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Rhaenyra replies warily: “We will ensure that the Triarchy is ready to sail, and then we will march on King’s Landing.”

Daemon scoffs. Outside somewhere, his gore-red dragon shrieks, a shrill reptilian clicking that makes the castle walls shake. “They’d better be ready. The Usurper has my daughter Rhaena, and only the gods know what he’s done to her.”

The archer—because all those of his profession must have sharp eyes—observes that the nobles and servants of House Hogg bow low to Rhaenyra, but their gazes are also shifting and watchful. They are false friends, and she knows it. They will serve her the finest provisions they’ve squirreled away for winter and then, once her dragons have flown south and her Northmen have marched towards Vhagar’s waiting ever-hungry jaws, they will send out ravens warning the Usurper that the Bitch Queen is approaching.

“Vhagar is slow,” Daemon says. “She always has been. She will be slower now than ever. I know, I’ve seen her through the winters she spent with Laena.” At the mention of this name, Rhaenyra flinches. “Her titan bones ache and her flesh thickens. She is slow to rouse and even slower to take flight. Aemond is young, so he won’t know this. But he has wasted too much time.”

“She is still fearsome,” Rhaenyra answers, low and distant. “She will always be the greatest threat to us.”

“Caraxes is still swift and vicious. I will keep Aemond distracted, I will make him chase me, and when the opportunity presents itself I will burn him to death in his own saddle. You, Jace, and Baela will torch the Red Keep and the city. There are no innocents there. They are all traitors to the crown, best to start fresh. Less mouths to feed through the winter. We will attack by land and sky. The Triarchy will attack by sea, launching scorpion bolts and unimpeded by the Ironborn. The Usurper and Daeron’s puny dragon will be overwhelmed. And this war will be over.”

“Yes,” Rhaenyra says, little more than a whisper.

They’d like to believe they have chosen the timing and the circumstances, but the truth is that things are very bad. Jace and Baela’s efforts to block trade in the Reach were impeded by the Greens’ arrangement with Dorne. The Riverlands houses allied with the Usurper have—whether out of genuine devotion to him or fear of Vhagar’s wrath—buried their winter provisions in secret caches rather than feed Cregan Stark’s wolves and the rest of the Black soldiers. Even houses loyal to Rhaenyra have begun to murmur in the shadows: Does the queen expect us to fight for her until we starve away in our boots and our armor? If the Usurper is so incapable, why does the capital love him? If we are meant to be ruled by a woman, why can’t she win?

“Jace?” Rhaenyra says, her pale eyes brightening when she notices he’s entered the room. He and Baela arrived only days ago, along with their remaining forces from the Reach. Even when there are no battles, their numbers dwindle: sickness, weakness, desertion. Then she looks to the archer. “Who is this?”

“He’s been fighting for us since the war began, he is a steadfast supporter of our cause. And he is very good with a bow. The gods gave him a gift.”

Rhaenyra says to the archer, a bit uncertainly, still not understanding why he has been brought to her: “We are very grateful for your service, my lord. Which house do you hail from?”

“House Grimm of Greyshield, Your Grace,” the archer replies with a sincere bow.

“Ah, in the Reach.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Very far west, in the Sunset Sea. At the mercy of the Ironborn, I fear.”

“We have warred with them for generations. My brother Gabriel and the rest of his crew were murdered by the Red Kraken and his sister when they sailed south to King’s Landing.”

Rhaenyra shakes her head; genuine sorrow shimmers in her strange foreign eyes. She knows what it is like to lose people she loves. She may yet lose even more of them. “Only a monster would embolden the reavers. You have my word that under my rule, the Ironborn will be brought to heel. If need be, my dragons will convince them, just like when my forefather the Conqueror flew to the Iron Islands on Balerion the Black Dread.”

“Yes, yes, very good,” Daemon says irritably to the archer. Rhaenyra glares at him. “It’s a singular pleasure to make your acquaintance. Anything else?”

Prince Jacaerys says: “The Triarchy is famed for their archers. He should be with them, on a ship right at the front.” The prince, it strikes the archer suddenly, looks more like a king than anyone else in this room. It’s not his face or his hair. It’s not his parentage. It’s the steadiness in his voice, the moderation in his judgment. He does not have the enchantment of a Targaryen, but perhaps that is a fair trade. He doesn’t have the madness of one either. Prince Jacaerys takes one of the arrows from the archer’s full quiver. “These arrowheads were made with Valyrian steel. They can pierce almost any armor, we’ve tried them. This archer put an arrow through the Usurper’s hand at Tumbleton. If he can get that close again, maybe he can kill him.”

“Where on earth did you get Valyrian steel?” Daemon demands.

“The Usurper’s dagger,” Jace says. “He lost it, we found it. The smiths at Horn Hill, the seat of the loyal House Tarly, were familiar with Valyrian steel and knew how to reforge it.”

The Rogue Prince is furious. “You took my brother’s dagger, you took an heirloom of my house, and you had it cut into pieces and given to some nobody from nowhere—?!”

