(a/n: hey jinx again now i want to make a note in case anyone is confused of timeline and stuff so right now we are in what could be considered may of 279 ac i did this to give me enough time for the whole Viking saga which 20 ish years now maybe 19 most of that time will be skipped since i can't be bothered and would take up to much brain power but some things will be different.)
Two days after the spar, the Red Keep was still talking about it, which meant King's Landing had naturally begun lying about it. By the second morning, Jinx had heard that Arthur Dayne had needed three men to lift Dawn after the duel, that Barristan Selmy had been swallowed to the waist by living shadow, and that the Stranger himself had appeared behind Jinx with a scythe tall enough to cut the Tower of the Hand in half. Apparently the story had reached Flea Bottom before breakfast, where tavern keepers and fishmongers had improved it further, and one servant returning from the city solemnly informed Brandon that Jinx had fought both Kingsguard blindfolded while floating above the ground.
Brandon thought that version was excellent and wanted to encourage it. Jinx thought the entire matter had become troublesome enough without his elder brother helping the city invent new miracles, especially because rumors could be ignored while kings could not, and Aerys had already demanded an explanation for the black ink that had turned one of his training yards into something resembling a spilled inkpot possessed by an angry god.
Explaining Blackscript had cost Jinx another secret he would much rather have kept in Winterfell.
Aerys had not been satisfied with knowing that Dark Sister possessed an enchantment. He wanted to know why it possessed one, whether Blackfyre did as well, whether every Valyrian blade could awaken something similar, why the histories of House Targaryen said nothing about it, and—most irritatingly—how Jinx had known where to look when maesters who had spent their lives studying Valyria had not. Jinx had tried giving him half-answers until the king began circling back to the same questions with that brittle suspicion Jinx had learned to recognize, and eventually decided that surrendering one piece of knowledge was safer than allowing Aerys to invent a conspiracy around the missing pieces.
What Jinx had pieced together was that the finest Valyrian weapons had never been merely expensive swords. Blades forged to the standard expected by one of the Forty great dragonlord families could, during their making, be worked with a second pattern hidden beneath the steel itself, a runic structure laid into the weapon while it was still being folded and shaped. Not every Valyrian sword had received such work, and even among those that had, no two powers seemed guaranteed to resemble one another; the enchantment belonged as much to the individual blade as the steel did.
Aerys had become terribly interested at the words Forty great families.
Jinx regretted saying them almost immediately.
The runes were the more difficult part to explain, because nobody could simply examine an old sword and see them. They had been cut while the metal was still being worked, folded into the layers as the blade was reforged again and again, until by the time the weapon cooled into its final shape the markings had vanished so completely that even knowing they were there did not make them visible. Jinx himself had spent nearly two weeks with Dark Sister trying increasingly ridiculous methods before proving the runes existed at all, and another three days after that discovering how to coax the buried pattern close enough to the surface to be seen without damaging the steel.
He had not told Aerys how.
That particular omission was one of the few successes of the conversation.
Unfortunately, telling a king that some Valyrian swords possessed hidden powers had meant telling Brandon Stark the same thing, and Brandon had spent most of the following evening pretending not to think about Ice. He finally gave up the next afternoon while the brothers were gathered in Jinx's chambers with Elia, where the windows had been opened against the southern heat and a pitcher of watered wine sat mostly untouched between them.
"Could Ice have one?" Brandon asked, turning the cup in his hand while watching Jinx closely enough that there was no point pretending he meant anything except the ancestral Stark sword. Eddard remained near the window, where he had been reading one of the histories Aerys had deposited in Jinx's rooms, but his attention moved away from the page before Jinx answered.
Jinx made the mistake of grimacing first. "Probably not," he admitted, and Brandon's face immediately suggested that House Stark had just been personally insulted by dead Valyrian smiths. "Either our ancestors bought one that was never given the deeper work, or some clever merchant saw a northman carrying enough silver to buy a small castle and decided he could charge full price for the plain version."
Brandon did not appreciate the possibility that an ancient Stark had been cheated, although Jinx thought it far funnier than the alternative. Eddard, predictably, cared less about some centuries-dead merchant and more about what Jinx had already done to determine the answer, and he closed the book across one finger before asking how certain Jinx actually was.
