THE IRON SUITOR
Grief appeared alone at daybreak, her black sails stark against the pale pink skies of morning.
Fifty-four, Victarion thought sourly when they woke him, and she sails alone. Silently he cursed the Storm God for his malice, his rage a black stone in his belly. Where are my ships?
He had set sail from the Shields with ninety-three, of the hundred that had once made up the Iron Fleet, a fleet belonging not to a single lord but to the Seastone Chair itself, captained and crewed by men from all the islands. Ships smaller than the great war dromonds of the green lands, aye, but thrice the size of any common longship, with deep hulls and savage rams, fit to meet the king’s own fleets in battle.
In the Stepstones they ha d taken on grain and game and fresh water, after the long voyage along the bleak and barren coast of Dorne with its shoals and whirlpools. There, the Iron Victory had captured a fat merchant ship, the great cog Noble Lady, on her way to Oldtown by way of Gulltown, Dusk endale, and King’s Landing, with a cargo of salt cod, whale oil, and pickled herring. The food was a welcome addition to their stores. Five other prizes taken in the Redwyne Straights and along the Dornish coast—three cogs, a galleas, and a galley—had brought their numbers to ninety-nine.
Nine-and-ninety ships had left the Stepstones in three proud fleets, with orders to join up again off the southern tip of the Isle of Cedars. Forty-five had now arrived on the far side of the world. Twenty-two of Victarion’s own had straggled in, by threes and fours, sometimes alone; fourteen of Ralf the Limper’s; only nine of those that had sailed with Red Ralf Stonehouse. Red Ralf himself was amongst the missing. To their number the fleet had added nine new prizes taken on the seas, so the sum was fifty-four … but the captured ships were cogs and fishing boats, merchantmen and slavers, not warships. In battle, they would be poor substitutes for the lost ships of the Iron Fleet.
The last ship to appear had been the Maiden’s Bane, three days previous. The day before that, three ships had come out of the south together—his captive Noble Lady, lumbering along between Ravenfeeder and Iron Kiss. But the day before and the day before there had been nothing, and only Headless Jeyne and Fear before that, then two more days of empty seas and cloudless skies after Ralf the Limper appeared with the remnants of his squadron. Lord Quellon, White Widow, Lamentation, Woe, Leviathan, Iron Lady, Reaper’s Wind, and Warhammer, with six more ships behind, two of them storm-wracked and under tow.
“Storms,” Ralf the Limper had muttered when he came crawling to Victarion. “Three big storms, and foul winds between. Red winds out of Valyria that smelled of ash and brimstone, and black winds that drove us toward that blighted shore. This voyage was cursed from the first. The Crow’s Eye fears you, my lord, why else send you so far away? He does not mean for us to return.”
Victarion had thought the same when he met the first storm a day out of Old Volantis. The gods hate kinslayers, he brooded, elsewise Euron Crow’s Eye would have died a dozen deaths by my hand. As the sea crashed around him and the deck rose and fell beneath his feet, he had seen Dagon’s Feast and Red Tide slammed together so violently that both exploded into splinters. My brother’s work, he’d thought. Those were the first two ships he’d lost from his own third of the fleet. But not the last.
So he had slapped the Limper twice across the face and said, “The first is for the ships you lost, the second for your talk of curses. Speak of that again and I will nail your tongue to the mast. If the Crow’s Eye can make mutes, so can I.” The throb of pain in his left hand made the words harsher than they might have been elsewise, but he meant what he said. “More ships will come. The storms are done for now. I will have my fleet.”
A monkey on the mast above howled derision, almost as if it could taste his frustration. Filthy, noisy beast. He could send a man up after it, but the monkeys seemed to like that game and had proved themselves more agile than his crew. The howls rang in his ears, though, and made the throbbing in his hand seem worse.
“Fifty-four,” he grumbled. It would have been too much to hope for the full strength of the Iron Fleet after a voyage of such length … but seventy ships, even eighty, the Drowned God might have granted him that much. Would that we had the Damphair with us, or some other priest. Victarion had made sacrifice before setting sail, and again in the Stepstones when he split the fleet in three, but perhaps he had said the wrong prayers. That, or the Drowned God has no power here. More and more, he had come to fear that they had sailed too far, into strange seas where even the gods were queer … but such doubts he confided only to his dusky woman, who had no tongue to repeat them.
When Grief appeared, Victarion summoned Wulfe One-Ear. “I will want words with the Vole. Send word to Ralf the Limper, Bloodless Tom, and the Black Shepherd. All hunting parties are to be recalled, the shore camps broken up by first light. Load as much fruit as can be gathered and drive the pigs aboard the ships. We can slaughter them at need. Shark is to remain here to tell any stragglers where we’ve gone.” She would need that long to make repairs; the storms had left her little more than a hulk. That would bring them down to fifty-three, but there was no help for it. “The fleet departs upon the morrow, on the evening tide.”
“As you command,” said Wulfe, “but another day might mean another ship, lord Captain.”
“Aye. And ten days might mean ten ships, or none at all. We have squandered too many days waiting on the sight of sails. Our victory will be that much the sweeter if we win it with a smaller fleet.” And I must needs reach the dragon queen before the Volantenes.
In Volantis he had seen the galleys taking on provisions. The whole city had seemed drunk. Sailors and soldiers and tinkers had been observed dancing in the streets with nobles and fat merchants, and in every inn and winesink cups were being raised to the new triarchs. All the talk had been of the gold and gems and slaves that would flood into Volantis once the dragon queen was dead. One day of such reports was all that Victarion Greyjoy could stomach; he paid the gold price for food and water, though it shamed him, and took his ships back out to sea.
The storms would have scattered and delayed the Volantenes, even as they had his own ships. If fortune smiled, many of their warships might have sunk or run aground. But not all. No god was that good, and those green galleys that survived by now could well have sailed around Valyria. They will be sweeping north toward Meereen and Yunkai, great dromonds of war teeming with slave soldiers. If the Storm God spared them, by now they could be in the Gulf of Grief. Three hundred ships, perhaps as many as five hundred. Their allies were already off Meereen: Yunkishmen and Astapors, men from New Ghis and Qarth and Tolos and the Storm God knew where else, even Meereen’s own warships, the ones that fled the city before its fall. Against all that, Victarion had four-and-fifty. Three-and-fifty, less the Shark.
The Crow’s Eye had sailed halfway across the world, reaving and plundering from Qarth to Tall Trees Town, calling at unholy ports beyond where only madmen went. Euron had even braved the Smoking Sea and lived to tell of it. And that with only one ship. If he can mock the gods, so can I.
“Aye, Captain,” said Wulfe One-Ear. He was not half the man that Nute the Barber was, but the Crow’s Eye had stolen Nute. By raising him to Lord of Oakenshield, his brother made Victarion’s best man his own. “Is it still to be Meereen?”