Chapter 1: The Sixteenth Name Day
The Merman's Court blazed with light from iron braziers, their flames throwing dancing shadows across the carved sea creatures that covered every wall. The great hall was full and loud, the way a proper feast ought to be.
The long table groaned under the weight of northern plenty — charcoal-grilled boar with crackling skin, geese stuffed with wild berries, planked river salmon, eel pie with a golden crust, and great steamed lobsters from the harbor, their shells still red from the pot.
Henry Reyne had barely touched any of it.
He wore a white velvet doublet with a Red Lion embroidered across the chest — a lion with a gilded tongue and gilded claws, the sigil of a house that no longer held the castle it was named for. His auburn hair curled close against his head. His eyes drifted, unfocused, over the mermen carved in the old wood paneling as if he were looking at something far beyond them.
This was his sixteenth year in this world. His memories of his old life — another world, another time — had gone hazy at the edges the way dreams do in the hours after waking. He could only half-remember that the people around him, this whole world, bore a resemblance to a story he'd once known. A television series. Something with dragons and scheming lords. The details had slipped away, worn smooth by sixteen years of living.
Henry's mother had died in childbed. His father, Jeyro Reyne, had raised him alone. Their days were made of lessons and sword drills and the rare quiet evenings when his father would sit with him and talk.
"Henry, never forget Castamere. Never forget what they did to us. The Lannisters will answer for it — you'll make them answer for it. Restore what your grandfather Roger built. Remember what we are. Fire Tests Gold."
His father had seldom smiled. Willis Manderly — his father's squire, later his father's sworn knight, now something closer to an older brother — had filled in the rest. Lady Reyne, Willis told him, had never been strong after the night the family fled through the rain and the river crossings, soaked to the bone and hunted. She'd sickened. She'd died giving Henry life.
Ser Jeyro Reyne had been a quiet man before that. After, he'd become something grimmer. He'd trained like a man trying to punish his own body into forgetting grief, and in the hollow space where laughter might have lived, he kept only one thing — his hatred of Tywin Lannister.
"From the day she died, there was nothing in him but that," Willis had said once, not unkindly. "He went into Robert's Rebellion the way some men go to a prayer — hoping to put his hands around Tywin's throat. But the old lion never came out to fight. He sat behind his walls and let other men bleed."
Henry looked up at the blue-green banners hanging from the rafters. The white merman stared back at him — green-haired, green-tailed, clutching a black trident. House Manderly's sigil. An old house with a long memory.
They'd been great lords once, in the Reach, masters of the Mander River basin. A thousand years ago, King Perseon Gardener III had decided they'd grown too powerful and too proud — which, in Henry's experience, was usually how it went with kings and their great lords. He'd called his banners and driven the Manderlys from the lands their family had held for generations. No trial, no charge. Just exile.
They'd wandered for years before the Starks took them in. The King in the North had given them the mouth of the White Knife, and the Manderlys — merchants at their bones in a way most northmen weren't and never would be — had built White Harbor out of sheer stubbornness and coin. The only real city in the North. They'd been loyal to House Stark ever since, more loyal, some said, than any house born north of the Neck.
The Manderlys had found solid ground after their long exile. They'd made something from nothing in a strange land.
Henry tightened his grip around his wine cup. Fire Tests Gold. The words of the Reyne family.
"Brother, you look like a man attending his own funeral." Willis Manderly dropped a heavy arm across Henry's shoulders and grabbed a piece of eel pie with his free hand. His walrus mustache glistened with grease. "It's your name day, for the gods' sake. Sixteen years old. Smile. The training yard will still be there tomorrow."
Willis laughed the easy laugh of a man who'd seen enough hard things to appreciate a good feast when one was put in front of him. He was ten years Henry's elder. The year Henry was born, Willis had been just old enough to ride to war as Jeyro Reyne's squire. He'd followed Ser Jeyro to the Battle of the Bells and watched him fall there — gravely wounded, fading fast. Jeyro had still managed to knight Willis before he died. Made a proper ceremony of it, even then.
