Chapter 167: Three Dragons, Perhaps Not All

Jason’s pupils tightened. Three dragons, perhaps not all. Beyond Daenerys’s Drogon and Rhaegal, a third dragon somewhere; or another exiled thread of the dragon’s blood, gathering strength in the east and looking west. Set that beside the Vale’s quiet arsenal, and the sea got very cold. “Who are you people, truly? And why bring this to us?”

Elliott was silent a moment, and his gaze went north, as if it could pass through the mist to the ice-locked continent beyond. “Who we are matters little, my lord. What matters is that the balance we keep, and certain older duties and oaths the duke has inherited, may share a certain resonance. We see men preparing to tear this continent open again with fire and steel, and draw the innocent by the hundred thousand into a whirlpool of hatred. We see the vipers in the shade whetting their fangs, and the dark currents of the east quietly gathering. Few in this age attempt to root hope in ruined ground and guard the fire of life while they do it. We judge Lord Arthur to be one of the few. So we bring the warning. To believe it, and how to answer it, is his choice.” He drew his gaze back. “The letter’s contents are more detailed and more certain than my summary. See it reaches the duke with all speed and all care, my lord. Time may be short. The Vale’s stockpiling nears completion; the east’s shadow is already moving; and the queen on the Iron Throne spends her whole strength consolidating King’s Landing and refereeing the Reach and Dorne, insufficiently awake to the north and the east alike. Should these forces erupt together, or converge in some fashion no one has priced, the consequences will be past imagining.”

Jason’s hand closed hard on cylinder and scroll, and the sea in his chest would not settle. Whatever this guild was, its reach, its sight, and its strange, partial detachment ran far past any trading company, past most kingdoms’ spies; and the weight of what it carried could not be set aside. “Master Elliott. Your letter goes to Casterly Rock in secret, at the best speed there is. And you?”

“Our errand is done.” Elliott bowed slightly. “We take our leave here, my lord, and continue our voyage, and our watching. May the gods, old and new and whichever you keep, protect you; may wisdom and courage keep you company. Perhaps, when the true storm comes, we shall meet again. Farewell.”

He and his two attendants went over the side, and the three albatross ships trimmed their strange sails and ran southeast into the deep mist at remarkable speed, dwindled to specks, and were gone as if they had never been. Jason stood at the bow a long time, looking after them, the wind no colder than before and his heart much heavier, weighted now from the far east and the shadowed north at once. Then he looked down at the cylinder and the scroll in his hand.

“Pass the word: the fleet comes about for Seagard at full speed!” he snapped to his first mate. “On arrival, the fastest horses and the best riders, relayed day and night: this letter goes to Casterly Rock in the shortest time a horse can make, into Lord Arthur’s own hand. Raise the patrol and alert grades on every northern route, White Harbor to Moat Cailin above all, and watch for anything strange out of the east. And send to our eyes along the Vale’s coast: those three private harbors are to be watched like sick children, and anything unusual reported at once.”

“At once, my lord!” The squadron heeled and cut for home like a whipped horse, and Jason’s thoughts ran ahead of it to Casterly Rock. He did not know the letter’s exact words; what Elliott had said aloud was enough. Beneath the seeming stability of Westeros a new storm was building, one that might dwarf the War of the Five Kings and the war of the dragon and the lion together, and its center would not be King’s Landing, nor Highgarden, nor Sunspear, but the ice fields of the North and the oceans of the east.

The black sails had passed; the albatross had delivered its burden. Whether what it carried was a saving warning or the overture to a greater chaos, only time would show. But the warning bell, at least, had been rung, in cold metal, across a cold sea.

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Late spring sunlight fell through the tall arched windows of the study at Casterly Rock and laid bright patches on the floor, and warmed nothing. The fire had died in the hearth and no one had ordered it relit; the ash and the chill suited the room’s owner. Arthur sat alone behind the desk with the Albatross Guild’s metal cylinder open before him, and in it a single sheet of parchment, thin as a cicada’s wing and strangely tough, worked by some technique he did not know, covered in a dense, elegant, ancient script that was not the Common Tongue. He could read it. It was a script passed in secret among oathkeepers, greenseers, and a handful of ancient families; and that he could read it, and that they had written in it, settled by itself the question of what the albatross was tangled with.

The contents were more detailed than Lord Jason’s account, and worse, and they confirmed every one of his deepest recent anxieties, section by section.

The Vale. It itemized the armaments Petyr Baelish had smuggled through three private harbors over the past year, out of Braavos, Pentos, and even distant Qarth: components of fine castle-forged weaponry enough to fit out five thousand men at the least; a specially compounded wildfire; the critical parts of great scorpions and torsion catapults; and quantities of specialized mountain-war equipment, grapnels, climbing gear, snow kit. All of it dispersed into hidden valleys and underground stores behind the Bloody Gate, under guard of Petyr’s most bound men. And worse: the report noted that Petyr appeared to have opened secret contact with certain Spice Lords of Qarth, who were in truth ancient families holding real power and real arts, seeking some relic or working that could influence weather, or raise fog at scale, which had exactly one use, and that use was cover for large operations in complex country, which was to say the North. The Guild’s assessment: the Vale’s final preparations might complete within two or three months.

Across the narrow sea. It confirmed Lord Jason’s soldier-crewed merchantmen, and named them: ships of an eastern secret society called the Shadow Moon Court, sworn to a young man who styled himself the son of Rhaegar, under the name Aemon Blackfyre, or something near it, claiming the blood of the dragon and of certain ancient eastern royal lines both, and gathering about himself exiled knights, sellswords, and strange talents of the east. They recruited along the shores of the Jade Sea; they drew quiet funding from factions in Volantis and Qarth; and their eyes were on Westeros. The Guild judged that the Shadow Moon Court had indirect contact with Petyr, and that the two had reached some tacit arrangement, non-interference at the least, limited cooperation at the worst, each meaning to break the standing balance for his own harvest. And at the report’s end, set apart in heavy runes, one line more: in the Shadow Lands east of Asshai, whispers extremely ancient and extremely evil had begun to echo, faintly answering abnormal tremors in the green pulse; there might be a threat in the east beyond all worldly contests of power.

King’s Landing and Dragonstone. Daenerys spent her strength consolidating the capital and refereeing the Reach and Dorne, insufficiently awake to north and east; Tyrion and Varys were alert and bound hand and foot by consolidation and coin. The queen’s two dragons were stable in body, and showed a certain unease, a certain refusal, toward the far north and toward the east, toward the whisper-lands, which might limit their reach in exactly the directions that mattered. And within King’s Landing the old factions, Cersei’s nostalgics and the newly discontented, still whispered in cellars, one more crack under the floor.

The Reach and Dorne. Tense standoff, constant small blood, large war suppressed by the crown’s hard mediation; Olenna and Doran each stockpiling and waiting; both watching the North’s new soil and the Vale’s movements with sharp attention and no free hands. Dorne appeared to have caught wind of the Shadow Moon Court; Doran’s eastern web might hold threads no one else had.

The North. Jon holding order together under Lord Carrell’s supervision; the plowing barely begun; New Soil’s external supply squeezed hard by the new rules, its growth slowed. Petyr, checked at the Gift’s edge, had shifted method: now he courted the middling lords of the eastern hills, the ones the status quo starved or New Soil’s rise discomfited, feeding their resentment of Winterfell’s weakness and the west’s infiltration. The thread between Moat Cailin and Grey Creek ran quieter and tighter under the pressure; and the crown’s gaze and the Vale’s fangs fixed on the recovering land from their opposite angles.