“Daemon,” Rhaenyra says, not yet convinced but listening, and her husband groans. He stares at the archer, seething; one can imagine steam smoking from his nostrils and fire blazing up through his throat. Daemon sent the girl Nettles away into the labyrinth of the Vale, the archer has heard through soldiers’ gossip; not to protect her from combat, as the girl was keen to keep fighting even without her dragon, but to assuage Rhaenyra’s mistrust. The queen and her consort must be united while the carnage paints their walls bloody. Both of their lives hang in the balance.

“This war will not be won by heirlooms or prophesies,” Prince Jacaerys says calmly. “It will be won by skill, and strategy, and the love of the people we are to rule over. One dagger does us little good if the Usurper is on dragonback. But a quiver of arrows in the right person’s hands can claim the Iron Throne.”

The queen looks at Daemon. He sighs and relents; on his belt, he still wears the dagger he took from the Greyjoy bitch, a murderess without mercy. And beside the archer, Prince Jacaerys smiles beneath curls inked by the old, dark blood of the First Men.

In the darkness, in the firelight, Maester Orwyle brings Mother’s letter. You scream when you read it, and then you sink into the chair by the hearth like a drowning man through water, gazing at the gold-blood flames but not seeing them, seeing instead the hemorrhage from Dalton’s slit throat, Nightfall’s white moonstone pommel slathered red, a small lone ship sailing west to the Lonely Light at the edge of the world, your baby cradled in Mother’s weathered unbeautiful arms, she who lost so many children but has been blessed by the Drowned God with another.

Mother wrote that Dalton gave my son the Celtigars’ horn. He believed that the prince was meant to have it. More than himself, more than me.

Aegon tries to console you, but you can’t respond. He tries to hold you, but your body is stone and the letter is still crumpled in your hands. So he kneels on the floor and rests his head in your lap and tells you how sorry he is, and when your fingers come to life again they tangle in the silver threads of his hair, and you know that even if Dalton is gone, you aren’t alone.

He taught me to sail, he taught me to kill, he taught me about the Drowned God. He decided I would marry Aegon.

“It wasn’t a glorious death,” you say at last.

Aegon scoffs bitterly, his head still in your lap. “Does such a thing exist?”

“Oh, absolutely. To die protecting the people and places you love, to die with a purpose, to die victoriously. But to be murdered in his sleep by his own salt wife…” Your voice breaks. I’ll have her tortured to death. I’ll have her keelhauled until her skin hangs in ropes like red eels. “There is no glory in it. It achieves nothing. In fact, it imperils us.”

“I didn’t think anyone could kill him,” Aegon says softly.

“I hope they put his body in the sea.”

Aegon takes your hand—you can feel the scar tissue from where the archer’s arrow pierced his flesh at Tumbleton—and kisses your palm.

“Now there will be a kingsmoot,” you say. “There could even be a civil war. There is no clear heir, Dalton had many salt wives and at least a dozen young sons. One family must prevail somehow. The others won’t defer to the Harlaws so easily, noblemen of many houses have the chance to act as regents until their boy comes of age. Goodbrother, Merlyn, Drumm.”

“The fleet will stay here until the battle is won, won’t they?”

I hope so. They have to. “I’ll go out and speak to them in the morning.”

“You’re certain the baby will be safe?”

“Mother set sail with him as soon as she learned of Dalton’s murder. The crew are men who have known and loved her and Father for decades, they are devoted, they are capable. And our son is of no consequence to the Ironborns’ squabbling. He is a Targaryen, not a Greyjoy. He and Mother might have reached the Lonely Light already. The Ironborn there are strange and secretive, but very loyal.” And they understand the kind of magic that comes from the sea.

“I can’t think about him being so far away,” Aegon says, embers and flames reflected in the wet blue gleam of his eyes. “Way out there in the middle of the ocean? Surrounded by riptides and storms?”

“He’s with his own kind. He’s with the Drowned God.”

“What do you think his gift will be?”

You smile in the firelight. On Aegon’s nightstand, the green pearl glows, an inferno flickering on lightless depths. “I don’t know. I don’t even know my own gift.”

Aegon raises his head and touches your face, his hand gentle, his thumbprint sweeping away the tears that glitter on your cheeks. “Not archery?”

“No. I’m not that good.”

“Not giving birth to twenty of my children on the beach, thereby horrifying Mother and Floris?”

Impossibly, you laugh, still crying. “I suppose we’ll find out eventually.” You are thinking of Dalton again, scrabbling over rocks together, eating oysters fresh from the surf, being entombed by Mother’s arms when she told stories late into the night. She did not leave you to maids and wet nurses. You were her treasures, the same as gold or glass or steel reaved from land dwellers. You were the only ones that lived. “Dalton always forgave me for having too much mercy.”

Now Aegon is solemn, and still, and thoughtful. He says, studying you like a sketch he’ll never quite get right: “I think the Drowned God knew you’d need to be merciful to love me.”

And in the silt of your bones, in the currents of your blood, you know that’s true.