Willis had brought Jeyro's body home and his blood-red armor with it. He'd taken the nine-year-old Henry in without being asked and raised him the way his father would have wanted.
"Sorry." Henry raised his cup and drank. "I was somewhere else for a moment. Lord Manderly's feast is magnificent. Tell him I said so."
"Tell him yourself, he's right—"
"Father." A small hand pressed down on Willis's wrist before he could reach his cup again.
The girl was nine years old, brown-braided and sharp-eyed. Wynafryd Manderly, Willis's eldest daughter, had the look of someone who had spent years learning exactly how much trouble her father was capable of and planning accordingly.
"You've had three cups since we sat down," she said. "Mother's in the back washing Wylla's hair — apparently your younger daughter got into some green dye and turned herself the color of a Manderly banner, eyebrows excluded. If you pour one more cup before supper's properly done, I'm going straight back there to tell her exactly where you've been hiding the Arbor red."
Willis went a little red himself. "This is a celebration," he said, with great dignity. "Drinking at a celebration is not — it is entirely distinct from — a man celebrating a name day with a cup of wine is not by any reasonable measure—" He trailed off into something about how wine was the gods' gift to good fellowship, which made the nearby knights laugh hard enough to slosh their own drinks.
Then he fished two gold dragons from his belt pouch and pressed them quietly into Wynafryd's hand. "For jewelry. Not a word to your mother."
The coins disappeared into her Manderly-green purse before he'd finished the sentence.
"Wynafryd," Henry said, with a conspiratorial wink, "you might as well let him drink. Otherwise he'll hide the barrels in my chambers."
She turned the same look on him. "Then I'll bring Mother to your chambers."
A herald's voice rang out from the entrance before Henry could answer.
"Lord of White Harbor, Warden of the White Knife, Shield of the Faith, Defender of the Dispossessed, Lord Marshal of the Mander, Knight of the Order of the Green Hand — Lord Wyman Manderly!"
The man who entered was enormous. Not tall — wide. Wyman Manderly had been fat when Henry was small, and the years had been generous to him in the worst way. He moved through the hall like a ship navigating shallow water, listing slightly from side to side, nodding and smiling at the greetings called out from every table.
The Manderlys had kept their Reacher titles and honorifics for centuries — Green Hand Knights, Lord Marshal of the Mander — the way exiles keep old photographs. They hadn't forgotten where they came from, even if where they came from no longer wanted them.
Wyman made his way to the high seat at the table's head — a great carved chair with extra cushioning, wide enough to seat two ordinary men — and lowered himself into it with the focused determination of a man who had made his peace with his own dimensions. His belly settled against the table's edge. He adjusted the sword at his hip — he was the only man in the hall wearing one, which was against every custom of the feast, but it was his hall and his table, so no one said a word about it.
He raised a wine cup and let his pale blue eyes travel the length of the table.
"Everyone here is kin, or sworn man, or sworn knight," Wyman said. "We are gathered to mark the sixteenth name day of Henry Reyne — son of my dear friend, the late Ser Jeyro Reyne, rightful Lord of Casterly Rock — and to mark the day he comes into his manhood."
"To Lord Henry!" The hall went up as one.
Henry rose and lifted his cup to the room. Around him, men and women drained their cups to the bottom.
Servants moved silently with silver pitchers, refilling everything in sight.
Henry remained standing.
"My lords and knights." The hall quieted. "Twenty-eight years ago, House Reyne was betrayed. Tywin Lannister led his army against our walls under the cover of darkness and friendship, and he butchered everyone he could catch. My father and mother escaped only because the family's sworn men bought their flight with their lives." He paused. "And then that same Tywin Lannister had the whole bloody story turned into a song so the whole realm could hear how thoroughly he'd destroyed us."
Curses ran the length of the table like fire down a fuse. Damned Lannister. Spineless snake. Coward.