"Certain enough that I stopped checking," Jinx said, reaching toward Dark Sister where it rested against the side of his chair without drawing it. "Dark Sister has the buried pattern. Ice doesn't answer the same method at all, and unless whoever forged it used an entirely different kind of work—which is possible, but I doubt it—it was made without one."
Eddard's gaze drifted toward the sword at Jinx's side, then toward nothing in particular as though Ice might be waiting beyond the wall instead of hundreds of leagues north at Winterfell. There was no offense in his face, only the quiet resistance Jinx had come to expect whenever curiosity approached something Ned considered part of the family rather than merely family property. "There is nothing wrong with Ice," he said at last, and Jinx could hear the direction of the conversation before his brother finished speaking.
"I never said there was," Jinx replied, settling farther into the chair while Brandon's attention moved between the twins with growing interest. Ned knew him well enough that the denial did not help; his expression remained patient, almost annoyingly so, until Jinx admitted what he had actually been considering. "I'm thinking about whether it could be made more useful, which is not the same thing as saying it's bad."
That distinction mattered considerably more to Jinx than it did to Eddard. Ice was beautiful, ancient, terrifying in the proper setting, and about as convenient for an ordinary fight as carrying a section of castle gate into battle, because the enormous greatsword demanded size, leverage, and room that most men did not possess. The Starks had therefore spent generations using one of the rarest metals in the world largely for ceremony and executions, which Jinx considered a rather grand waste even if the executions looked impressive.
"Father uses it for judgment," Eddard reminded him, though his tone made clear that the sword's meaning mattered more than its practical handling. Jinx understood that better than Ned probably thought, but understanding tradition did not require worshipping every inconvenience it produced.
"And then it goes back on the wall until the next deserter needs his head removed," Jinx said, tapping one finger against the arm of his chair while choosing his words carefully enough not to turn the disagreement into an argument. "If we owned a Valyrian hammer the size of a horse, I'd still ask whether someone could make it easier to carry. Ice being old does not make it less ridiculous to use in an actual fight."
Brandon laughed into his cup before Eddard could answer, although the laugh faded when Jinx added that changing the sword would not necessarily mean destroying its identity. If he ever attempted anything, he would keep the steel within House Stark, preserve its history, and have the work done only by someone who genuinely understood Valyrian reforging rather than allowing an ordinary smith to experiment on an ancestral relic with a hammer and confidence.
That should have been the end of the conversation.
Elia ruined that possibility by noticing what Jinx had avoided saying.
She had been sitting across from him with one leg tucked slightly behind the other, listening more than speaking while the three brothers argued around the subject, and she waited until Brandon started asking whether the hidden runes could somehow be restored before joining in. "You keep saying the original forging matters," she observed, turning her cup slowly between her fingers, "but you have not actually said the runes can only be placed during the original forging."
Jinx looked at her.
Elia looked pleasantly back.
Brandon stopped speaking.
Eddard sighed very quietly and set his book aside altogether.
Dornish people, Jinx had learned, were extremely good at this sort of thing. Oberyn usually attacked a secret by being shameless until resisting him became more exhausting than surrender, while Elia did something far worse: she asked one precise question, noticed the exact place where an answer became evasive, and then waited until silence did the work for her.
Jinx tried giving her an explanation about uncertainty.
Nobody believed it.
He tried explaining that Valyrian metallurgy was dangerous and difficult.
That only made Brandon lean closer.
Eventually Jinx rubbed both hands over his face, muttered something impolite about the entire Dornish peninsula, and told them what he had not told Aerys.
He believed the runes could be added.
The room became noticeably quieter around that admission, not because anyone had suddenly forgotten how to speak but because all three understood at once why Jinx had separated this piece of knowledge from everything he had given the king. The runes did not appear to require an untouched original blade; they required Valyrian steel in the proper state during the reforging process, while its layers could still accept the pattern before being folded and sealed again.
Jinx had never attempted it.
That distinction mattered.
"If I found someone who actually knows how to rework Valyrian steel, I think I could inscribe a new pattern during the forging," he explained, lowering his voice even though he had already placed enough small protections around his chambers to make casual eavesdropping difficult. "I know how Dark Sister's pattern is structured now. That doesn't mean I can decide exactly what Ice would become, because I still don't know how much comes from the runes and how much comes from the blade itself."