A storm is blowing in off Blackwater Bay when you go down to the dock at dawn, cold damp gales full of stray raindrops, a hidden grey sun. Your black leather boots thud against wood, your right hand rests on the hilt of the dagger Aegon had made for you, your white tunic—held shut by gold buttons embossed with tiny krakens—flaps like sails in the wind.

Rollo Pyke has already given the crew the order to raise the anchor, and the vessel is unleashed from its mooring; you have to run to leap from the wooden planks and catch the rope netting, heave yourself upwards, scramble onto the foredeck. Rollo is there, a large and stoic man like Dalton never was, not particularly surprised to see you. His arms are a patchwork of peculiar white blotches like the markings of a spotted whale, as some Ironborn from the Lonely Light are known to have. My baby is with your people, you think hazily. Will they know about the Celtigars’ horn? Will they know about krakens?

“What are you doing?” you ask as the crew rushes all around you, letting down sails and rolling barrels to be tucked away somewhere safe for the journey.

“Going home.”

“You can’t,” you say, thunderstruck, horrified. “The battle is still ahead of us. The Triarchy is coming, Rhaenyra’s dragons are coming.”

“The Red Kraken made the alliance with the Usurper,” Rollo says as savage wind wails. “And it died with him. No king should be bound to the will of the one who came before, and the same is true for the Lord of the Iron Islands. You know that.”

“But if you leave now, you will condemn us. You will allow the Triarchy to sail into the bay unimpeded. Vhagar cannot be everywhere.” And now she’s slower than she’s ever been before. “We cannot defend King’s Landing by both land and sea.”

“This city is not our home,” Rollo Pyke says. Once he was a bastard from the edge of the world, and then he wore enough callouses and scars into his skin to rise to a position of great honor as Lord Dalton Greyjoy’s first mate, and now he is the interim leader of the fleet until a new lord is chosen: through a kingsmoot, through negotiation, through blood. And the crown will take no part in it. “Our home is across Westeros in the Sunset Sea, and it is without a man to lead it. Our ships are not under the command of any Targaryen or any king. They are under the command of the one who sits the Seastone Chair. We must choose a new lord, and then he will decide.”

“But it will be too late for us here,” you object, you plead. “The battle will already be over.”

“The fleet isn’t pledged to you,” Rollo says, not cruel but only honest, as the Ironborn are supposed to be with each other. “It was pledged to your brother. And he’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t think Rhaenyra will come for you if she wins? She will want vengeance, she will burn the Iron Islands–”

“She will have many traitors waiting in line to be burned, if she is the victor. She is welcome to knock on our door with whatever men and dragons she has left, as winter freezes the ports and sickens her beasts, and we will deal with her. She is no Aegon the Conqueror. She is just a woman.”

“Rollo, please…”

He nods to the dock, shrinking behind you as the ship glides east. “I hope you’re prepared to swim back. I’d start now, before we take you even farther from your land dweller castles and your sweet wine and your boar and your venison.”

You look at the crew as they begin to steer the ship out into the bay, choppy waves breaking against the hull, murderous gusts in the sails. The men are somber-faced and slick-eyed; they mourn for the Red Kraken, and there is no weakness in that. He’s with the Drowned God, and there is no return from His halls that turn the dark depths to gold. He promised them triumph or a glorious death, and now he can give them neither.

Aegon could die. Floris and Aemond and all the others could die. My son could die.

Abruptly, like lightning splitting the sky, you whirl to Rollo and thrust both palms against his broad chest. He blinks at you, startled. “What are you so afraid of?” you hiss, you seethe, and the crew is listening. “What did we sail south for if not to war and to reave and to kill? You don’t want to slay dragonriders? You don’t want to strip the Bitch Queen’s body and take her foreign heirlooms? No true Ironborn would run from a fight brewing on the horizon. No true Ironborn would wish to be anywhere on earth besides here, on their ships, with their axes and their swords, ready to join the Drowned God in the depths. Don’t stay for the Red Kraken’s alliance. Stay for his dream of blood and gold and glory. You are a gifted man, Rollo. The Drowned God blessed you for a reason. Lead the fleet to victory, and then return home as heroes. You will kill dragons. You will kill the Valyrians who ride them, the descendants of the Conqueror. And I will be here with you, because I am an Ironborn too. And we don’t flee from storms. We sail into them.”

Some of the crew are raising their hands to clap, some of them whistle, a shrill sound like the screams of gulls. Rollo glances at them and then returns his eyes to you. They are the color of steel, cold and menacing, built to bite into flesh. Out in the mist, the other Ironborn vessels wait to follow the flagship out of the harbor, east to the gaping mouth of Blackwater Bay, south to skirt around the Cape of Wrath and Dorne until they meet the Sunset Sea. Their hulls bob on rough chop.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” you say, grinning, or perhaps it’s more like you’re baring your teeth, the storm in your eyes and rain on your face. “It’s triumph or a glorious death.”

