-palmed slap against the side of Jaime's head before they separated and scrambled to their feet and stood there panting and covered in wet leaves and mud, looking at the small figure who watched them both. 

She sighed. "I regret this already."

Daemon's eyes went wide. All the foolishness fell off his face at once and he took a half step forward, not daring to breathe too loudly. "Does that mean you are going to teach us?"

Clover set the jug down on a flat stone and folded her arms across her narrow chest. "You did Master Mantle to a sufficient level... you haven't mastered Veil yet however."

"But—"

"However." She held up one clawed finger and Daemon shut his mouth. "Veil is the simpler of the two, and any fool who can hold Mantle in his sleep can learn Veil in a day or two of trying. Which means that if I want you off my island before the leaves change colour, I will have to teach you something worth learning and then send you on your way before you come up with another reason to stay."

Daemon let out a whoop and launched himself at Jaime, landing on his back with both arms around his neck. Jaime staggered under the weight, cursed, grabbed Daemon by the arm and threw him off. Daemon hit the ground rolling and came up grinning.

"She is going to teach us!!!"

"I heard her, Daemon."

"She is going to teach us and we are going to learn everything."

"You look like a lunatic."

Clover watched this with a defeated expression. "I will teach you the foundations of aura. The four basic applications. I will also show you one technique of my people, though I do not expect either of you to learn it. It is not meant for men and it may not work for you at all. That is my offer."

Daemon was practically vibrating. "I will learn everything you teach me. Every single thing. I promise."

"I will too," Jaime said, and there was a competitive edge in his voice. "I will not fall behind."

Clover nodded once, sharply. "Then we begin now. Get up, get your—"

"Wait," Daemon said.

She stopped. "What."

"We don't know your name. You know ours. That doesn't seem right."

Clover looked at him for a moment. "You would not be able to say my name if you had a hundred years to practice. It is spoken in the true tongue, which your mind could not comprehend."

"Then what should we call you?" Daemon asked.

She considered this. Her golden eyes went distant for a moment. "The closest thing in your language to what my name means would be... Clover."

Daemon's face split into a grin. "I like that. Clover. It suits you."

"I did not ask whether it suited me."

"It does though."

"Can we start now?" Jaime said.

Clover looked at both of them, one and then the other, and then she picked up her bone-white stick from where it leaned against the stone and held it loosely at her side. "Get ready. I will not go easy on either of you."

_____________________________________

Two weeks had passed since the Mountain and his men had reached the shore of the Gods Eye, and in that time the search had produced nothing.

They had ridden the entire western shore from one end to the other, checking every inlet, every cove, every stretch of beach where a boat might have been launched or landed. The trackers had followed the two sets of footprints along the waterline for miles until the prints simply ended at a point where the beach gave way to smooth rock and there was nothing left to follow. 

The conclusion was unavoidable. 

At some point, for some reason that none of them could fathom, Jaime Lannister had gotten into a boat and gone out onto the water. There was only one place to go from that shore, and it sat two miles out in the middle of the lake. 

The Isle of Faces.

This put a problem in front of them that could not be solved by riding faster. They had no boat. The Gods Eye was too vast and too deep and too cold to swim. The Lannister men were soldiers, not sailors, and the prospect of crossing two miles of open water without their armour made them uncomfortable.

Gregor had sent four men back toward the nearest village a week ago with orders to find or buy or take a boat large enough to carry him and at least six others. The village was three days' ride to the south, which meant the round trip should have taken six days at most. It had now been nine. There was no word, no rider, no sign of the men he had sent.

The remaining guards had set up a permanent camp on the stretch where they had first reached the shore, and every day that passed without progress was worse than the last. Not because of the cold or the boredom or the dwindling supplies, though all of those were bad. 

It was because of him.

The Mountain had not spoken more than a dozen words since the fifth day. He did not eat with the men. He did not sleep in the camp. He stood apart, always apart, the men could feel the pressure of his anger the way animals feel a storm coming.

