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Lynn looked at the woman in his arms, crying like her heart would break. He could feel each sob move through her.
It wasn't fear. It was relief , the bone-deep kind that comes when you finally set down a weight you've carried so long you forgot it was there.
A woman who had lived over a thousand years, crying in his arms like a little girl who'd just been given candy.
"My lord." Melisandre lifted her head. Those eyes of hers, less uncanny now and more human, held a steadiness he hadn't seen in them before. "I don't mind. I'll do anything."
She had lived long enough to have seen everything. Every war, every miracle, every betrayal.
She had never felt alive until now.
Lynn smiled.
He let go, giving her room to stand.
"You're weak," he said, and nodded toward the large bed across the room. "Rest first."
Color rose in Melisandre's cheeks.
She looked at the bed. Then at him.
The meaning in that look needed no words.
Lynn caught it. He didn't take the opening.
The woman had just come back from death and survived a complete upheaval of her soul. Her body and mind were both at their most fragile point.
He wasn't that kind of man.
Tomorrow would do fine.
"Get some sleep." His voice was easy, unhurried. "When you wake up, I'll tell you about the interesting things ahead."
"Yes, my lord."
Melisandre didn't push. She could hear the care underneath his words , real care, not performed. She'd almost forgotten what that felt like.
She walked to the bed and lay down slowly.
The moment her body touched the soft mattress, exhaustion crashed through her all at once , a wave so complete it felt like drowning. Her eyes closed.
She was asleep before she could think another thought.
Lynn studied her sleeping face for a moment, quiet and still, then shook his head and walked out.
Cersei, Liana, and Sansa were still standing exactly where he'd left them.
When they saw him emerge, all three instinctively dropped their eyes. None of them could quite bring themselves to look at him directly. They hadn't come back yet from watching a dead woman breathe again.
Lynn didn't offer any explanation.
He crossed to the main seat, picked up the bowl of herbal broth someone had already prepared and left on the table, and drank it in one go. A warmth spread from his chest outward, steady and slow. The drain from the resurrection would work itself out.
He looked at the three women below him, each turning something over privately in her own head, and began working through his own calculations.
Renly was dead.
Stannis would absorb his army soon. After that, the march toward King's Landing , straight at Joffrey and the Iron Throne.
A major battle was coming.
And Lynn intended to take everything he could out of it.
His new skills needed feeding, and the experience wasn't going to earn itself.
The fiercer Stannis pushed, the better. More men meant more opportunity. This was the perfect moment to draw out every opponent, every hidden schemer, every quietly ambitious knife in the shadows.
One sweep. All of them.
Lynn leaned back.
The Iron Throne of Westeros, he thought, was beginning to feel like it wasn't so far away.
---
In the bedroom, Melisandre slept.
Deeply. Peacefully. The most restful sleep she'd had in a thousand years.
No Lord of Light coiling around her, no prophecy pressing down on her chest. Her soul felt weightless for the first time she could remember.
She dreamed.
She was back in Asshai first, and then further , all the way back to where she was born. She was a little girl again. Her parents stood beside her. The sun was warm. The air smelled like flowers.
Everything was exactly as it should have been.
Then the world cracked.
The warmth snapped into a biting, knife-edged wind. The garden collapsed into scorched ruin. Her parents dissolved to ash in front of her eyes.
"No!"
She screamed and tried to run, and couldn't move. Something held her , invisible chains wrapped around her consciousness, locked her in place, and then began to drag her down.
Down into nothing.
Down into dark.
She fell for what felt like forever.
When she stopped, she was standing in a world made entirely of ice.
Glaciers rose around her on every side, sharp and massive, disappearing into a pale sky. The ground beneath her feet was mirror-smooth. The cold was so deep it felt like it could stop thought itself.
And directly ahead of her: a throne.
It had been carved from pure ice crystal.
A figure sat on it. The outline suggested a robed human form.
But Melisandre knew , with absolute certainty , that it was not human.