Brandon's first instinct was plainly to ask what kind of power they could give Ice, but Jinx cut that thought off before it reached his mouth. He could probably influence the direction of the work, perhaps encourage ideas connected to cold, the North, winter, the Stark line, or whatever other concepts the sword already carried, but anyone claiming certainty would be lying.
The power might emerge from the runic pattern. It might be shaped by the history of the weapon, by the magical blood of its bearer, by the circumstances of the forging, or by some interaction between all of them that Jinx had not yet identified. He was confident enough to attempt the procedure one day; he was not stupid enough to promise what would wake up afterward.
Eddard absorbed that in silence for a while, his reservations no less obvious for being unspoken. Brandon, by contrast, looked as though somebody had informed him that Ice might one day breathe winter over battlefields, and Jinx decided not to ask what his brother was imagining because answering the resulting questions would likely consume the rest of the afternoon.
Elia asked something more useful. "Does Aerys know you can add them?"
"No," Jinx answered so quickly that Brandon smiled despite himself, and this time Jinx pointed at all three of them before the amusement could spread. "And he is not going to know. Not at court, not through Rhaegar because he happens to ask nicely, not while drunk, not while angry, and not in some supposedly private room where Varys has spent ten years teaching the walls to listen."
Eddard gave him a dry look at the last part, though he agreed without argument. Brandon took a little more persuasion because secrecy offended his natural preference for doing interesting things immediately, while Elia understood the danger without needing it spelled out: a prince who knew unusual things about Valyria was valuable, but a prince who could potentially create new enchantments in Valyrian steel might become something every great house in Westeros wanted to own, threaten, marry, imprison, or dissect depending upon temperament.
Jinx preferred remaining merely troublesome.
Aerys, unfortunately, was already becoming difficult enough with the knowledge he did possess.
Learning that Dark Sister's Blackscript might be one example of a wider class of lost Valyrian enchantments had transformed the king's interest in Blackfyre from obsession into something approaching impatience with the passage of time itself. Aerys had always wanted the ancestral sword returned because Blackfyre remained the most potent symbol of Targaryen kingship ever carried away from the family, but now he had begun wondering aloud what secret power might be sleeping inside it as well.
The summons came before supper.
Jinx arrived with Eddard and Brandon and found that Aerys had chosen a smaller audience than usual, though not a private one. Rhaegar stood near the long table beneath a map of Essos, Elia had arrived with Oberyn, Barristan remained near one wall in white armor, and several servants kept themselves far enough away to be invisible while still being available the instant the king wanted something.
Arthur was absent.
Jinx considered that fortunate. The bruise along the Sword of the Morning's jaw was still dark enough that one look at it might have sent Aerys back into questions about the training-yard fight, and Jinx had already explained Valyrian enchantments once this week.
Aerys barely waited for the doors to close. His fingers drummed against the arm of his chair while his eyes settled on Jinx with the peculiar mixture of expectation and accusation that seemed to be becoming familiar. "How long am I meant to wait?"
Jinx knew immediately what he meant, but decided that if Aerys wanted to be impatient he could at least expend the effort of naming the thing himself. He remained politely silent until the king's mouth tightened and Blackfyre finally appeared in the question.
"How long before the sword is found?" Aerys demanded, leaning forward enough that the rings along his hand scraped faintly against carved wood. "You tell me there is a trail, you tell me it can be followed, yet each day passes and Blackfyre remains in foreign hands while you dine, train, and experiment with another blade that already belongs to my house."
The last phrase was dangerous enough that Jinx left it untouched.
Brandon answered first, partly because he had never possessed Eddard's instinct for waiting and partly because they had already discussed exactly this problem. "We sent word to our father before the matter was settled," he said, and although his voice remained respectful, Jinx saw the way his back straightened beneath Aerys's attention. "He has begun asking the major northern houses what men they can spare."
Aerys wanted a number.
They did not have one.
Eddard stepped into the silence before that absence could become another accusation, explaining that Rickard would not weaken northern keeps merely to satisfy an expedition whose route was not yet certain. What he could send in greater numbers were greybeards—older fighting men from the major houses and their lands, many of whom had already spent decades with spear, axe, bow, or sword and who traditionally went out during harsher years rather than consume food younger families might need.