Two of them had already died. On the eighth day, when the frustration had built to a pitch that the camp could feel in its bones, Gregor had pointed at two of the guards, the youngest and the newest, and told them to draw their swords.

The first one lasted about thirty seconds. 

Gregor came at him with his greatsword in one hand, swinging it the way most men would swing a stick, and the young guard got his own blade up in time to block and the impact snapped his sword clean in half and drove the broken stump back into his own chest. The guard went down on his back and did not get up again.

The second one tried to run. He got four steps before the flat of Gregor's blade caught him across the back of the legs and took his feet out from under him. He hit the ground face first, and Gregor stood over him and looked down at him for a long moment, and then he turned away and walked back to his place by the water. The young man had dragged himself to the edge of camp and died there.

No one touched the bodies. No one said anything. The scar-faced lieutenant, who had served the Mountain longer than any of the others and had survived it by learning exactly when to be invisible, simply ordered two of the remaining men to dig a hole and put the dead in it and that was the end of it.

On the morning of the fifteenth day, Gregor stood at the water's edge and stared out at the distant green smudge of the island and punched a tree.

The trunk was as thick as a man's waist. His gauntleted fist went through the bark and into the trunk and the whole tree shuddered from root to crown and the birds that had been roosting in its upper branches exploded outward. 

He drew his fist back and punched it again, and again, and again, each blow landing with a sound like a battering ram hitting a gate. Splinters and chunks of pale wood flew in every direction. The trunk cracked. The tree groaned, leaned, and fell, crashing down the beach toward the water. 

The men in the camp did not look up.

The lieutenant approached carefully after the tree had stopped falling, keeping himself at the edge of what he judged to be safe distance, and waited until the Mountain's breathing had slowed from the ragged heaving that always followed these episodes.

"My lord. The men we sent should have returned by now. It may be that the village had no boats, or that they had trouble on the road."

Gregor did not answer.

"If we sent another party, perhaps to a different village, one on the eastern shore that might have fishing boats we could—"

"No." Gregor's visor was turned toward the island. "We wait."

The lieutenant swallowed and nodded and withdrew.

Gregor was angry. 

He had never failed Lord Tywin. Not once, in all the years he had served the lion lord, had he come back empty-handed. He had been commanded to bring Tywins boy back to Casterly Rock, and the boy would be brought back. Those were the orders. Those were the only orders that mattered.

But Tywin had said bring him back. 

He had not said bring him back alive.

So the conclusion was this. When the boat finally came, Gregor would go to the island, and he would find the boy, and he would kill him. And then he would go back to Lord Tywin and tell him that the boy had been dead when he found him, killed by bandits on the road or drowned in the lake or fallen from a cliff, whatever story fit the evidence. Gregor wouldnt allow this boy to get away with making a fool out of him. 

He turned from the fallen tree and walked back toward the camp, the men he passed shrank from his path like grass bending before a wind.

_____________________________________

On the Isle of Faces, Daemon ducked under Jaime's swing and came up inside his guard and drove his fist into Jaime's stomach.

The blow landed but Jaime had already shifted his aura, pulling it down to his midsection a fraction of a heartbeat before the hit connected, the impact met reinforced flesh and stopped dead. Jaime grunted but did not buckle, and he brought his elbow down hard on the back of Daemon's neck, forcing him to the ground. Daemon rolled sideways before Jaime's follow-up kick could land, came up onto one knee with his aura flaring and his hands raised.

They were both in full Surge, their aura pushed outward beyond the resting layer of Mantle into something thicker and fiercer. Daemon's Surge was rougher than Jaime's, less controlled, the edges of it wavering in places where his focus was not quite even, but the sheer volume of it was startling for someone who had been using aura for barely two weeks. Jaime's Surge was tighter and more disciplined both showed insight into their personalities if anything.

Clover sat cross-legged on a high rock at the edge of the clearing, her stick balanced across her knees, watching them.