The power radiating from it was familiar. Achingly, horribly familiar. She had prayed toward it for over a thousand years.
It was the Lord of Light.
But there was no warmth in it. No warmth at all. Only cold, and death, and something vast and ancient that had never cared about her or anyone like her.
"You have come."
The voice fell through the frozen air like a hammer finding stone. Each syllable carried a temperature that didn't belong in the world of the living. Melisandre's skin prickled. The hairs on her arms stood up.
This voice. She knew it. She had heard it in the flames , faint, rare, half-heard. The voice of divine prophecy itself.
"My lord!" Her consciousness reached toward it. "Why — why are you here?"
"This is my true domain."
The figure on the throne did not move.
"And you , my most faithful servant. My most capable instrument."
A pause.
"You have betrayed me."
The word hit her like a warhammer swung by something enormous. Her consciousness reeled.
Betrayed? When? How?
"You gave the authority I bestowed upon you to a false god," the voice said. "You surrendered your faith, your soul — everything — to a mortal who stole what was never his."
"Can he defeat the darkness?"
"No."
Something shifted in the voice. The first real emotion she'd heard in it.
Contempt. Pure and undisguised.
"He is the darkness."
Melisandre's thoughts fractured.
Lynn... is darkness? That's impossible.
"Your sin is unforgivable." The voice was patient, the way a glacier is patient , cold, slow, and crushing. "You will pay for it in full. I will let you watch the false god you chose, and every soul who follows him, ground to nothing by the true chosen one. I will let you watch this world drown in the destruction I bring."
The figure rose from the throne.
And Melisandre finally saw what sat there.
Not a robed human form.
A giant carved entirely from ice crystal , translucent, enormous, radiating pale blue light. Where its eyes should have been: two vortexes of white flame.
From that body came no living warmth. No heartbeat. Nothing but absolute cold and absolute death.
White Walkers.
No. Not a White Walker. Something so far beyond a White Walker that the comparison was almost laughable.
The Great Other.
The Lord of Light... is the Great Other.
The understanding struck her like lightning and kept striking. Every belief she had built her thousand years on, every prayer she had ever spoken, every fire she had ever looked into , all of it, pointing toward this.
She had spent her entire existence serving the thing she was supposed to destroy.
The giant slowly raised one hand.
An image materialized in front of her.
Dragonstone. The cold castle, its dark stone walls. Stannis Baratheon on his knees before a black altar.
"Stannis Baratheon," the voice said. "He is my chosen. He is the true Prince That Was Promised. He will carry the flame I give him and sweep every false god from this world. As his reward , he will be crowned king."
Then the image was gone.
The ice world collapsed.
Something hit her consciousness like a wall and flung her outward ,
---
"Ah!"
Melisandre came off the bed gasping, both hands clutching the mattress, chest heaving.
Cold sweat soaked her forehead.
The dream had been real. Not dream-real , real real. She could still feel the cold against her soul. Still feel those chains.
The Lord of Light is the Great Other.
Stannis is the true chosen one.
Lynn is a servant of a false god.
She pressed both hands to her temples.
But wait.
Hadn't the Lord of Light told her, himself, that Lynn was the chosen one? Hadn't she seen it in the flames, confirmed over and over? Now he was telling her she'd betrayed him by following Lynn?
What was any of this?
Her mind turned in circles, finding no ground to stand on.
She looked toward the window.
Dawn. The sky was already pale.
Something landed on the sill with a flutter of dark wings.
A raven.
A small roll of parchment was tied to its leg.
Melisandre's heart lurched. She crossed the room, untied the parchment with shaking hands, and unrolled it.
One line. Scrawled in a hurry, but she recognized the handwriting immediately.
Davos.
Stannis has gone mad. He refuses to admit he used dark magic to take the throne. He's already sent assassins to King's Landing. If this letter reaches you, leave immediately.
Go to Essos. Don't ever come back.
➤ Next: Stannis Playing with Fire
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