The cog came around the headland as the last strip of orange bled out on the horizon, her sails hanging slack in the dead air while the oars dragged her forward, a jagged black scar cutting across the slate water. Corlys stood at the edge of the pier and took the sight of her straight in the chest. When her hull kissed the pilings and the gangplank dropped, the heavy thud of wood on stone shuddered right up through the soles of his stiff boots and settled in his bones.
Six Dragonkeepers filed down the plank in dun robes gone ragged and grey at the hems, and behind them rolled the carts—lambs bleating in thin, frantic warbles, the axles screaming with the dry shriek of iron, heavy chains coiled in the beds like sleeping vipers kept for this grim work alone. A thick, sour reek rolled off the timber with them: tallow and dung and the sharp tang of fear-sweat, animal and human braided together. Behind Corlys, his men shifted, leather groaning as calloused hands closed around the shafts of spears they knew better than to raise.
The lead keeper was a slight man with ink still stained black beneath his nails, his face pinched and salt-scoured from the crossing. He cracked open a scroll by the yellow flare of a guardsman's lantern and cleared his throat.
"By the grace of the Seven, Viserys of House Targaryen, First of His—"
Corlys's answer cut across the reading before the keeper could finish. "I know the hand that signed it. Spare me the wax and the seals."
The keeper's mouth snapped shut around the rest of the royal name. His gaze flicked past Corlys's shoulder to the dozen white-knuckled fists gripping ash-wood spears, and he rolled the parchment tight and bowed instead.
Corlys turned on his heel and walked toward the grooms holding the horses. His knees clicked sharply with every stride, stiff and aching from the long hours of waiting.
They rode inland at a measured walk, guards fore and aft, the carts penned between them like cursed cargo no one wanted brushing against their stirrups. Down through the fish-town every shutter was barred tight against the dusk, though Corlys felt the prickle of a hundred unseen eyes watching through the dark cracks in the timber all the same. Up into the pines they climbed, where the brine of the sea gave way to crushed resin and wet, mossy bark, and out at last onto the open ridge, where the grass ran pale as bone and the night wind had teeth in it.
The carts were drawn up in the gathering dark. One of the keepers lifted a horn scarred black along its lip—old dragonfire—and blew a single long, mourning note that rolled out over the ridge and died against the black expanse of the sea. When the sound faded, there was nothing left in the world but the low moan of the wind through the pine-crowns and the small, wet sounds of twelve mounted men fighting to keep their horses from bolting into the trees.
The horses caught the scent first—ears swiveling wildly, weight bunching back on their haunches as they wrenched against their iron bits to spin and flee. Then the rookery at the ridge's edge erupted all at once, a hundred black shrieking shapes exploding from the pine-tops in blind terror, and a massive shadow tore straight down through the heart of them like a hawk dropping through sparrows.
He took a dozen birds in a single pass. Loose feathers drifted lazily down through the freezing air long after he had already banked hard and come roaring back for the ridge, low and blindingly fast, great wings cupping to spill the wind at the very last heartbeat.
He hit the earth with a force that shot straight up Corlys's spine and rattled the teeth in his jaw. The line broke—not into flight, for none of them turned their backs, whatever else might be sung of that night, yet it broke all the same.
Spear-points wavered wildly in the gloom. A destrier reared screaming and nearly pitched its rider headlong into the gorse. All down the line, the scent of sudden, sharp terror cut straight through the pine resin as men who had held shieldwalls against ironborn axes found themselves trembling in their stirrups.
The Dragonkeepers had gone the color of old parchment. Usually they moved around beasts like grooms around prized stallions, humming low, rhythmic songs under their breath to settle wild blood. Tonight not a single note left their throats. Their hands shook against their robes as they stared up at the pale, furious bulk of him—Seasmoke—left to rot in his grief on this sea-bitten rock for the better part of a year, untamed and uncomforted.
Only Corlys held his ground.
His hands hung loose at his sides, bare of steel. He rooted his heels deeper into the turf as the dragon's massive head swung through the dark, a wave of hot sulfur and old ash washing over his face, while those pale, molten eyes locked onto his and burned there. Somewhere behind him, one of the keepers choked out half a prayer before swallowing it down.
Corlys let the silence stretch, taut as a bowstring, for as long as the beast demanded it.
A lamb went to the knife as the keepers finally shook off their paralysis. Its throat parted with a wet hiss, and its blood steamed bright and thick as it soaked into the freezing grass.
Seasmoke's nostrils flared wide, grey scales rippling along his snout as his head cocked toward the fresh kill, yet he refused to stoop.
A second lamb followed. Then a third. Still his great wings stayed mantled, arched high and rigid above him like a vault of ribbed iron. His ribs heaved with a deep, rattling breath that blew a swirling cloud of grey ash across the turf.