"You pulled your Surge back when you threw that punch," she called down to Daemon. "I could see it thin out across your arm. You are trying to use Focus and Surge at the same time and you cannot do both yet, so your Surge is dropping every time you attack. Stop throwing focused strikes. Stay in Surge and fight with what Surge gives you. Your whole body is stronger so use all of it, not just your fist."

Daemon nodded, sweat dripping from his jaw, and adjusted. He came at Jaime again, this time throwing a combination that used his legs and elbows and shoulders as much as his fists, and the difference was immediate. He was faster when he was not trying to concentrate his aura into a single point, and the strikes came with more natural power because his whole frame was behind them rather than just the arm.

Jaime read the change and adapted in the space of a breath, stepping offline from Daemon's rush and catching him with a hook to the ribs that Daemon had not seen coming. Daemon took it on his Aura and kept moving, sweeping at Jaime's legs and forcing him to jump, then driving upward with his shoulder into Jaime's chest as he came down.

They crashed together and went to the ground, grappling in the leaves, both of them burning through their aura reserves at a rate that was making Clover's clawed fingers tap against her stick with something that might have been impatience.

"Enough," she said.

They broke apart and lay on their backs in the churned-up leaves, both of them blowing hard, their auras guttering like candle flames in a wind as their reserves ran low.

"Have you spent your aura?"

Daemon nodded, still panting. "Empty. I have got nothing left."

Jaime wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and nodded as well. "Likewise."

"Good. Then sit up and begin Earthsong."

Both of then tried not to groan. Daemon had learned early that groaning in response to Clover's instructions earned a rap from the stick that left bruises in places he did not know could bruise. Jaime had learned it even earlier, on account of being the one more likely to groan.

They both sat up and crossed their legs and placed their hands on their knees and closed their eyes.

Earthsong was the technique of the Children that Clover had promised to teach them. She had explained it simply. Your body makes aura, but the world makes aura too. The earth beneath you, the trees around you, the water, the air, every living thing is part of a larger flow of energy that is older and deeper than any man's reserves. Earthsong was the art of quieting yourself enough to feel that flow, and then opening yourself to it, and letting a small amount of it enter your body and replenish what you had spent.

It was, in essence, meditation. Deep meditation, the kind that required you to empty your mind entirely and sit with nothing inside you but stillness and breath, until the boundary between your body and the ground became thin enough that the energy could cross it.

Daemon closed his eyes and let his breathing slow. He felt the cold of the earth through the thin cloth of his breeches and the faint dampness of the leaves beneath him. He let his thoughts go quiet, one by one, the way the septon had taught him to do when he was very young and could not sleep, letting each thought drift past like a leaf on a stream without holding onto any of them.

The sound of the wind through the weirwood canopy filled his ears. He breathed in and felt the faintest thread of warmth enter through his legs and his tailbone and his palms where they rested on his knees, a trickle so thin it was barely there at all, but it was there and he could feel it pooling in his chest alongside the faint dregs of his own spent aura.

He sat and he breathed and he let it come.

Beside him, Jaime was having a different experience entirely.

He sat with his eyes closed and his jaw clenched and his fingers digging into his knees, everything about his posture radiated frustration. His mind would not quiet. Every time he tried to empty his thoughts, another one would rush in to fill the gap, a worry about the Trials, a flash of his father's face, a replay of the sparring session he had just finished, a calculation about whether Daemon was doing better than him at this, which he almost certainly was, which made the next thought even harder to push away.

The earth beneath him was just earth. 

Cold dirt and wet leaves and nothing else. 

He could not feel what Clover was talking about, no flow, no warmth, no deeper current. He felt like a man pressing his ear to a wall trying to hear a conversation that was not happening.

After ten minutes he opened his eyes and his hands balled into fists and he let out a frustrated breath through his teeth. "I cannot do this."

Clover, who had been watching them both with her senses extended, looked at him without surprise. "Try again."