Now the men are howling, and so is the wind, the ocean thrashing beneath a sky made of ghosts. Rollo Pyke looks back to King’s Landing, then out over the bay, and finally to his crew. They shout that they would be proud to fight if he commands them to, and that they are willing to sacrifice one more moon before they see their families again, hold their children and their wives, bleed to ensure the transition of power on the Iron Islands favors the houses of their choosing.

Rollo gives the signal to come about, and his men bellow and beat their chests. “For the Drowned God,” he says. “And for the Red Kraken.” Then he sails you back to shore.

Where the dock meets the sand, you find Aemond, evidently on his way to confront the Ironborn. He is resting one hand on Blackfyre’s hilt. He halts when he sees you coming out of the fog. “They’re staying, aren’t they?”

“They are,” you assure him.

“Because we need their ships.”

“The fleet will remain in the bay until the battle is won, Aemond.”

“Good.”

“And I will fight with them.”

His scarred brow furrows. You think of his blind eye and remember, randomly, how the large mud-colored dragon Sheepstealer was killed. The smallfolk blinded him with crossbows and scorpion bolts, Floris once told you. “Because they’ve insisted upon it?”

“Because it’s where I belong.” Because the Drowned God is here, and He’s calling to me from the maelstroms and the riptides.

Aemond sighs, thawing with relief, still staring out over the water with the dark flecks of ships reflected in his eye, his hair secured in a long silver braid that hangs over one shoulder. You remember watching Alys weave the glimmering strands together during dinners and games of cards or dice. “I’d expect nothing less from a beast.”

“Aegon can’t know.”

“I won’t tell him.”

“He thinks I’ve agreed to stay under the Red Keep in the tunnels with the rest of the women.”

Aemond’s gaze returns to you, amused. “He must know you never would.”

“Yes, but he worries.”

“Helaena bled to death in her rooms. You would have perished in the same place, if not for my Alys. He must think that my wives are well protected, but his are condemned.”

Is that true? You consider Aemond for a while, then offer him a vague off-kilter smile. “No Ironborn hopes to die in bed.”

Aemond chuckles, bows his head slightly, tells you of the battle preparations as you walk back to the Red Keep together.

You find Floris in her rooms, sewing a large square blanket that she and Alicent have been working on for weeks. Floris holds it up so you can see. “It’s for the children to play on together,” she says, beaming. She shows you one side, and then the other. “The front has a dragon for Alerys—green, of course—and then on the back there’s a big scary kraken for Baby Aegon!”

You laugh. Floris is so proud of her efforts that you hesitate to point out the error. “Krakens have ten legs, not eight.”

“No!” she gasps, distraught. She frowns down at the kraken, which glares back with sinister golden eyes. “Where on earth will I fit them in?”

“Don’t worry. He won’t be able to count for a long while yet. You have plenty of time to make him another blanket someday.”

Floris smiles. “I do, don’t I?”

“I’m glad you and Alicent have found an activity to enjoy together.”

“She’s happier now. She’s easier to talk to.”

“Mother sews beautifully,” you say softly, missing her very much. “When the war is over and we’ve rebuilt here, we will send for her. Before the ports freeze, before winter entraps her at the Lonely Light for a year or more. Then she will bring the prince home to us, and you will get to meet her at last. I think you’ll like her. She’s an Ironborn, but she’s a lady too.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Floris replies, resuming her stitching. “I’ve always wanted a real mother.”

The next morning, when you cross through the River Gate to hunt in the Kingswood—smallfolk children following you with their homemade bows and shushing each other so the wildlife won’t be scared off—the grass snaps beneath your boots. The frost has arrived, and so too will Rhaenyra with her dragons and her Northmen. You emerge from the forest with a myriad of squirrels and rabbits, fattened for winter, and drop them on doorsteps. The children scamper home with their own prizes like wolves with prey clenched in their teeth, like a pod of spotted whales stalking seals, misfortunate creatures handed off to mothers to be skinned and butchered.

A man opens his blue door and asks with a grin as you pass by: “Where are you going, Your Grace?”

“To help win the war for you,” you answer, and he guffaws. “The king will be in the sky, and I will be in the bay.”

“And the Bitch Queen will be in the seven hells,” the man says, then picks up the rabbit you’ve left him and retreats back inside to resume the work that must be done: shuttering windows, sharpening knives.

At night, you find Aegon at his writing desk, scratching out black-ink shapes over and over again, his shoulders slumped and his face grim in the firelight. You pour a goblet of red wine and bring it to him with the same words he used on the night he finally claimed you as his wife: “Here. Calms the nerves.”

He looks up at you, smiles, wraps his arms around your waist and rests his head against the softness of your belly and does not let go for a long time.

At the Lonely Light at the edge of the world, the priests and maesters are deciphering the ancient etchings on the horn once hoarded by the Celtigars amongst their treasure.

At Harrenhal, in the green and the mist, Alys and her baby—not legitimate under the law, but a royal child nonetheless—are safely hidden away, protected by the legends of ghosts that keep the Black forces far from their castle walls.

At the Eyrie in the Vale, Rhaenyra’s two young sons with Daemon are already snowed in for the winter, the roads impassable, their lives spared from assassins and the Valyrian magic in their blood unspilled.

