Chapter 24

  Princess Elia Martell

  Elia Martell sat at her mother’s bedside, listening to her breathe. Princess Mariah’s hand lay slack in her own, the skin thin and cool, veins faintly visible beneath it like pale blue ink.

  The woman who had ruled Dorne for more than thirty years seemed to have diminished into something smaller now, as though the bed itself barely noticed her weight.

  The rise of her chest was a shallow, uneven thing. Sometimes there was a pause long enough that Elia’s fingers tightened in fear, only for the next breath to come with a faint, rattling wheeze.

  She had not woken once in the past three days. The room was dim despite the blazing noon sun outside, the light filtered through sheer curtains that stirred faintly with the sea breeze. The scent of crushed herbs lingered in the air: sage, feverfew, milk of the poppy. The taste of it strong enough to prickle the back of Elia’s throat.

  Maester Caleotte had come and gone, whispering to his underlings quietly when he thought she couldn’t hear, and offering measured reassurances that meant very little when she could. There was nothing else they could do, they said. Only rest now. Only time. The Princess was strong and might still pull through.

  A sweet lie, she thought. Princess Mariah Martell had been ill for years, Elia could admit that. Yet she had endured it well until Lord Ormond Yronwood came to Sunspear.

  She brushed her thumb across her mother’s knuckles. She leaned closer, as if proximity alone might anchor her mother to the world.

  “I’m here,” she said quietly, though she knew the Princess could not hear her. “I’m here, mommy.”

  Elia did not cry. There were servants moving quietly beyond the screens, the soft rustle of silk and footsteps carefully measured. A princess of Dorne was rarely truly alone, even here.

  She had learned, over the years, how to hold herself together in rooms like this. In public, at least. The court at Sunspear expected composure from a Martell, especially one so often held up as the image of Dornish grace in place of her own mother. She saved her tears for beneath the covers at night when she would open her heart to Ashara, or back when she was younger with Oberyn, when they’d shared a bottle of wine under the stars.

  Here, she sat straight-backed and calm, her grief folded neatly away where no one could see it. She could not show weakness, not now as Dorne leaned precariously on a precipice.

  Her thoughts drifted, unwillingly, back to the meeting that had broken the Princess.

  She could remember the weight in her mother’s eyes after it, the way her hand had trembled when Elia poured her watered wine that night. Choosing between one’s child and one’s realm was not a choice at all. No wonder her heart had not been strong enough.

  Lord Ormond Yronwood had arrived in Sunspear beneath yellow and black banners to voice his concerns, he had said. Concerns for Dorne’s stability. Concerns for old wounds reopened by Oberyn’s return.

  And he had brought five hundred knights to escort him, enough to remind everyone who truly held strength along the Boneway. He’d planted them on the coastal road between Sunspear and the Water Gardens where Oberyn waited along with her uncle Lewyn, as if to threaten both the city and the exiled prince.

  Her mother, ever pushing for peace and stability, had welcomed Lord Ormond into the Tower of the Sun itself. Before he met Princess Mariah alone, he had spoken in front of the entire court, his voice smooth and practiced. He spoke at length of honor, of justice, of his father, Lord Edgar, and of the rumors that still clung to Oberyn’s name like a disease.

  Poison, they whispered still, even years later. It was only supposed to be a duel to first blood, after Oberyn was caught abed with Lord Edgar’s mistress. Her brother had won, but the Bloodroyal expired not a week after it.

  Oberyn had denied it, of course. When she confronted him, he had looked her in the eyes when he said it, his dark gaze fierce with indignation.

  “If I had killed him,” he had told her once, voice low and bitter, “I would not hide behind my mother’s skirts about it.”

  But his pride was not proof, and Oberyn had never been one to beg belief from those already inclined to hate him.

  Sending him away had been her mother’s decision. Elia had heard the order herself, watched the way Princess Mariah’s voice quivered as she spoke it. For the good of Dorne, she had said. To keep the peace with the Yronwoods.

  Oberyn had laughed, as he was wont to do, but it was a humorless thing, and he left Sunspear before dawn next morning without another word. Despite being hurt by it, Elia could not help but think Oberyn had enjoyed his exile more than he wanted her to believe.

  He’d gone to the Citadel first, ever thirsty for knowledge, and forged six chains in less than a year and a half. In a letter, he said he left Oldtown out of boredom, and thus the Disputed Lands came after, to soldier with a mercenary band like a common brigand.

  He rode with the Second Sons for a while, she knew, traveling from Myr to Volantis and even later to Slaver’s Bay. He told it all proudly of how far he traveled in the rare letters he sent, as if distance might dull the ache he left behind.

  And now, when word came that Oberyn intended to return, the Yronwoods somehow got wind of it and had moved swiftly.