Aerys's expression suggested that the word greybeard had conjured an army of bent old men carrying walking sticks.
Jinx had seen enough southern misunderstandings of the North to know exactly where that thought came from. "Some of those greybeards can still kill men half their age," he added before Aerys dismissed them entirely, remembering hunters from the Wolfswood who could walk younger men into exhaustion and old Mormont retainers whose backs had outlasted several generations of southern opinions about them. "They are old, not dead."
Brandon's mouth twitched at that, but he wisely kept the reaction to himself.
The uncertainty continued irritating Aerys until Oberyn finally pushed away from the pillar he had been using as support. He had spent most of the discussion watching the king with a degree of casualness that made Elia occasionally glance toward him as though checking whether her brother had remembered where he was.
"My mother has already answered," Oberyn said, directing the opening toward Aerys rather than Jinx despite a brief sideways glance that made clear who he actually expected to judge the number. "I wrote to her after Jinx first explained where the trail might lead. Dorne can provide five thousand."
That changed the room.
Aerys's fingers stopped against the chair, Rhaegar's attention sharpened, and even Barristan shifted slightly from his place near the wall. Five thousand was not an escort for treasure hunters; five thousand armed men wandering east beneath Stark and Martell banners would be an expedition large enough that cities, sellsword companies, and khalasars might care where it was going.
Oberyn finally looked directly at Jinx. "Enough?"
Jinx moved toward the map instead of answering immediately.
His grandmother's clues had never been kind enough to form a straight road. They consisted of old merchant names, ports that had changed hands, Blackfyre supporters dead for generations, family ledgers with pages deliberately removed, and fragments that only became useful when placed beside things Daemon had apparently said during the five years he survived in Yi Ti.
"Probably enough," Jinx said, which made Aerys look immediately dissatisfied. He ignored the king for another moment and placed one finger near Volantis, tracing an invisible route eastward where several of the older records disappeared. "The problem is that the trail splits."
The stronger path connected Blackfyre to people who had later become associated with the Golden Company. That did not necessarily mean the sword remained in their possession, especially after generations of captains, claimants, failures, and changing hands, but if they did have it then nobody was going to walk into their camp and politely request the most important relic of the cause that had created them.
"They're not ordinary sellswords," Jinx said, glancing toward Barristan because the older knight understood that better than anyone else in the chamber. "If Blackfyre is still with them, five thousand men may be what keeps the first conversation from becoming the last one."
Barristan's jaw tightened slightly, though he did not contradict him. The Golden Company had discipline, old grudges, exiled bloodlines, and the particular sort of pride produced by men who had spent generations insisting that defeat had merely been delayed.
The other possibility was stranger.
Jinx moved his finger farther east, beyond the Free Cities and toward the enormous grasslands that Westerosi maps represented with large stretches of confidence and very little useful detail. One of his grandmother's clues mentioned a Blackfyre supporter travelling east with a sword-shaped chest after a failed attempt to move something through Volantis, followed years later by a family account claiming the man had died among riders and been buried far from any city.
Brandon leaned closer to the map while Eddard remained a little farther back, studying Jinx rather than the parchment. Rhaegar understood before anyone needed to name the place. "The Dothraki Sea."
Jinx nodded. "If the Golden Company doesn't have Blackfyre, I think there's a real chance it went into a grave somewhere out there."
Oberyn's eyebrows lifted with something much too close to interest.
Elia noticed.
Her expression became tired.
Aerys cared about something else entirely. "Then dig it up."
Jinx looked toward him and considered explaining Dothraki burial customs in detail, then decided the king probably did not need a lecture to understand that people tended to become upset when foreigners excavated their ancestors. "That is the plan," he said instead. "The difficulty comes when a khal notices several thousand outsiders digging through a grave that belonged to someone his people remember."
Aerys dismissed that with the same ease he had dismissed Yi Ti's royal titles days earlier, but Jinx was less concerned with the king's confidence than the men who would actually have to cross the grasslands. If Blackfyre was with the Golden Company, there would almost certainly be a confrontation unless diplomacy performed a miracle; if the sword was buried in the Dothraki Sea, they might have to find a tomb before a khalasar found them.