"I have been trying. There is nothing there. I cannot feel anything beyond my own body and my own aura and my own thoughts, and I cannot make my thoughts stop, because every time I try to stop thinking I start thinking about whether I have stopped thinking, which is itself a thought, and it goes round and round like a dog chasing its own tail."

"You are fighting it but you cannot force stillness. You have to let it come to you."

"That means nothing to me."

"Give it time."

"I do not have time. I have been sitting here for ten minutes and I have accomplished nothing."

"Some take years to learn Earthsong. Some never learn it at all. There is no shame in that."

Jaime stood up and brushed the leaves from his breeches. "Fine. Then I will work on something I can actually do." He walked to the edge of the clearing and drew his sword and began running through forms, his blade cutting through the air, his body moving with the grace that was so natural to him it looked effortless even when he was tired.

Clover watched him go and then turned her attention back to Daemon, who had not moved.

"You feel it," she said quietly.

"Yes," Daemon murmured without opening his eyes. "It is like sitting next to a very slow river. I can feel it moving past me and some of it I can sort of draw in."

"Good. That is good."

She watched him for a while longer, her golden eyes narrowed in thought, and then she stood. "That is enough for today. Go and eat. Both of you."

Daemon's eyes opened and his stomach growled so loudly that Jaime, twenty paces away, looked over and raised an eyebrow. They were both famished. Training with aura burned through a body's energy the way a bonfire burned through kindling, and after a full day of sparring and meditating they were both hollow to the bone.

They sat together by the fire with the fish Daemon had caught that morning cooking on skewers, and they ate like men who had not seen food in a week, tearing into the hot flesh with their fingers and burning their tongues and not caring. Jaime ate three fish in the time it took Daemon to eat four, and Daemon was reaching for a fifth when Jaime started talking.

"I hate the meditation," Jaime said, sucking grease from his thumb. "I understand why she wants us to do it but I just cannot sit still that long. My body starts to itch and my mind starts to race and I end up more wound up than I was when I started. I am never going to learn Earthsong."

"You're being a baby about it," Daemon said through a mouthful of fish.

"No I'm not!"

"Uh huh."

Jaime threw a fish bone at him. Daemon caught it without looking and tossed it into the fire.

"What I want," Jaime continued, wiping his hands on his breeches, "is to start working on my Expression. That is where the real power is. The basics are important, fine, I understand that, but the basics are just the foundation. Expression is what makes a warrior truly dangerous. It is what separates a competent knight from a legend."

Daemon looked at him with his head tilted. "Remind me what Expression is again."

Jaime leaned back on his hands. "Expression is your personal aura. It is the fourth foundation alongside Mantle, Veil, and Surge."

"Every person's aura has a nature to it. Expression is the art of shaping that nature into a technique that belongs to you and only you. No two people develop the same Expression. A man's expression is the truest thing about him. The maesters at the Citadel have studied it for centuries, and the one thing they all agree on is that you cannot teach someone their Expression. You can only help them find it."

"That sounds incredible," Daemon said with awe. He turned toward the trees where Clover had settled herself on a rock and was cleaning her claws with the tip of a thin bone knife. "Clover can you teach us that?"

Clover looked up from her claws. "Before you can begin to develop your Expression, you need to know what kind of aura you carry. Each person is born with an affinity that shapes what their Expression can become. Some affinities lend themselves to certain kinds of abilities and make others harder or impossible. If you try to develop an Expression that goes against your nature, you will waste years and end up with something weak and wrong."

Daemon leaned forward, already hooked. "How do we find out what kind we are?"

Before Clover could answer, Jaime spoke up. "The basin test. It is an old method the maesters use. You take a cup of water, put a leaf on the surface, and channel your aura into it. The way the water reacts tells you your type. The maester at the Rock showed it to me once, though we never actually did it because I left before my training got that far."

Daemon was on his feet before Jaime had finished the sentence. "We should do it right now."

"Daemon, we just sat down to eat—"

"Right now, Jaime. Where is the cup?"

"We don't have a proper cup, we have a hollowed-out piece of wood that you carved with a dagger."

