“A gift for my sweet sister. He was another dwarf.”
“A little man, aye. Like you, and Oppo. Groat. Are you sorry about the juggler too?”
“I never knew your juggler existed until this very moment … but yes, I am sorry he is dead.”
“He died for you. His blood is on your hands.”
The accusation stung, coming so hard on the heels of Jorah Mormont’s words. “His blood is on my sister’s hands, and the hands of the brutes who killed him. My hands …” Tyrion turned them over, inspected them, coiled them into fists. “… my hands are crusted with old blood, aye. Call me kinslayer, and you won’t be wrong. Kingslayer, I’ll answer to that one as well. I have killed mothers, fathers, nephews, lovers, men and women, kings and whores. A singer once annoyed me, so I had the bastard stewed. But I have never killed a juggler, nor a dwarf, and I am not to blame for what happened to your bloody brother.”
Penny picked the cup of wine he’d poured for her and threw it in his face. Just like my sweet sister. He heard the galley door slam but never saw her leave. His eyes were stinging, and the world was a blur. So much for befriending her.
Tyrion Lannister had scant experience with other dwarfs. His lord father had not welcomed any reminders of his son’s deformities, and such mummers as featured little folk in their troupes soon learned to stay away from Lannisport and Casterly Rock, at the risk of his displeasure. Growing up, Tyrion heard reports of a dwarf jester at the seat of the Dornish Lord Fowler, a dwarf maester in service on the Fingers, and a female dwarf amongst the silent sisters, but he never felt the least need to seek them out. Less reliable tales also reached his ears, of a dwarf witch who haunted a hill in the riverlands, and a dwarf whore in King’s Landing renowned for coupling with dogs. His own sweet sister had told him of the last, even offering to find him a bitch in heat if he cared to try it out. When he asked politely if she were referring to herself, Cersei had thrown a cup of wine in his face. That was red, as I recall, and this is gold. Tyrion mopped at his face with a sleeve. His eyes still stung.
He did not see Penny again until the day of the storm.
The salt air lay still and heavy that morning, but the western sky was a fiery red, streaked with lowering clouds that glowed as bright as Lannister crimson. Sailors were dashing about battening hatches, running lines, clearing the decks, lashing down everything that was not already lashed down. “Bad wind coming,” one warned him. “No-Nose should get below.”
Tyrion remembered the storm he’d suffered crossing the narrow sea, the way the deck had jumped beneath his feet, the hideous creaking sounds the ship had made, the taste of wine and vomit. “No-Nose will stay up here.” If the gods wanted him, he would sooner die by drowning than choking on his own vomit. And overhead the cog’s canvas sail rippled slowly, like the fur of some great beast stirring from a long sleep, then filled with a sudden crack that turned every head on the ship.
The winds drove the cog before them, far off her chosen course. Behind them black clouds piled one atop another against a blood-red sky. By midmorning they could see lightning flickering to the west, followed by the distant crash of thunder. The sea grew rougher, and dark waves rose up to smash against the hull of the Stinky Steward. It was about then that the crew started hauling down the canvas. Tyrion was underfoot amidships, so he climbed the forecastle and hunkered down, savoring the lash of cold rain on his cheeks. The cog went up and down, bucking more wildly than any horse he’d ever ridden, lifting with each wave before sliding down into the troughs between, jarring him to the bones. Even so, it was better here where he could see than down below locked in some airless cabin.
By the time the storm broke, evening was upon them and Tyrion Lannister was soaked through to the smallclothes, yet somehow he felt elated … and even more so later, when he found a drunken Jorah Mormont in a pool of vomit in their cabin.
The dwarf lingered in the galley after supper, celebrating his survival by sharing a few tots of black tar rum with the ship’s cook, a great greasy loutish Volantene who spoke only one word of the Common Tongue (fuck), but played a ferocious game of cyvasse, particularly when drunk. They played three games that night. Tyrion won the first, then lost the other two. After that he decided that he’d had enough and stumbled back up on deck to clear his head of rum and elephants alike.