Either possibility made five thousand Dornishmen feel far more sensible than excessive.
Jinx looked at Oberyn and gave him a small nod. "Five thousand should do, especially once Father's men join us. I'd rather bring too many and discover we didn't need them than arrive at the Golden Company's camp or somebody's ancestral tomb with three hundred men and confidence."
Oberyn looked pleased with that answer, though Jinx suspected the prospect of travelling across Essos toward either a famous sellsword company or an angry khal was helping considerably. Brandon did not look much less interested, and even Rhaegar's usual restraint had acquired the distant look he got whenever some piece of old Valyrian history moved from a book into the real world.
Eddard was the only one whose expression remained mostly unchanged.
Jinx noticed that and understood why.
Men were already being counted for a journey whose destination none of them knew, toward enemies who might not exist, after a sword lost generations before any of them were born. That was exactly the sort of plan that became much easier to admire on parchment than after the first bodies were buried beside the road.
Jinx's attention returned to the map.
He still wanted Blackfyre.
That had not changed.
He simply wished ancient families would occasionally lose their priceless magical swords somewhere convenient, preferably under a bed in a quiet inn with decent food.
Two days later, the matter of Valyrian steel had finally stopped consuming every meal in the Red Keep, though Brandon still occasionally looked at Dark Sister as if he might bully its runes into explaining themselves. Midday found most of them gathered around one of the smaller royal dining tables rather than the great hall, where sunlight came through the high windows in pale bars and the heat had settled thick enough that even Jinx had given up complaining about cold wine becoming warm before he could finish it. Rhaella sat near the head of the table with Elia beside her, while Rhaegar had somehow managed to keep a book open near his plate without either his mother or wife making him put it away. Arthur and Barristan ate farther down with considerably better manners than Brandon, Oberyn was picking apart something roasted and heavily spiced, and Jinx had already worked his way through enough food for several ordinary men without anyone at the table finding that remarkable anymore.
The doors opened midway through the meal, and the gold cloak who entered looked old enough that Jinx wondered how he had survived so long wearing that particular color. Grey showed through his beard and along both temples, his breastplate carried enough scratches to suggest years rather than negligence, and he stopped well inside the doorway before bowing because his breathing had not quite recovered from climbing whatever collection of stairs had brought him there. One of Aerys's guards moved as though to intercept him, but the man had apparently been sent through proper channels, because after a quiet word he was allowed forward.
"Your Grace," the gold cloak began, and whatever else he had intended died when Aerys looked up from his meal with immediate annoyance.
"What?"
The older man hesitated. It was only a fraction of a moment, but Jinx had spent enough time around frightened men lately to recognize someone reconsidering every word before it left his mouth. "A ship was found drifting into the bay, Your Grace. No colors that we could see. No harbor mark either."
Aerys stared at him as though the man had interrupted the king to announce the discovery of a floating barrel. "And why am I hearing of it?"
The gold cloak swallowed. "My men thought—"
"Then tell your men to think somewhere else." Aerys pushed his cup aside harder than necessary, wine climbing one edge before settling again. "If they are smugglers, hang them. If they are pirates, hang them twice if that pleases you. Gods, must every bit of driftwood in Blackwater Bay be carried into my hall?"
Nobody answered that, which was probably sensible.
The old gold cloak had the unfortunate look of a man who knew leaving now would be easier and had decided not to do it. "Most of them can't stand, Your Grace," he said, speaking more quickly before Aerys could dismiss him again. "Some were awake when we boarded them. Not much. One tried talking."
Aerys made an impatient motion with two fingers.
The man glanced around the table, perhaps searching for somebody less dangerous to address. "I think it was the Old Tongue."
That got three Starks moving almost together.
Jinx's hand stopped halfway toward another piece of meat. Eddard looked up sharply enough that whatever he had been listening to Rhaegar say vanished from his attention, while Brandon simply put his cup down and leaned toward the guard. The reaction was immediate because the Old Tongue was not something one expected to hear from starving strangers drifting into Blackwater Bay; even in the North it survived mostly among the mountain clans, old names, older prayers, and people who lived far enough from roads that Andal speech had never entirely pushed it aside.