  The meeting between Lord Ormond and her mother had lasted hours. When it ended, the Princess had looked older than Elia had ever seen her. That night, her mother’s breath had come labored and uneven. By morning, she could barely rise from her bed.

  Three days later and she had not opened her eyes again.

  Elia swallowed, forcing herself back to the present. She reached for the cool cloth resting in a bowl beside the bed and dabbed it gently against her mother’s brow. Her skin felt clammy beneath her touch.

  A soft knock sounded at the door.

  Elia did not turn. “Come in,” she said.

  She knew the footstep even before the voice. Ashara Dayne moved like a fairy, quiet and swift like she could float over marble. Her presence was a comfort Elia had leaned on more times than she could count.

  The girl stopped just inside the room, hands clasped before her, violet eyes flicking briefly to the bed before returning to Elia.

  “Has word come from Doran?” Elia asked before her lady-in-waiting could speak.

  Ashara hesitated. “No,” she said. “Nothing yet.”

  Elia pressed her lips together, just briefly, before smoothing them again. Doran’s silence weighed on her more heavily than she liked to admit. Her older brother had always been deliberate, even as a child.

  While Oberyn and Elia would plunge into the sea from the cliffs an hour’s ride from the Water Gardens, Doran would wait for them at the top of the ridge, watching them quietly. Why risk it, he would say. What will I gain from it?

  Fun was not an acceptable answer for him. He never did something that wouldn’t benefit himself or their house. And for years now, he had spoken of the Yronwoods growing power, of the danger in letting any bannerman grow too comfortable beneath their mother’s gentle rule.

  Yet now, when they marched soldiers into Sunspear, he did nothing. Or nothing that Elia could see. She could never figure out his mind these days.

  Ashara cleared her throat. “My lady… there are visitors.”

  Elia looked up. “Visitors?”

  “Yes,” Ashara said. “They arrived not an hour past. A knight of Tarth, a Ser Galladon. He comes with Ser Gerion Lannister, Lord Tywin’s youngest brother. Ser Gerion is badly wounded. They say he’s been poisoned.”

  For a heartbeat, the room felt too small. Elia closed her eyes, drawing a slow breath through her nose. Another problem. Another weight added to a balance already strained to breaking. Lannisters, of all people, bleeding in Sunspear while a Yronwood host camped outside the city and her mother lay dying.

  She felt the urge to laugh. To just go hysterical and damn everyone else. She suppressed it quickly with some effort.

  When she opened her eyes, her face was once more calm, composed. “Have them brought inside,” she said. “ See that the maesters attend Ser Gerion at once. Quietly, if possible.”

  Ashara nodded. “At once, my lady.” She turned to go, then paused, glancing back. “Elia… are you well?”

  Her eyes softened. She looked down at her mother once more, at the woman who had carried the weight of Dorne with gentle hands that now lay helpless atop white linen.

  “No,” she said. Then, after a breath, “But I will be.”

  She rose from the bedside, smoothing her skirts, and composed herself as she had been taught to do since girlhood. Whatever storms gathered around Sunspear, she would meet them with her head held high.

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  xxx

  Galad

  We were allowed through the first of the Threefold Gates in a hurry. The guards stiffened when they saw the Lannister colors and the state of the man on the cart, and whatever questions they might’ve had died on their tongues when Ser Sarek barked Ser Gerion’s name.

  They had been twitchy, for some reason, well-armored and many in number, but it didn’t take more than ten minutes for confirmation to come from inside and the great gates to open with a heavy groan.

  We rolled into the city at a rattling place, hooves clopping sharp against the sun-warmed road. I’d paid a ruinous price to rent the cart and animals, but I would’ve paid double still. Ser Gerion lay bundled in blankets, skin gray and slick with sweat, his breath shallow and uneven.

  How long? That question had been gnawing at me since the deck of the Western Will. Hours? Days? At his worst, when Ser Gerion started choking on his own saliva and blood, I’d thought he had no more than minutes. Now, each rise of his chest felt like a small victory.

  The Shadow City rose around us as we passed deeper into Sunspear, its baked stones glowing warm beneath the Dornish sun. From a distance, it had looked small and contained, more town than city, its walls hugging the shoreline like something grown from the sea bed rather than built.

  Up close, it was different. We were cutting through Sunspear on a straight thoroughfare that bypassed the Winding Walls, but around us, the Shadow City brimmed with life.

  It was madness, the buildings clumped and pressed together like molded clay. Colorful bazaars, timbered inns, mud-brick shops, alehouses and winesinks. The homes grew above them, two, three, four-storeys high. Clothes were hung to dry on lines that shot across the streets, tiny alleys ran between buildings narrow enough three men couldn’t walk abreast.