"That will work. Clover, will that work?"

Clover sighed. "It will work if it holds water long enough for you to channel into it."

"Good. I am going to get water."

He was gone before anyone could object, crashing through the undergrowth toward the lake with the single-mindedness of a dog that had spotted a rabbit, and Jaime watched him go and shook his head and finished his fish.

When Daemon came back he was carrying the crude wooden cup full to the brim, walking with exaggerated care to keep it from spilling, his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration. He set it down on the flat stone between them and plucked a red weirwood leaf from the ground and placed it carefully on the surface of the water, where it sat and spun slowly.

"Who goes first?" Daemon asked.

"You found the water," Jaime said. "You go first."

Daemon knelt beside the stone and placed both hands around the cup without touching the water. He closed his eyes and focused the way Clover had taught him, reaching for the aura inside him and letting it form around his body.

The water began to change colour.

It was faint at first, easily something that could have been a trick of the weirwood light, but it changed until the water was the same colour as the red leaf.

Daemon opened his eyes and pulled his hands away.

Clover came closer. She looked at the cup and then at Daemon. "The water changed colour so you are an Emitter."

Daemon grinned. "Great! What does that mean?"

Clover sighed. "It means you will excel in expelling aura from your body."

Jaime shook his head and knelt down beside the cup. "My turn."

He placed his hands around the cup the same way Daemon had and closed his eyes and channeled. The effect was different and immediate. The leaf on the surface did not move. The water did not change colour. Instead, something appeared in the water itself. Small, faint, barely visible at first, but growing more distinct as Jaime pushed more aura into the cup. Tiny specks of something solid, like flecks of dust or grains of sand, materialized in the water where there had been nothing before.

Jaime opened his eyes and looked at the cup. The specks were plainly visible, catching the light as they drifted.

"Impurities," Clover said. "You are a Conjurer."

Jaime pulled his hands away and sat back, and his brow furrowed as he processed this. "Conjurer. That means my Expression will involve creating things. Objects. Constructs made of solidified aura."

"That is correct."

Jaime was quiet for a moment, turning this over, and then a thoughtful look settled onto his face that Daemon recognized as the expression he wore when something had genuinely interested him for the first time. "I could make weapons," he said, half to himself. "Blades that appear when I need them and vanish when I do not. Shields. Armour."

"In theory," Clover said. "In practice, you are a long way from any of that."

Daemon had been listening to this exchange with growing excitement, and now he stood up and brushed off his knees and rolled his shoulders and looked out into the woods with the particular gleam in his eye. 

"I am going to go work on my expression."

Jaime opened his mouth, and the words it is not that easy, you cannot simply walk into the trees and come back with a fully formed personal technique, it takes months or years of careful study and experimentation and self-knowledge were lined up and ready to come out. But then he looked at Daemon's face, and he thought about the Mantle they had mastered in a single night, and the Surge they had picked up in weeks rather than months, and he closed his mouth again.

"Fine," he said instead, standing up. "Then I will go and work on mine as well."

...

The days ran on.

They trained from dawn until they dropped. Mantle was second nature now, running without thought even in sleep. Veil came quickly once they turned to it properly, Daemon mastering it in a single afternoon and Jaime taking two days, which bothered him more than he let on. Surge grew steadier and more sustainable with every session, the duration stretching from less than a minute to the better part of five under Clover's relentless drilling. 

Clover drove them hard. 

She was not kind about it and she was not gentle and she rapped them with her stick when they slacked and dumped water on them when they slept past dawn and told them plainly when they were doing something wrong, which was often. But she was also, beneath all of it, a teacher of extraordinary skill. She saw things in the way they moved their aura that they could not see themselves, tiny inefficiencies and habits and dead spots, and she corrected them. 

She pushed Earthsong on them daily. Daemon continued to improve at it, drawing more from the world each time he sat and opened himself to it, and his recovery after hard training grew noticeably faster as a result. Jaime continued to struggle with it, and Clover, after the first week, stopped pushing him and simply said that some gifts were not for everyone and that there was no shame in it.