Aerys noticed their interest before he understood it. "You think?"
The gold cloak nodded, uncomfortable now that half the table was watching him. "My brother took the chain, Your Grace. Maester. He learned some of it at the Citadel and taught me bits when we were boys because he thought it amusing." Something in his face suggested the brother had been considerably more amused than he had. "I don't speak it. Not properly. But I know the sound of some words, and these men... it was close."
"Close?" Eddard asked.
The guard turned toward him with visible relief at receiving a question he could actually answer. "Wrong in places, my lord. Or older, perhaps. I couldn't tell. They kept saying the same things. Water, I think. Land. One word that sounded like heim, or ham. There were others I'd never heard."
Jinx was already getting up.
Brandon followed without bothering to ask whether they had permission, and Eddard rose more deliberately a moment later, pushing his chair back before looking toward Aerys. That small difference between the brothers was old enough that Jinx barely noticed it anymore: Brandon moved when something caught him, Ned remembered there were people in the room who could have them arrested for doing so.
"Sit down," Aerys said.
Brandon stopped.
Jinx did too, though only because Ned's hand had caught the edge of his sleeve.
The king looked from one Stark to another, suspicion beginning to replace irritation now that their interest had made the abandoned vessel interesting to him as well. "Why?"
"Because no one should be speaking the Old Tongue this far south unless they came from the North," Eddard said. He kept his voice plain, which usually served him better with Aerys than trying to sound clever. "And if they came from the North by sea, someone may know them."
"They didn't," the gold cloak said before remembering whom he was interrupting. He lowered his eyes. "Begging pardon, Your Grace. The ship isn't northern."
That made Jinx pay closer attention.
"What does that mean?" Brandon asked.
The old man frowned as he searched for the description. "Long. Narrow. Shallow underneath, from what the harbor men said. One mast. Oars all down both sides, though half are gone. Bow carved like some sort of beast." He rubbed his thumb against one knuckle, then added, "Doesn't look like anything I've seen from White Harbor."
Jinx exchanged a glance with Eddard.
White Harbor built proper ships. The Ironborn built longships, but no Ironborn crew would have been remarkable enough for a harbor watchman to run uphill to the Red Keep, and their speech was not the Old Tongue. The Skagosi were stranger, but even that did not fit neatly enough to settle the feeling beginning to crawl beneath Jinx's skin.
Rhaegar had closed his book.
"I would like to see it," he said, and there was a quiet interest in his voice that Jinx had already learned meant the prince had forgotten whatever else he intended to do that afternoon. Arthur looked at him before looking toward Aerys, while Barristan's expression showed much less curiosity and considerably more concern about why the heir to the throne had just volunteered to visit a ship full of unknown armed men.
Oberyn wiped his fingers on a cloth. "So would I."
Elia gave him a look.
"What?"
"You have no idea who they are."
"That is generally why one goes to look."
She opened her mouth, thought better of whatever she had been about to say, and began to rise instead. Rhaella reached across without hurry and touched two fingers against Elia's wrist before lifting her tea with the other hand.
"Leave them to it," the queen said.
Elia glanced toward her. "You aren't curious?"
"Very."
Rhaella took a small sip while Jinx watched the corner of her mouth threaten to move. "There are already seven men preparing to crowd onto a dock because someone found another group of men on a boat. I think they will manage without us."
Oberyn made a faint sound through his nose.
Elia looked toward her brother, then Jinx, Brandon, Eddard, Rhaegar, Arthur and Barristan, apparently counted them, and sat back down. "Seven."
"That was what I said."
Aerys looked less amused by the arithmetic. He waved them away at last, though not before ordering Barristan and Arthur to remain with Rhaegar and sending additional gold cloaks ahead as if the half-dead foreigners might somehow mount an assault between the river and the castle. Jinx did not wait long enough for him to reconsider, and Brandon was already questioning the old guardsman before they had cleared the room.
The walk down from the Red Keep took longer than Jinx wanted because King's Landing seemed deliberately designed to place a hill between him and anything interesting. The old gold cloak led them through streets that grew louder and fouler as they descended toward the river, answering Brandon when he could and ignoring him when he could not. The strangers had been found shortly after dawn beyond the usual fishing traffic, their vessel drifting badly with its sail half-torn and no one answering the first calls from the watch boat. Two men aboard had drawn weapons when the gold cloaks climbed over the side, but neither had managed more than a few steps before collapsing.