He found Penny on the forecastle, where he had so often found Ser Jorah, standing by the rail beside the cog’s hideous half-rotted figurehead and gazing out across the inky sea. From behind, she looked as small and vulnerable as a child.
Tyrion thought it best to leave her undisturbed, but it was too late. She had heard him. “Hugor Hill.”
“If you like.” We both know better. “I am sorry to intrude on you. I will retire.”
“No.” Her face was pale and sad, but she did not look to have been crying. “I’m sorry too. About the wine. It wasn’t you who killed my brother or that poor old man in Tyrosh.”
“I played a part, though not by choice.”
“I miss him so much. My brother. I …”
“I understand.” He found himself thinking of Jaime. Count yourself lucky. Your brother died before he could betray you.
“I thought I wanted to die,” she said, “but today when the storm came and I thought the ship would sink, I … I …”
“You realized that you wanted to live after all.” I have been there too. Something else we have in common.
Her teeth were crooked, which made her shy with her smiles, but she smiled now. “Did you truly cook a singer in a stew?”
“Who, me? No. I do not cook.”
When Penny giggled, she sounded like the sweet young girl she was … seventeen, eighteen, no more than nineteen. “What did he do, this singer?”
“He wrote a song about me.” For she was his secret treasure, she was his shame and his bliss. And a chain and a keep are nothing, compared to a woman’s kiss. It was queer how quick the words came back to him. Perhaps they had never left him. Hands of gold are always cold, but a woman’s hands are warm.
“It must have been a very bad song.”
“Not really. It was no ‘Rains of Castamere,’ mind you, but some parts were … well …”
“How did it go?”
He laughed. “No. You do not want to hear me sing.”
“My mother used to sing to us when we were children. My brother and me. She always said that it didn’t matter what your voice was like so long as you loved the song.”
“Was she …?”
“… a little person? No, but our father was. His own father sold him to a slaver when he was three, but he grew up to be such a famous mummer that he bought his freedom. He traveled to all the Free Cities, and Westeros as well. In Oldtown they used to call him Hop-Bean.”
Of course they did. Tyrion tried not to wince.
“He’s dead now,” Penny went on. “My mother too. Oppo … he was my last family, and now he’s gone too.” She turned her head away and gazed out across the sea. “What will I do? Where will I go? I have no trade, just the jousting show, and that needs two.”
No, thought Tyrion. That is not a place you want to go, girl. Do not ask that of me. Do not even think it. “Find yourself some likely orphan boy,” he suggested.
Penny did not seem to hear that. “It was Father’s idea to do the tilts. He even trained the first pig, but by then he was too sick to ride her, so Oppo took his place. I always rode the dog. We performed for the Sealord of Braavos once, and he laughed so hard that afterward he gave each of us a … a grand gift.”
“Is that where my sister found you? In Braavos?”
“Your sister?” The girl looked lost.
“Queen Cersei.”
Penny shook her head. “She never … it was a man who came to us, in Pentos. Osmund. No, Oswald. Something like that. Oppo met with him, not me. Oppo made all of our arrangements. My brother always knew what to do, where we should go next.”
“Meereen is where we’re going next.�
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She gave him a puzzled look. “Qarth, you mean. We’re bound for Qarth, by way of New Ghis.”
“Meereen. You’ll ride your dog for the dragon queen and come away with your weight in gold. Best start eating more, so you’ll be nice and plump when you joust before Her Grace.”
Penny did not return the smile. “By myself, all I can do is ride around in circles. And even if the queen should laugh, where will I go afterward? We never stay in one place long. The first time they see us they laugh and laugh, but by the fourth or fifth time, they know what we’re going to do before we do it. Then they stop laughing, so we have to go somewhere new. We make the most coin in the big cities, but I always liked the little towns the best. Places like that, the people have no silver, but they feed us at their own tables, and the children follow us everywhere.”