  Ahead, the Old Palace loomed large, its shape unmistakably like that of a great ship run aground. Its sandstone hull was broad and curved, its prow thrust boldly toward the water. The Spear Tower and the Tower of the Sun flanked it like masts, taller than I’d realized from the deck of the Fair Winds.

  I had found them elegant from the sea the night before, something different and exotic to be appreciated like a painting in a museum. As I made my way closer and closer to them, they looked like a proper, defensible citadel, raised to endure siege and storm.

  My arms ached dully as we passed the second gate, a deep, heavy soreness that I felt sinking into my bones. We’d rowed for hours after turning back, every able man taking an oar. Grey, Jack, Jace, Ser Sarek, all of us. I could still feel the rhythm of it in my shoulders, the burn that had turned to numbness and then back again.

  Despite coming to the castle of a Great House of Westeros, there had been no time to change and clean. I could only imagine how badly we looked and smelled, covered in salt and blood as we were. I could feel it crusting in my skin, begging to be itched.

  That wasn’t the worst, though. My chest throbbed with every breath.

  I coughed, then, a croaky, wet sound, and had just enough warning to cover my mouth and turn away. When I pulled my hand away, dark splotches stained my knuckles. I wiped my mouth quickly and rubbed it against my already tainted shirt.

  Grey noticed anyway. His eyes flicked to me, brows drawing together, but I shook my head once and he didn’t insist. There were some advantages in your friends being your subordinates.

  The party around me was a strange one. Grey and the twins at my back, faces drawn and tired, with Jack sporting a crooked limp he managed to make look like a cool strut. Ser Sarek Hill and six Lannister guards flanked the cart, eyes hard and watching, hands never straying far from sword-hilts as if there were further pirates hiding in the sandy depths of Sunspear.

  And behind us all, wrists bound and posture infuriatingly relaxed, the Tyroshi pirate walked with a faint smile on his lips, bright blue hair bound back with a cord.

  I tried not to look at him if I could avoid it. It wasn’t healthy for a growing boy to feel angry all the time.

  After passing the third gate and making it into the citadel proper, we were escorted straight to the Spear Tower, the guards there already moving aside as word traveled ahead of us. The air inside was cooler, the stone swallowing the heat of the sun and leaving a pleasant chill behind.

  The maester’s chambers lay partway up, the scent of herbs growing stronger with each step, and they took Ser Gerion from the makeshift stretcher the moment we arrived at the sitting room.

  I stood there a moment as they carried him away, watching his head loll slightly with each step.

  Strangely, I felt hollow. I’d been moving since the first arrow flew hours before in the early morning. Every thought bent toward killing and survival and then rowing and rowing until the movement became memory.

  Now, with the last thing still to do given over to someone else, the world seemed to slow all at once.

  “Ser Galladon.” Ser Sarek’s voice cut through the fog. “You should be seen as well.”

  “I will,” I said. “After him.”

  He nodded, though his eyes lingered on my chest a moment longer than I liked. Couldn’t a man cough some blood in peace anymore?

  The pirate was dragged away next, down a narrow stairwell toward the cells beneath the tower. He met my gaze as he passed, smile still in place. I exhaled sharply to keep myself from doing something stupid.

  We were left in a waiting chamber outside the maester’s rooms. Stone benches lined the walls, with tapestries hanging between them. The sun-and-spear sigil appeared the most, but there was the usual medieval stuff as well, hunting scenes and long-ago battles rendered in bright thread.

  After a few minutes of just sitting in silence, which was both peaceful and unnerving after the day I had, a pair of servants brought bread and salt on a platter for us, as well as refreshments and some food, setting them before us with a murmured welcome.

  I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until then. I tore off a piece of bread and ate mechanically, barely tasting it. My hands shook now that there was nothing left to do.

  Footsteps thudded up the steps. A moment later, a pair of young women entered the waiting room, and not a pair of eyes from the six men sitting there didn’t widen at their appearance.

  Wearing the orange and red colors of House Martell, Princess Elia would’ve been hard to mistake. Slim and elegant, her hair was dark, braided intricately and pinned back from her pretty face, gold chains threading through the black locks like rays of sunlight.

  Behind her came Ashara Dayne. It could only be her. She was dressed more simply in pale lavender, but there was nothing simple about her presence. For a second, I thought I’d gone to another world entirely and an elf had strayed into my path, so beautiful she was. Her violet eyes were bright with curiosity as they swept the room.

  She smiled faintly when she caught my gaze, as if already amused by something I hadn’t said yet.

  “You must be Ser Galladon Tarth,” Elia said. Her voice was a soft, lilting thing.

  “I am, princess,” I said, rising with a wince I managed to hide. “Galladon of Tarth. These are my men, Grey, Jack, Jace, and this is Ser Sarek Hill, of Ser Gerion’s guard.”