It was a sore subject across the realm, not just for the Reyne family. During Robert's Rebellion, Tywin had kept the Westerlands' army behind Casterly Rock's walls while the rest of the realm bled itself half to death fighting the Targaryens. He'd waited until the rebel cause won the day at the Trident — until Prince Rhaegar lay dead in the river with Robert's warhammer having caved in his chest — and only then had he marched. He'd talked his way through King's Landing's gates claiming he'd come to help, then sacked the city and murdered the royal family down to the youngest children before Robert had even arrived.
He'd sworn fealty to King Robert with his hands still red.
Robert had accepted. Tywin had done the dirty work no one else had the stomach for, after all. And the Lannisters sat at the victors' table as a result, fat and satisfied, as if they'd fought the whole war instead of watched it.
A lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of sheep. That was Tywin's answer when men called him what he was.
Henry turned to Lord Wyman. "When my parents had nothing and nowhere to go, the Defender of the Dispossessed opened his gates to them. Bread and salt. A hearth and a roof. My father raised me on what that friendship meant." He raised his cup. "House Reyne will not forget it. Not in my lifetime, and not in my children's."
"Long live friendship!" The hall raised their cups together.
Wyman pushed himself to his feet — a considerable effort — his belly pressing against the tableedge, and gestured for quiet.
"I sheltered Jeyro Reyne, yes," he said, when he had it. "But shelter doesn't begin to describe what passed between us. I called him brother, and he earned it. I grew too fat to ride to war — the gods know it, and so do all of you — and Jeyro Reyne rode under my family's banner when I could not, led my men into the field, and paid for it with his life." Wyman nodded slowly. "I gave him a place to sleep. He gave his life in service to my house. There is no accounting for that."
He let that sit for a moment.
"And before he died, he sent my son back to me. Willis went to war a reckless boy and came home a knight. That is not a small thing." Wyman raised his cup higher. "To Jeyro Reyne. May the gods keep him."
"To Jeyro Reyne."
The feast rolled on. The fire in the braziers burned lower. The talk grew louder and warmer the way it does when good wine has been moving around a table long enough.
Near the end of the hour, Wyman beckoned Henry to his side.
"You were born around this hour, if I recall it right." He took Henry's hand in both of his own, the way a grandfather might. "The Hour of the Bat. I remember Jeyro pacing outside the door."
He squeezed Henry's hand once, then let go.
"You're a man grown now. Your father's home — the villa near Fisherman's Square, the one I gave him when he first came to White Harbor — it's yours. It always will be, whatever you decide. Whether you stay in White Harbor or take the road south someday, there will always be a seat at my table and a fire in my hearth for you." He patted Henry on the arm. "Happy name day, son."
Henry pulled the old man into a hug without thinking. Wyman laughed quietly and patted his back.
"Now then." Wyman braced himself against the armrests and rose again, and the hall fell quiet without being asked. He didn't raise a cup this time. His expression had changed.
"I owe all of you an explanation for why I was late tonight. A raven came from Winterfell while I was reviewing it." He drew a slow breath. "The realm has had six years of peace since Robert's Rebellion ended. Six years. And now Balon Greyjoy has set a piece of driftwood on his head and called himself a king."
The hall erupted.
Wyman slammed the flat of his hand on the table until he had quiet again. "He's renounced his oath to the Iron Throne. He means to break the Seven Kingdoms apart while Robert is still learning what it means to sit the throne. And he says he'll do it the old way — raids on our shores, fire on our fishing villages, chains on our people."
"War!" Three knights near the far end were on their feet before he'd finished.
"Lord Eddard Stark, Warden of the North, has called his banners in the king's name." Wyman's voice had gone flat and steady — the voice of a man who has made up his mind. He drew the sword at his hip, the one no one had said anything about all evening, and raised it point-up so the firelight caught the steel.
"House Manderly answers. As we always have."
The hall came to its feet.
"War! War! War!"