"They're armed?" Barristan asked.
"Were," the gold cloak replied. "We took everything we could find. Swords, axes, knives. Round shields too."
Arthur had been quiet since leaving the castle, but that made him look toward the man. "What kind of swords?"
"Some straight. Some not. Nothing fine." The guard shrugged. "Iron, mostly. Maybe steel on the better ones. They looked used."
Oberyn smiled faintly at that. "Everything sounds more reassuring after axes."
Barristan ignored him.
By the time they reached the riverfront, Jinx could smell the ship before he had a clear view of it. Salt, wet timber, old sweat, bilge water and sickness mixed with the ordinary stink of the Blackwater, and a knot of curious dockworkers had gathered behind a line of gold cloaks despite repeated orders to move on. The vessel itself sat against one of the lesser quays under guard, its hull scarred pale where waves or rocks had stripped away whatever finish once covered the wood.
It was long.
Much longer than Jinx expected from the guard's description, though low enough in the water that the deck seemed almost uncomfortably close to the river. A single mast rose amidships with a torn square sail hanging uselessly from it, and shields had been fixed along the sides, many cracked or missing. The prow curved upward into the carved head of some narrow-faced beast whose paint had been flayed away by weather.
Brandon slowed.
"That's no Ironborn ship."
"No," Eddard said.
Jinx said nothing.
Something about it bothered him.
Not because he recognized the exact ship. He did not. It was the arrangement of it—the long shallow hull, the overlapping boards, the shields along the gunwales, the single square sail—that caught at a piece of memory so old and so completely belonging to another life that for several seconds he could not place why it felt familiar.
Then one of the men aboard began shouting.
The sound came weakly at first, more rasp than voice, followed by the scrape of somebody attempting to rise and being forced back down by a gold cloak. Jinx stepped nearer the gangplank before Barristan's arm moved instinctively across Rhaegar's path, though the prince merely leaned enough to see past him.
The stranger was broad despite starvation, his hair filthy and tied away from a face burned red by wind and sun. A beard covered most of his jaw. His clothes were wool, leather and fur cut in a fashion Jinx had never seen anywhere in Westeros, and one wrist had been bound with cord after someone apparently decided shackles were unnecessary for a man who could barely sit upright.
He said something again.
The old gold cloak frowned. "That. That's what I meant."
Eddard listened closely.
Brandon did too, though his expression quickly admitted he understood almost none of it.
Jinx understood more.
Not every word. The pronunciation was wrong, centuries removed from anything familiar to him, and his knowledge of the language had never been remotely good enough to carry a conversation. Yet certain sounds reached through the differences with an unpleasant familiarity.
The stranger pointed weakly toward the west.
He said several things Jinx could not follow.
Then one word emerged clearly enough that Jinx forgot about the stink of the river, the crowd behind them, and the ache still lingering in his palm from Blackscript.
"England."
Jinx stared at him.
The man sagged against the gold cloak holding him, eyes half closed, and repeated it with greater desperation as if the word itself ought to explain everything. "England."
Brandon looked toward Jinx because he had noticed the change in his face.
Eddard noticed a heartbeat later.
Jinx wished neither of them had.
By late afternoon the strangers had been washed, their wounds bound, and their thirst brought under control slowly enough that none of them drank themselves sick. The worst of them had been given broth and watered wine under the maesters' supervision, but exhaustion had claimed nearly all of them before there was any chance of questioning anyone properly, leaving the infirmary filled with the low sounds of sleeping men and the occasional scrape of a servant moving somewhere beyond the closed doors. Ragnar lay among them with his head turned slightly toward the wall, one hand loose beside him, and without those pale eyes constantly measuring the room he looked far less like the man Jinx remembered.
Jinx stood near the foot of Ragnar's bed with Eddard and Brandon beside him, and for a long while none of the brothers found anything worth saying. Rhaegar, Arthur, Barristan and Oberyn had been drawn away earlier, which suited Jinx perfectly, because he had no intention of explaining this with half the royal household listening through an open doorway. Even after the last servant had gone and the door was shut, the silence remained heavy enough that Brandon, who usually treated silence as a personal challenge, left it alone.