Jaime had not believed that for a moment, and he had gone off on his own and sat by the shore and tried again, alone, for two hours, and gotten nothing. He had come back in a foul mood and sparred with Daemon until they were both bruised and panting.

What surprised all three of them, though none of them said it aloud for different reasons, was how naturally the days fell into a rhythm, and how comfortable that rhythm became. 

Clover, who had been alone on the island for longer than Daemon or Jaime could imagine, found that the noise and constant bickering of two teenage boys was not, in fact, as intolerable as she had expected. 

The island had been quiet for a very long time. 

Quiet was good for meditation and for memory and for the work of keeping the old ways alive. But quiet could also be lonely, and lonely could become something terrible if you carried it long enough. 

She had not realized how terrible it had gotten until there were suddenly two loud, ridiculous boys crashing through her woods and arguing about fish and falling out of trees and asking her a thousand questions a day.

One evening, after a particularly brutal day of training in which Clover had made them spar while maintaining Surge until they both collapsed, she announced that they had mastered the basics to an acceptable level.

"There is more to learn. You could spend your whole lives refining what I have taught you and still find room to improve. But you have the foundations, and you have them well, and there is nothing else I can give you in the time we have left. The rest will come from practice and from experience."

Daemon, who was lying flat on his back in the leaves with his arms spread and his chest heaving, turned his head toward her. "I don't think I am done learning from you."

"Perhaps not, but you do not have any more time."

Jaime, who was in a similar position a few feet away, lifted his head. "It's less than two months until we need to be in King's Landing. If we leave within the next few days, we can make it with time to spare. If we stay any longer, we risk missing the Trials entirely."

Daemon knew he was right, but the thought of leaving this place was kind of sad. 

Clover looked at them both for a long moment. Then she said something that neither of them expected.

"When your Trials are done," she said quietly, "you may come back."

The clearing went still.

Daemon sat up slowly, his eyes wide. "Truly?"

Clover folded her arms and looked away, as though she had just said something embarrassing and was hoping no one had noticed. "Yes... but if you have not improved since then I will send you right back where you came from."

"We understand and don't worry I'm definitely coming back," Daemon said. 

Jaime sat up and shook his head, but he was smiling. "I will come back as well," he said. "Thank you. For everything you taught us."

Clover made a dismissive sound in her throat that did not quite disguise what was underneath it. "Fix the boat tomorrow. You leave the day after."

...

Their last evening on the island fell and Daemon and Jaime had built the fire in the usual place, in the clearing near the great carved basin, and they sat together preparing the fish Daemon had caught that afternoon while Clover sat on her rock and watched them with an expression she would have denied was fond.

Daemon was gutting the last fish with his knife when he stopped and a sly grin spread across his face. He glanced sideways at Jaime, who was arranging the green-wood skewers over the flames.

"Jaime."

"What."

"Watch this."

Daemon set the knife down. 

He picked up one of the uncleaned fish and held it in his open left palm. He held his right hand above it, fingers spread, and his face went still and focused.

"Dismantle," Daemon said quietly.

Something happened to the fish. The cut was invisible but the result was not. The belly of the fish opened in a clean straight line from gill to tail, as precise as any blade could have made, and the guts slid neatly out of the cavity and onto Daemon's palm in one piece, leaving the flesh inside clean and ready to cook.

Jaime's hands stopped moving on the skewers. His eyes went wide and fixed on the gutted fish in Daemon's palm. He stared at it for a long while and then he looked up at Daemon's face, and Daemon was wearing the most insufferably smug expression Jaime had ever seen on another human being.

"You did not," Jaime said flatly.

"I did."

"When?"

"Last few days. While you were off swinging your sword at trees."

Jaime's jaw almost cracked. 

He looked at the fish again. 

He looked at Daemon's face. 

The smugness had not decreased.

"You developed your Expression," Jaime said. "Before me."

"I did."