That’s because they have never seen a dwarf before, in their wretched pisspot towns, Tyrion thought. The bloody brats would follow around a two-headed goat if one turned up. Until they got bored with its bleating and slaughtered it for supper. But he had no wish to make her weep again, so instead he said, “Daenerys has a kind heart and a generous nature.” It was what she needed to hear. “She will find a place for you at her court, I don’t doubt. A safe place, beyond my sister’s reach.”
Penny turned back to him. “And you will be there too.”
Unless Daenerys decides she needs some Lannister blood, to pay for the Targaryen blood my brother shed. “I will.”
After that, the dwarf girl was seen more frequently above deck. The next day Tyrion encountered her and her spotted sow amidships in midafternoon, when the air was warm and the sea calm. “Her name is Pretty,” the girl told him, shyly.
Pretty the pig and Penny the girl, he thought. Someone has a deal to answer for. Penny gave Tyrion some acorns, and he let Pretty eat them from his hand. Do not think I don’t see what you are doing, girl, he thought, as the big sow snuffled and squealed.
Soon they began to take their meals together. Some nights it was just the two of them; at other meals they crowded in with Moqorro’s guards. The fingers, Tyrion called them; they were men of the Fiery Hand, after all, and there were five of them. Penny laughed at that, a sweet sound, though not one that he heard often. Her wound was too fresh, her grief too deep.
He soon had her calling the ship the Stinky Steward, though she got somewhat wroth with him whenever he called Pretty Bacon. To atone for that Tyrion made an attempt to teach her cyvasse, though he soon realized that was a lost cause. “No,” he said, a dozen times, “the dragon flies, not the elephants.”
That same night, she came right out and asked him if he would like to tilt with her. “No,” he answered. Only later did it occur to him that perhaps tilt did not mean tilt. His answer would still have been no, but he might not have been so brusque.
Back in the cabin he shared with Jorah Mormont, Tyrion twisted in his hammock for hours, slipping in and out of sleep. His dreams were full of grey, stony hands reaching for him from out of the fog, and a stair that led up to his father.
Finally he gave it up and made his way up top for a breath of night air. The Selaesori Qhoran had furled her big striped sail for the night, and her decks were all but deserted. One of the mates was on the sterncastle, and amidships Moqorro sat by his brazier, where a few small flames still danced amongst the embers.
Only the brightest stars were visible, all to the west. A dull red glow lit the sky to the northeast, the color of a blood bruise. Tyrion had never seen a bigger moon. Monstrous, swollen, it looked as if it had swallowed the sun and woken with a fever. Its twin, floating on the sea beyond the ship, shimmered red with every wave. “What hour is this?” he asked Moqorro. “That cannot be sunrise unless the east has moved. Why is the sky red?”
“The sky is always red above Valyria, Hugor Hill.”
A cold chill went down his back. “Are we close?”
“Closer than the crew would like,” Moqorro said in his deep voice. “Do you know the stories, in your Sunset Kingdoms?”
“I know some sailors say that any man who lays eyes upon that coast is doomed.” He did not believe such tales himself, no more than his uncle had. Gerion Lannister had set sail for Valyria when Tyrion was eighteen, intent on recovering the lost ancestral blade of House Lannister and any other treasures that might have survived the Doom. Tyrion had wanted desperately to go with them, but his lord father had dubbed the voyage a “fool’s quest,” and forbidden him to take part.
And perhaps he was not so wrong. Almost a decade had passed since the Laughing Lion headed out from Lannisport, and Gerion had never returned. The men Lord Tywin sent to seek after him had traced his course as far as Volantis, where half his crew had deserted him and he had bought slaves to replace them. No free man would willingly sign aboard a ship whose captain spoke openly of his intent to sail into the Smoking Sea. “So those are fires of the Fourteen Flames we’re seeing, reflected on the clouds?”