At Storm’s End, Jaehaera plays with tiny butterflies her father once carved for her out of wood, and she waits—although she can’t recall his face—for him to bring her home again.

On Pyke in the Iron Islands, Lord Gabriel of House Grimm is alive and well, although his brother the archer does not know this. He takes pride in the garden he tends; he is better at horticulture than anyone else he’s met in his new grey, rocky home. He is falling in love with an Ironborn woman. He is falling in love with the sea. And sometimes he thinks of the queen whose mercy convinced the Red Kraken to spare his life years ago, and he feels something like gratitude.

On Dragonstone, unclaimed dragons are retreating into their warm volcanic lairs to wait out the frost: the Cannibal, Grey Ghost, Silverwing, Vermithor, and if the prophesies of priests are true your son will never ride any of them, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a beast of his own.

And here in King’s Landing, the first snow of the season begins to fall, light and soundless, little more than flurries. The snowflakes melt into the pieces of parchment that Rhaenyra sent in the night, dropped by her fastest dragon, Moondancer. Daeron had wanted to go after her on Tessarion, but Criston stopped him; he must not be lured into a trap.

Rhaenyra implores the smallfolk of the capital, who flock to the few among them who can read to relay the message: The Usurper endangers your families by refusing to fly out from the city to wage his wicked war. Instead he brings it to your doorsteps. Renounce him, and open the gates for my Northmen. Turn your crossbows and your blades towards the Greens. If you aid me, you will live. If you burn, it is the Usurper’s doing, not mine.

But the smallfolk are not swayed. They’ve rebelled against the Bitch Queen once already; why will she not surrender? She could flee to Essos, she could try to negotiate for asylum, she could admit to herself at last that King Viserys never wanted his brother Daemon anywhere near the Iron Throne. He chose Aegon. And Aegon is worthy.

Now you find Aegon—not a myth but a man, your husband, your king, and you’ve never wanted anyone else—in the castle courtyard wearing black armor, and while people are rushing in every direction and Aemond is already mounting Vhagar down on the beach, he is standing on the gravel as the snow blows around him and melts into his silver hair. He is looking for someone.

“Your Grace, we must go now,” Criston is telling him. “The Triarchy ships have been spotted...”

Then Aegon sees you walking with the other women towards the Tower of the Hand, and he smiles. He comes to embrace you, perhaps to say something, but before he can begin you drop to your knees to bow to him, lower than you ever have before, and the courtiers and guards stop in their tracks to stare. Aegon’s companions Reyne, Estermont, and Waters watch uneasily. You take both of Aegon’s hands and kiss the steel that shields his knuckles, and he shakes his head and asks: “What’s this?”

You gaze up into his blue eyes, the color of a summer ocean, as pebbles bite through your trousers. You have your dagger at your waist, your bow thrown over one shoulder...for just in case, Aegon believes. “I hope I won’t disappoint you.”

“You couldn’t.” He lifts you, whisks a snowflake from your eyelashes with the leather of his glove, kisses you swiftly like he knows he’ll get another chance soon. “Now go to the skull.”

Aegon and Criston and the other men depart to burn and to bleed. You hurry inside the Tower of the Hand with the noncombatants: Floris, Alicent, maids and ladies alike, Maester Orwyle, the blinded Sir Tyland Lannister, the crippled Lord Larys Strong, the bound hostages Rhaena Targaryen and Addam of Hull. But as the others descend the gloomy staircase to pray in the shadow of Balerion’s skull, you stay in the ghost-grey daylight.

“What are you waiting for?” Floris says, tugging at your hand. Beauty is tucked under her other arm, eyes ever-gaping, too-large tongue lolling. “We must take shelter. The castle could be burned.” Then she realizes why you aren’t following and begins to weep. “No, you must stay here where it’s safe, you must—!”

“Nowhere in the city will be safe if we lose.”

“You promised the king, you promised me, please come with us—”

“Floris, you belong down there with the others. Keep their spirits up, pray with Alicent, help care for the wounded if anyone gets hurt. But I belong on an Ironborn ship.”

“You’re scaring me.”

You smile, showing your teeth, your eyes full of cold fire like moonshine. “This is who I am.”

She sobs but relents, throwing her free arm around you, holding you tightly and kissing your forehead. Beauty wheezes and whines, licking the tears from Floris’ cheeks. Then Floris whirls away and flees down into the tunnels, into the dust and the spiderwebs and the shadows and the torchlight, and when you can no longer hear the echoes of her footsteps pattering you shut the door to the staircase, lock it, and sprint for the dock.

The gulls have abandoned the city. The dark waves are rough with chop as the snow falls silently into them. The sky is grey and hazy, the wind bitterly cold, visibility poor. You can see a vague gargantuan shadow circling high over the bay: Aemond on Vhagar, patrolling for Caraxes. Meanwhile, Rollo’s ship is waiting for you; they have already raised the anchor and the narrow gangway, but that’s no obstacle. You always climb up the rope netting anyway, just like Dalton used to. Just like he taught you.