"You developed it before me and the first thing you used it for was gutting a fish."

"Well. I eat a lot of fish."

Clover, who had been watching from her rock, made a sound.

Both boys turned to look at her. She had her clawed hand pressed over her mouth, and her golden eyes were squeezed shut, and her shoulders were shaking.

She was laughing.

It was the first time either of them had heard her truly laugh. She rocked forward on her stone and her hand dropped from her mouth and she laughed until she wheezed, the sound of it was so strange and so unexpected that it broke something loose in the clearing, and Jaime, despite his frustration, despite the indignity of being beaten to the punch by a boy who had used his first personal aura technique to clean a fish, started laughing too.

He tried not to. 

He pressed his lips together and looked away and clenched his jaw, but the laugh came up through his chest anyway and burst out of him, and he put his face in his hands and shook his head and laughed.

Daemon looked from one to the other, genuinely confused. "What is so funny?"

Jaime lifted his face from his hands and wiped his eyes. "Nothing," he said, still grinning despite himself. "Nothing at all. Come on. Let's eat."

...

Daemon and Jaime stood on the beach with their packs on their backs and their weapons at their hips, and the small figure of Clover stood before them with her stick in one hand and an expression on her face that she was working very hard to keep neutral.

"Thank you," Daemon said. "For saving my life. For teaching us. For putting up with us when you had every reason to throw us back in the water. For everything."

"You have said this already," Clover replied. "Three times this morning. Twice last night. I accept your thanks."

Daemon grinned and before she could react he stepped forward and scooped her up off the ground in a hug that lifted her feet clear of the shingle and swung her in a full circle. She was so light in his arms that it was like picking up a child.

"Put me down," she said, her clawed hands pressing against his chest without any real force behind them. "Put me down this instant, you ridiculous creature, I am older than your entire bloodline and I will not be swung about like a—"

He swung her around a second time.

"Daemon."

A third time.

"Daemon!"

He set her down gently on the beach and stepped back, still grinning, she straightened her bark-woven clothes and smoothed her tangled green hair with as much dignity as the moment allowed. 

"You are the most insufferable man I have met in a thousand years of living," she said, though she was looking at the ground when she said it. 

Jaime stepped forward next and he inclined his head in a bow. "I owe you a great deal," he said. "More than I can properly repay. And I know that I was not always... easy. If I was rude to you at any point, if my pride or my temper caused offence, I ask your forgiveness for it. It was not deserved."

Clover looked up at him, and the hardness in her golden eyes softened by a fraction. "You were rude at many points, lion-blood. But you also worked harder than I expected you to. You are forgiven."

Jaime nodded, and something in his shoulders relaxed.

Clover reached into the folds of her bark clothing and drew out two small bundles of dried leaves, each one tied with a thin strip of vine. The leaves were a deep grey-green colour and even from a pace away they gave off a bitter smell that made Daemon's nose wrinkle.

"Take these," she said, holding one out to each of them. "The creature in the lake does not care for the smell of this herb. It grows only on this island and I have cultivated it for a long time. Hang it over the side of your boat where the water touches the hull and the scent will spread across the surface around you. The creature will keep its distance as long as the smell is strong. It should last long enough to get you to the far shore."

Daemon took his bundle and held it to his nose and immediately pulled it away, his face screwing up. "This smells like something died inside something else that also died."

Jaime took his bundle and tucked it into his belt. "Thank you. For this and for everything."

They dragged the boat down the beach to the water's edge and pushed it halfway into the shallows, the hull scraping over the smooth stones until it floated free. Jaime climbed in first and settled himself at the oars while Daemon hung both bundles of herb over the sides. 

Daemon climbed into the bow and turned back toward the island. "I will see you soon," Daemon called out, and he raised his hand and waved.

Clover raised a hand and waved back. Then she turned and walked up the beach toward the treeline, the pale trunks seemed to lean toward her as she passed between them, and then she was gone, absorbed into the wood as completely as if she had never been.