  Elia inclined her head to me. “You are welcome in Dorne,” she said. “I would hear of what brought you to Sunspear in such haste shortly. For now, please, eat and rest.”

  She excused herself then and slipped into the maester’s room, the door closing softly behind her. Ashara didn’t seem in as much of a rush as her princess. She drifted closer to me, hands clasped behind her back, head tilted as she studied me openly.

  “Ser Galladon, is it?” she said.

  “Yes, my lady.”

  She smiled up at me. I towered over her by almost a foot, but she didn’t seem the least bit intimidated.

  “You don’t look like a ser,” she said.

  I put a hand to my chest, mock wounded. “Not dashing enough? I shall endeavor to improve my dashiness at once, if it pleases you.”

  She laughed, a bright sound I wouldn’t mind hearing again. “No,” she said. “You just look too young. They really ought to stop giving spurs out to just anyone.”

  She meant it as a joke, but Ser Sarek bristled like a kicked dog.

  “That ‘anyone’,” he snapped, “cut his way through half a galley to reach Ser Gerion, my lady, then killed a man twice his size with a knife after being knocked flat by a warhammer. We would not be here if it weren’t for him.”

  Ashara blinked, and even I was taken aback by his fervor. Didn’t know I had gotten a fan all of a sudden.

  Then Ashara laughed again, delighted. “Oh, I like you,” she said to Ser Sarek, who flushed and looked vaguely affronted by that as well.

  She turned back to me. “So,” she said. “Just knighted, then? For today’s heroics? If so, we must celebrate tonight.” She fluttered her lashes shamelessly.

  She was clearly trying to provoke me for a bit of fun, so I decided to play into her game.

  “No,” I said. “Not for this. I was knighted last moon, when I knocked a certain Dornish kingsguard with eyes much like yours out of a tourney.”

  Her brows shot up. “Arthur?” she asked. “Wait, the Sapphire Knight? The one who bested my brother. You’re him?”

  “Come to think of it,” I said, ignoring her confusion, “his eyes were much prettier than yours. They were a really nice, gleaming violet.” Leaning a bit closer, I squinted at her. “While your eyes have a more… froggish-purple color to them.”

  “Froggish?” Ashara spluttered, red staining her cheeks. Then she shook her head. “Wait, wait. You bested Arthur? But Arthur is—”

  “A better rider than me,” I admitted easily. “As is the Prince, but fortune was on my side that day. The king saw fit to reward me with knighthood after that.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then composed herself with visible effort. “Well,” she said primly, “if the king says so, who am I to argue your worthiness, ser.”

  The door opened again. Elia emerged, the maester just behind her. His face was pinched, his steps brisk as he barked orders to his bevy of helpers before hurrying away.

  The Princess turned to us slowly, and something in her expression made my stomach sink. “Tell me what happened,” she said. “From the beginning.”

  So I did. I spoke of the attack, of the fight on the cog and the carrack both. I didn’t embellish anything, just kept to the basics. I wasn’t trying to paint myself as some sort of hero. The trick was to always let others do so for you.

  When I finished, Elia let out a long breath. “The maester cannot identify the poison,” she admitted quietly. “He believes it will kill Ser Gerion. Days, perhaps, and sooner if it worsens. He will do what he can to slow it.”

  Fuck. My heart sank. I swallowed the coppery taste that had grown in my mouth and breathed out. There was still a way to see him through.

  “We took the man who poisoned him alive,” I told her. “The captain of the galley. He hasn’t said much yet, but we haven’t had the time to ask. He’s in the cells below with some Lannister guards.”

  Elia’s brown eyes sharpened. “I will see to it that he is questioned thoroughly,” she said. “We have our ways to make a man speak here.”

  I bowed my head in thanks. I had thought that it might come to this, and I was dreading being the one to see it done. Or even order it. It was a foolish sentiment after all the killing I’d doled out just today, but torturing someone left a strange hollow in my gut that I did not want to bring about if I could help it.

  “I will arrange rooms for you and your men,” Elia continued. “And any who need the maester will receive his care.” She rose, smoothed her skirts, and gave me a small curtsy. “On behalf of my mother, the Princess Mariah Martell, you have our thanks for ridding our waters of these villains.”

  I thanked the princess for her care again, and there was a brief stretch of awkward silence until Ashara clapped her hands once.

  “I’ll escort the hero myself.” Before I could protest, she was already turning toward the door, glancing back at me with a grin. “Come along, Ser Sapphire Knight,” she said lightly. “Let’s get you clean, you stink worse than pig piss.”

  Pig piss? My mouth hung open. After a moment, I let out something like half a chuckle, half a sigh. Definitely not an elf. A gremlin, yes. Gremlin seems more fitting.

  I still followed along, naturally.