I’m going to slaughter land dwellers for you today, you think, hoping he can hear you. I’m going to send many to the Drowned God. I’m going to paint the bay bloody. And I’m going to kill Rhaenyra.

“You’re here,” Rollo Pyke of the Lonely Light at the edge of the world notes when your boots hit the foredeck. He has an axe gripped in one fist, a hammer in the other. He’s not surprised to see you, but his voice might have some approval in it. He uses his hammer to point to your armor, already laid out on a barrel of rum tied to the base of the mast.

“I wouldn’t be anywhere else.” No one helps you don your armor. You throw on the clinking chainmail and then the leather overtop, tightening the straps until it fits you like the shell of a crab, knowing you will not molt it until the battle is won.

“I heard the Bitch Queen tried to order the smallfolk to let her wolves into the city.”

“It didn’t work.”

Rollo smiles. “What is dead may never die.”

“What is dead may never die.”

Then the captain tells his crew as they navigate out into the bay, the rest of the fleet following, phantoms in the mist, silhouettes and shadows: “Starboard,” because he remembers you shoot best from that side.

You hear the screeching of dragons, and you turn back to King’s Landing. A small lightning-quick beast, Moondancer or Vermax, is soaring past the Red Keep with Tessarion in pursuit. The invader breathes fire down onto the castle ramparts, burning the archers stationed there. Launched scorpion bolts sail harmlessly past it; the dragon is too small of a target, too fast, too agile.

Just outside the city walls, the Northmen are clashing swords with your armies, men from the Crownlands, the Stormlands, the Reach, the Westerlands. Aegon and Sunfyre must be there, because you cannot see him. Rhaenyra and Syrax could be over land as well, providing protection to Cregan Stark’s wolves, evading Aegon, distracting him.

But where is Caraxes?

You nock an arrow, pacing along the bulwark, peering into the fog as snow falls into your eyes, melts into the black leather of your gloves. Then—like Aegon materialized out of the gloom of the tunnels when he would meet you by Balerion’s skull—the Triarchy’s ships begin to appear through the overcast veil. The waves thrash against the hull, making the ship pitch and list. You don’t mind. Your boots follow the currents instinctively. You were born to be here. The sails are made of the black and gold banners of House Greyjoy.

The cloud-covered colossus that is Vhagar roars—she quakes the planks and the masts, she sends quivers through the surf—and swoops low to meet the Triarchy. They outnumber the Ironborn vessels three to one, perhaps even five to one, but that is no matter; each Ironborn man is worth ten of any ordinary sailors, and they are not afraid to meet the Drowned God. We Do Not Sow, your house proclaims, but you’ve been planting seeds of horror for centuries before the conquest, and you’ll be doing it long after the Targaryens and their dragons are dust. The ocean is eternal. The sea is a battlefield, and a feast, and a cradle, and a grave.

Vhagar emerges from the thick bleak sky and bears down on the Triarchy ships...and then like a red comet, like a crimson meteor, Daemon and Caraxes come screaming out of the mist and shoot past Vhagar towards the Iron Fleet.

Rollo is booming commands, and the ship banks so steeply you have to grab the bulwark to keep from tumbling overboard. Your vessel narrowly escape as Caraxes opens his jaws and rains fire down on the Ironborn just behind you, and you can hear them shrieking, and you can smell them cooking in their armor until they leap overboard to end their agony and join the Drowned God in the depths. Vhagar burns a handful of Triarchy ships then turns to follow Caraxes, but she is slow, so slow.

“Starboard, starboard!” Rollo is barking at the men as your ship careens into the path of an enemy vessel, and you turn just in time to coast alongside it. Your arrows find the two men up in the crow’s nest, two swordsmen on the deck, an archer taking aim at you. The Ironborn cast their grappling hooks and drag the men from the Free Cities into their gullet like a spotted whale swallowing a seal. There is terror in their voices as they shout commands in a language you can’t understand. You go over first, like Dalton would have if he was here. Rollo and the others follow. You put an arrow through an eye, an arrow through a throat; you draw your dagger and paint it red with the lifeblood of some traitor whose name you will never know, an enemy, a land dweller, and the Drowned God drinks the corpses you send Him like a man dying of thirst.

You feel the impact craters against your spine and your shoulders. You are riddled with arrows, you wear spines like a lionfish, but none of them pierce the chainmail beneath your light leather armor. When you grin, there’s other people’s blood on your teeth. When you open your mouth, you laugh. Your veins are full of saltwater currents, and your bones are the sunken wreckage of ships, and the Drowned God is here with you—and so is Dalton, and Father, and the Grey King, and Mother’s dead babies, and the daughter that was buried in this bay—and the barrier that exists between this world and the next, like plunging from open air into water, ceases to exist. All the world is an ocean, drowned and doomed, and what is dead may never die.

You glance back at the city. Caraxes races Vhagar to the Red Keep and wins; the serpentine, gore-red dragon spirals around the castle and assails it, melting stone, shattering glass. Flames explode through Maegor’s Holdfast, and you think: Our banners are burning, and our beds, and the menagerie of creatures Aegon once carved for Helaena, and the kraken and oyster he carved for me, and the gowns Mother spent years sewing, and the Drowned God’s pearl.