“Fourteen or fourteen thousand. What man dares count them? It is not wise for mortals to look too deeply at those fires, my friend. Those are the fires of god’s own wrath, and no human flame can match them. We are small creatures, men.”
“Some smaller than others.” Valyria. It was written that on the day of Doom every hill for five hundred miles had split asunder to fill the air with ash and smoke and fire, blazes so hot and hungry that even the dragons in the sky were engulfed and consumed. Great rents had opened in the earth, swallowing palaces, temples, entire towns. Lakes boiled or turned to acid, mountains burst, fiery fountains spewed molten rock a thousand feet into the air, red clouds rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons, and to the north the ground splintered and collapsed and fell in on itself and an angry sea came rushing in. The proudest city in all the world was gone in an instant, its fabled empire vanished in a day, the Lands of the Long Summer scorched and drowned and blighted.
An empire built on blood and fire. The Valyrians reaped the seed they had sown. “Does our captain mean to test the curse?”
“Our captain would prefer to be fifty leagues farther out to sea, well away from that accursed shore, but I have commanded him to steer the shortest course. Others seek Daenerys too.”
Griff, with his young prince. Could all that talk of the Golden Company sailing west have been a feint? Tyrion considered saying something, then thought better. It seemed to him that the prophecy that drove the red priests had room for just one hero. A second Targaryen would only serve to confuse them. “Have you seen these others in your fires?” he asked, warily.
“Only their shadows,” Moqorro said. “One most of all. A tall and twisted thing with one black eye and ten long arms, sailing on a sea of blood.”
* * *
Samwell
Sam stood before the window, rocking nervously as he watched the last light of the sun vanish behind a row of sharp-peaked rooftops. He must have gotten drunk again, he thought glumly. Or else he’s met another girl. He did not know whether to curse or weep. Dareon was supposed to be his brother. Ask him to sing, and no one could be better. Ask him to do aught else . . .
The mists of evening had begun to rise, sending grey fingers up the walls of the buildings that lined the old canal. “He promised he’d be back,” Sam said. “You heard him too.”
Gilly looked at him with eyes red-rimmed and puffy. Her hair hung about her face, unwashed and tangled. She looked like some wary animal peering through a bush. It had been days since they’d last had a fire, yet the wildling girl liked to huddle near the hearth, as if the cold ashes still held some lingering warmth. “He doesn’t like it here with us,” she said, whispering so as not to wake the babe. “It’s sad here. He likes it where the wine is, and the smiles.”
Yes, thought Sam, and the wine is everywhere but here. Braavos was full of inns, alehouses, and brothels. And if Dareon preferred a fire and a cup of mulled wine to stale bread and the company of a weeping woman, a fat craven, and a sick old man, who could bl
ame him? I could blame him. He said he would be back before the gloaming; he said he would bring us wine and food.
He looked out the window once more, hoping against hope to see the singer hurrying home. Darkness was falling across the secret city, creeping through the alleys and down the canals. The good folk of Braavos would soon be shuttering their windows and sliding bars across their doors. Night belonged to the bravos and the courtesans. Dareon’s new friends, Sam thought bitterly. They were all the singer could talk about of late. He was trying to write a song about one courtesan, a woman called the Moonshadow who had heard him singing beside the Moon Pool and rewarded him with a kiss. “You should have asked her for silver,” Sam had said. “It’s coin we need, not kisses.” But the singer only smiled. “Some kisses are worth more than yellow gold, Slayer.”
That made him angry too. Dareon was not supposed to be making up songs about courtesans. He was supposed to be singing about the Wall and the valor of the Night’s Watch. Jon had hoped that perhaps his songs might persuade a few young men to take the black. Instead he sang of golden kisses, silvery hair, and red, red lips. No one ever took the black for red, red lips.
Sometimes his playing would wake the babe too. Then the child would begin to wail, Dareon would shout at him to be quiet, Gilly would weep, and the singer would storm out and not return for days. “All that weeping makes me want to slap her,” he complained, “and I can scarce sleep for her sobbing.”
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