Corlys watched the pale steam curl up from the grass between them, his jaw set hard as sea-stone as the dragon hunted the wind for Laenor—for the warmth, the salt-skin, the familiar heartbeat that had vanished off the face of the world. But the wind brought him nothing.
And so those molten eyes swung back to Corlys.
Corlys crossed the grass himself.
A hand caught sharply at his sleeve from behind—Ardos, by the tight, urgent rasp of his voice, pleading, "Please, my lord, get back"—and Corlys tore his arm free without glancing back. He reached the last cart, threw the iron latch on the cage, and hauled a lamb out by the scruff of its wool. The blade did its work in one clean, merciless stroke. The blood gushed thick and scorching warm across his cold-numbed knuckles.
He carried the carcass across the dark and laid it down in the grass a bare arm's length from Seasmoke's foreclaws.
"Eat," Corlys said.
Seasmoke dropped his head and tore into the flesh, and the wet, brutal crunch of grinding bone sent the horses scrambling backward against their bits all down the ridge. Corlys walked back, dragged the other slain lambs across the turf, and laid them at the beast's feet as well, watching the massive jaws work in the dark while the warm blood cooled and stiffened on his skin.
The keepers crept forward while he fed, moving in the erratic, jumping glare of tallow torches. Heavy buckles and cold chain. A war-saddle cinched tight over scales still radiating a furnace heat that blistered through their thick leather gloves. It took the better part of the night, the men gasping and shivering in the biting wind, their fingers clumsy as they wrestled the stiff leather straps. When Seasmoke finally tore free of the ridge, launching himself into the black sky with a thunderous downdraft that nearly ripped the guards from their saddles, the stars were already blazing overhead. One keeper clung white-faced to the saddle-horns behind his neck.
They rode down the ridge in thick, suffocating darkness, no man speaking a word. The empty cages rattled and knocked together in the cart-beds all the way down the mountain.
At the foot of the slope, the eldest keeper reined his mount alongside Corlys. He bowed low over his horse's neck and begged a night's shelter, pleading the late hour and the treacherous black voyage back toward King's Landing. Corlys didn't look at him; he stared back up at the jagged black spine of the ridge instead—at the crushed grass, the scattering of black feathers already whirling away on the wind, the only proof left that anything magnificent had ever stood there.
"You'll have it," he said, and the words scraped out of his throat like dry ash.
Rhaenys was waiting beneath the torchlit arch of the gates when he rode into the courtyard, the firelight catching the bright silver threads of her hair. Fresh dragon-smoke still clung thick to the wool of her cloak, and somewhere out beyond the seawalls Meleys loosed one long, keening cry that rattled the leaded glass in the keep's high windows. One glance at the dun robes trailing behind him told her everything. She wasted no breath on questions. She simply fell into step beside him as they climbed the cold stone stairs, and the small, fierce tilt of her chin toward him carried all the grief and fury either of them needed to speak.
The keepers were fed that night with every courtesy the laws of guest-right demanded, and not a single drop more. Corlys sat above the salt and pushed food aimlessly around his trencher, his legs heavy as lead beneath the oak table. Across from him, Rhaenys gripped her wine cup so tightly her knuckles shone white, looking as though she meant to snap the silver stem in two. The keepers offered up careful, brittle chatter about the king's failing health and the morning winds for the crossing home, and received in return a silence so heavy it pressed down on the rafters.
Corlys rose and left the hall before the sweets were ever carried in.
He had barely taken ten strides down the vaulted stone passage when a servant caught up to him, chest heaving in a way that spoke of two flights of stairs taken at a dead run.
"A skiff just slipped into the private landing. One passenger. She asked that she be brought to you and no one else."
"Did she give you a name?"
The servant hesitated. "No, my lord."
Corlys held the man's anxious eyes for a heartbeat and found something in them that he understood well enough.
"Where is she now?"
"Your solar, my lord. I kept the corridor clear."
Corlys gave a curt nod of dismissal and walked unhurried down his hall.
The solar was stiflingly warm when he pushed open the heavy door. Someone had banked the hearth fire high, and the heat pressed hard against the tapestried stone until the air itself felt close and used. Yet beneath the sharp bite of woodsmoke ran another scent entirely—sweet myrrh and crushed red rose, a rich, lingering perfume that had no business inside the salt-stained walls of High Tide.
The cloaked figure standing by the hearth rose slowly as the iron latch clicked shut behind him.
Corlys stopped short of crossing the room. He could still taste copper sharp on the back of his tongue. His hands, though he had scrubbed them twice in cold basin water, still carried the faint, clinging reek of lamb's blood beneath his nails, and somewhere deep behind his ribs the heavy, rhythmic beat of Seasmoke's wings was still pulsing, fading far slower than it had any right to.
Then the woman reached up and drew back her hood.