“Again!” Rollo Pyke is howling, because another Triarchy ship is approaching, seeking to ram through the captured vessel and split the hull and send the Ironborn sinking into the cold dark tides, but they’ve never seen a rogue wave. Rollo is swinging his hammer, crushing bones and excavating teeth from jaws. His crew is gutting the Triarchy men with blades and hacking off their limbs with axes. All across the bay, this is happening, the Ironborn wearing blood and the Triarchy shedding it, and you can hear weak faithless sailors begging their captains to flee and abandon Rhaenyra: Where is the Dragon Queen? Has she forsaken us? The Ironborn are beating their armored chests and screaming. They are chanting Dalton’s name: The Red Kraken, the Red Kraken!

You are loosing arrows in a mindless, instinctive barrage, and so you don’t realize Caraxes is back until you feel the heat of the ships he’s burning. Embers glow in the air, smoke joins the mist to cloud your vision. Rollo is urging his crew onwards; to evade the flames, you must continue to the next ship, and then the next, and then the next. Your dagger is in your hand; you slit throats, wrists, bellies. You blind eyes and widen mouths, and when blood coats your skin you wear it proudly.

Where is Vhagar??

She’s here, but always a few moments too late. Caraxes abruptly contorts and dives at Vhagar, snaps his narrow reptilian jaws at the saddle, barely misses biting Aemond in half. Vhagar flies after Caraxes, but she cannot catch him, and this is Daemon’s design. The Ironborn scorpion bolts cannot pierce the Blood Wyrm. The city is burning. Moondancer is a silvery flash like a mirror, always just ahead of Tessarion; when the Blue Queen weaves to intercept her, Vermax arrives to defend his mate, biting at Tessarion’s thin wings and small, breakable claws. The Triarchy launches scorpion bolts that stab into Vhagar’s gut. They cannot kill her, but they can slow her down, and these vanishing seconds Aemond cannot afford.

But Syrax can’t outmatch Sunfyre. Can she?

The Bitch Queen’s dragon hurtles around the Red Keep and bolts out over the bay, Sunfyre chasing her. Syrax ducks beneath Caraxes and Sunfyre nearly flies into the Blood Wyrm’s waiting, needlelike fangs. When Sunfyre banks steeply to carry Aegon back towards the city, Caraxes lunges after him like a viper. Vhagar is burning Triarchy ships, but she has to stop to go after Caraxes again, to protect Aegon, to safeguard the king. The Ironborn ships are aiming their scorpions at Syrax; the Bitch Queen flies low to burn them. Planks char, hulls breach, sails turn to ash. The vessel you and Rollo’s crew occupy is hit near the stern. Water pours in below deck. Your boots adjust effortlessly as the ship begins to sink; smoke fills the air and singes in your eyes.

You stand on the foredeck and thrust your dagger between your teeth, tasting blood, tasting vengeance. You nock your last arrow and stalk the Bitch Queen like a spotted whale, a wolf of the sea, a killer, a reaver who leaves nothing in their wake. You can see a long braid of silver hair, but she is bent over the saddle and wearing heavy armor. You can’t find her face. You can’t kill her. You need another target. You lower your aim to her dragon and—as if Syrax is a gull, a sparrow, a man up in a ship’s crow’s nest—you let the fletching whisper between your fingers.

Your arrow hits the dragon in the eye, half-blinding her. Syrax shrieks like a woman and twists and rolls through the ashen air, Rhaenyra holding on desperately, wrenched one way and then the other. And as you watch, an Ironborn scorpion bolt bursts through Syrax’s chest, guts her, opens her, spills her entrails into the waves.

The Bitch Queen’s dragon, dying rapidly, drops into the sea and whimpers there in a shrill, futile whistle. The water turns red. The Drowned God is feasting. A crew of Ironborn drag Rhaenyra from the bay and, as she screams and begs for her life, they rip off her rings and her armor, and then they cut off pieces of her silver hair to take home as keepsakes, and then they cut her throat and bathe themselves in her blood, her salt, her copper, her strange foreign magic. You grin beneath eyes that glow with the reflections of dragonfire. You drop your bow, your quiver empty, and take your dagger in your hand again. Rollo is giving the order to abandon ship.

An arrow comes from nowhere and hits you in the chest, kicks the air from your lungs, throws you down onto the deck. Your dagger clatters away. You go skittering across the listing wood, your gloved fingers clawing, your boots struggling for purchase.

I’m not weak. I’m not weak.

And no arrows can stop you. You push yourself up on your palms and try to stand, but you crumple like rigging when a mast is snapped, pulverized, eviscerated. Your lungs feel vast and barren. Your vision is dark around the edges, like twilight turning to ink. You crawl across the deck to reach for your dagger, but your hand can’t close around it.

What...?

Rollo Pyke is rushing by you, and—although Ironborn do not usually aid each other in combat—he stops to help you up. He extends a hand to you...and then something crosses his face, a shadow, a recognition, and he turns away and is gone.