Daemon watched the trees for a long time after she disappeared, and then he turned back to face the open water and let out a long breath.

Jaime rowed in silence for a few strokes, pulling them out past the shallows and into the deeper water where it was very misty.

Daemon looked at Jaime and a familiar grin crept across his face, the one that Jaime had learned to associate with incoming provocation.

"So," Daemon said, leaning back against the bow and folding his arms behind his head. "Remind me again. Who was it that said coming to the Gods Eye was a waste of time? Who was it that said there was nothing here but rocks and trees? Who was it that said we should stay on the road and go straight to King's Landing because sightseeing was going to get us killed?"

Jaime's jaw tightened and his strokes grew a fraction harder. "Daemon..."

"Who was it that said the Children of the Forest were just stories and that I was a fool for believing in them? Who was it that called me a madman for wanting to check? Who—"

"Yes, Daemon. Fine. You were right. I was wrong. It was worth it. Is that what you want to hear?"

"Say it again."

"No."

"Say it one more time, slowly, so I can remember it properly."

"I will throw you overboard."

Daemon laughed, loud and bright across the still water, and he sat forward and reached behind him for the long shape of his fishing rod, which was strapped alongside his pack. He assembled it and cast the line over the side, letting it trail through the water behind the boat as Jaime rowed.

Jaime watched the line hit the water and his hands stopped on the oars. "Do you really think that is wise? The creature is still somewhere in this lake. The herb might keep it from ramming us, but dangling food in the water seems like an invitation."

"We have the herb," Daemon said, settling the rod into a comfortable position against the side. "Clover said it would keep him away. We should be fine."

"She said it should last long enough to reach the shore. Should is not the same as will."

"You worry too much, Jaime."

"And you do not worry enough."

"Row. I am going to catch us lunch."

Jaime sighed but picked up the oars again, and the boat moved on through the mist, the island shrank behind them until it was just a shadow. 

They were perhaps halfway across, the mist beginning to thin as the far shore became a dark line on the horizon ahead of them, when Daemon sat up a little straighter and squinted into the grey.

"Jaime."

"What."

"There is another boat."

Jaime did not stop rowing. 

He glanced over his shoulder in the direction Daemon was looking and saw a shape in the mist ahead of them and slightly to the north, a darker patch against the grey that was resolving as they drew closer into the outline of a vessel. It was larger than their own, wider and longer, with a higher bow and what looked like six or eight oars on each side.

"Fishermen," Jaime said, turning back and pulling on the oars. "There are villages along the shore. They probably fish the water."

"Do fishermen usually have that many oars?"

"Some of them do. The bigger boats need more hands."

"Do fishermen usually wear armour?"

Jaime's strokes slowed.

Daemon was leaning forward now, his eyes narrowed against the mist, his fishing rod forgotten. The other boat was close enough now that details were becoming clear, and the details were not encouraging. The men at the oars were wearing leather and steel. And standing at the bow, was a man so large that for a moment Daemon's mind had refused to process him as a single human being. 

The two boats were converging on roughly parallel courses, and at their current speed they would pass within twenty metres of each other.

Daemon hummed thoughtfully.

The gap closed. 

Fifteen metres. 

The men in the other boat had not reacted to them yet, their attention fixed on the island ahead. 

Ten metres. 

Daemon could see the man at the bow properly now. He was enormous. He was the largest human being Daemon had ever seen, larger than he had imagined any human being could be, and the armour he wore was black and scarred and the sword across his back was as long as Daemon was tall.

The boats passed each other.

The giant's helmeted head turned toward their small boat, and for one long moment, the black visor was pointed directly at them.

Daemon looked at Jaime.

Jaime looked at Daemon.

"I don't think that's a fisherman," Daemon said.

(AN: I rushed their training arc a bit but I just wanted to get on with the story. Anyway as you can see Daemon will have a different power in this remake. While the copy was pretty good it seemed to be a bit too OP and not in a fun way. Plus I've always wanted to do an MC with Shrine. Anyway hope you enjoyed.)