A priest is sitting in the firelight: You will mourn many children, but your bloodline will be eternal.

You look down at the arrow, and blood is coursing down the shaft, and you realize that this one has not snagged in the leather or the chainmail. It has struck you in the flesh, in the soul.

Do you understand?

You gaze across the burning wreckage and the heat distortion that blurs the air, and on the foredeck of a Triarchy ship you see the silhouette of an archer nocking another arrow. Then Vhagar is here, unhinging her jaws like a snake, and the archer’s vessel explodes into splinters of wood and bone. Aemond is peering down from the saddle, trying to see what’s happened to you.

I have to be alright, you think. I have to hold my baby again.

You try once more to stand, but you can’t feel your boots, your ankles, your knees, your thighs that Aegon once coaxed open, your dreams of him melding into reality, your fantasies proven so miserably wrong and then so true. Your ship is sinking. You collapse against the listing deck and do not rise again.

The priest is saying: It will rule not just the Sunset Sea, but all those of Westeros. I see bubbles rising from the depths. I see ships snapped in two and pulled under.

What had you said when you blew the Celtigars’ horn and no krakens ascended from the depths? I’m of the sea, but I have no magic.

And Aegon had replied, smiling: I have magic, but I’m not of the sea.

“The baby is both,” you whisper as you stare up into the mist-and-smoke sky, as snowflakes fall into your eyes. Those who inhabit the Lonely Light will know that, and Aegon Ironborn will not be a king of fire and blood, but sea and storms. And one day when he’s old enough, and he has proven himself worthy...he will sound the horn and he will be answered.

Dalton once asked you, the day before you left the Iron Islands and never returned: Are you afraid?

Caraxes fills the sky as Daemon tries to find Rhaenyra, but it’s too late. Vhagar’s fangs close around the Blood Wyrm’s long sinuous throat. Caraxes battles fiercely, clawing Vhagar’s underbelly to scarlet ribbons, revealing her organs and ribs as if she is a keelhauled man; and Vhagar will die, but first she will crush his vertebrae and choke the life from his lungs.

What’s there to be afraid of? It’s triumph or a glorious death.

No: it’s both.

You look to the Red Keep. On the smoldering castle ramparts, two tiny figures—Jace and Baela, you think—have their hands in the air in surrender. Moondancer is still circling the capital, now listless and untethered from her rider, but Tessarion is devouring Vermax’s corpse. Vhagar flies Caraxes, now limp and boneless, farther out into the bay and discards him there, and the Blood Wyrm and his rider plummet into the depths, stirring up a tidal wave that is only a ripple by the time it reaches you. Then Vhagar, hemorrhaging and ruined, manages to retreat to the beach before crumpling there in the sand so Aemond will not be drowned.

The ocean is very loud in the shells of your ears. The light is fading. There is a glimmer overhead, pink and gold. There is a splash as Sunfyre lands in the surf, and then Aegon yanks off his heavy armor and crawls to you, onto the ship that is maimed and sinking, onto the deck that is now listing steeply, and you can feel seawater nipping at your fingertips before Aegon drags you to higher ground.

“No, no, no,” he’s moaning, touching your face, watching the blood spread across the deck and tinge the water, sapphires to rubies, and the snow is falling heavily now. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

I’ve never belonged anywhere more than I belong here. “I’m sorry,” you whisper.

“We’ll get Alys, I’ll fetch her from Harrenhal, she’ll be able to help you—”

“No.” Your hand settles where the arrow pierces your skin and muscles and ribs. It’s too late, even if the witch was right here waiting with a jar to fill with blood and seawater. “The heart has to be whole.”

“I let this happen.”

The priest is telling Mother: The baby will die. There’s nothing you’ve done wrong. It has to happen this way. “Nothing could have stopped me.”

“You should have married another man.”

“I’ve never wanted anyone else.”

He sobs and holds you, his silver hair brushing your cheeks, and you think of candlelight and his bed and Balerion’s skull. Snow is falling, and ships are burning, and men are dying; but in a future so near you can almost grasp it with your numb, trembling hands, everything has been set right, and the Seven Kingdoms all bow to the same king.

“Aegon—”

“No.”

“Aegon, put me in the sea.”

He rests his forehead against yours and shuts his eyes as if he can make this go away, a nightmare to wake up from, a mirage that vanishes. And then he nods and says: “What is dead may never die.”

“What is dead may never die.”

He kisses your lips, but he can’t taste you, only the salt and copper and warmth of your blood, and the red is there on his face when he pulls away, and then—because you need him to, but also because he believes—as the water washes over the deck, Aegon lifts you in his arms, and the ocean rises up to meet you, to cradle you, to entomb you, and when he lets go you sink, like an anchor, like a stone, down, down, down. The frigid blue turns to black, and your lungs burn, and there is a catastrophic pressure in your chest, and for a moment you are afraid. You reach for the surface, a different lifetime, a different world.

I can’t go yet. I’m not ready. I don’t know if I believe.