Eddard broke it first, although even he waited until Jinx had spent long enough staring at Ragnar that pretending nothing was wrong had become pointless. "England," he said quietly, and the single word carried the question well enough that he did not bother dressing it up with anything else.
Jinx did not answer immediately, because he had already decided on the walk back that the truth was impossible and a complete lie would be worse. He could hardly tell them that he remembered another life in which England had existed, that Ragnar Lothbrok had been a man from a story he had watched unfold, or that seeing him alive in King's Landing had cracked open several suspicions Jinx had spent years refusing to examine too closely. What he could give them was something close enough to truth that he would not have to remember a dozen invented details later.
"Before I left for Dorne, I had a dream," he said at last, still looking toward Ragnar rather than either brother. "Only once, and strange enough that I remembered it when I woke, though I never had it again."
Brandon shifted slightly, but did not interrupt him, and Jinx was grateful for that because he did not want to turn this into another conversation where every sentence had to be dragged out of him. He told them that the dream had carried him somewhere he had never seen and could not place on any map Maester Luwin had ever shown them, a country with green hills, broad fields, rivers cutting through rich farmland, and villages surrounded by soil fertile enough that parts of it had reminded him of the Reach. The people there knew little of the world beyond their own shores, or at least behaved as though what lay beyond them mattered less than whatever king, feud, harvest or church occupied the next valley.
"The place was called England," Jinx said, and this time neither brother needed to ask whether he was certain. "That was where I heard the name."
England itself had not been what stayed with him most strongly, because the people there followed a god Jinx had not recognized and priests who spoke of that god with the same absolute certainty septons sometimes reserved for the Seven. What unsettled him had been another land he saw farther north and across the sea, colder and harsher, where forests swallowed roads, winter bit harder into the earth, and men built their lives around poor soil, fishing, raiding, livestock and whatever the weather allowed them to keep. That place had reminded him of the North so strongly that even in the dream he had noticed the resemblance, but the similarity of the land had mattered far less than what he saw its people doing.
Brandon finally moved his attention away from Ragnar and toward Jinx, curiosity replacing the impatience he had been holding back. Jinx had expected the question before it came, but Brandon only asked what had been different enough to remain in his head for years, and that gave Jinx room to answer without pretending he had memorized every image.
"Faith," Jinx said, though he could see from both brothers' faces that the answer meant nothing by itself. He took a moment before continuing, because this was the part he needed them to understand rather than simply hear. "Not because they believed harder than we do, and not because their gods had the same names, but because they still knew what their rites meant."
That changed Eddard's expression before Brandon's, because Ned had spent more time beneath Winterfell's heart tree than either of them and had always treated the old gods with a quiet seriousness Jinx respected even when he did not share it. Jinx explained that the people in the dream made offerings in sacred groves, treated blood as something with religious weight rather than merely a thing spilled in battle, read signs from animals and weather, kept seasonal rites, and preserved stories that explained why one custom belonged beside another. Their gods had names unfamiliar to him and their myths were not northern tales, yet beneath those differences Jinx had recognized patterns that belonged uncomfortably close to fragments still preserved among the First Men.
"We have the pieces," Jinx said, leaning one shoulder against the bedpost while he tried to shape the thought without turning it into a lecture. "The heart trees, the old words, the crypts, the marriage rites, the things we're told never to do before a weirwood, but most of the reasons are gone. Maester Luwin could tell us what our ancestors practiced, but half the time nobody can tell you why they practiced it."
Eddard looked down at that, and Jinx knew he had struck something familiar because Ned had never needed an explanation for why one did not lie before a heart tree; it was simply something he had grown up knowing. Brandon was less bothered by the loss itself than by the idea that strangers somewhere beyond Westeros might possess what the Starks had misplaced, and his gaze went back toward the sleeping men as though they might wake carrying answers in their pockets.
Jinx told them that, in the dream, he had first assumed he was seeing another religion entirely, because the names and stories were too different for anything else to make sense. Only after seeing the same kinds of rites repeated did he begin to suspect that the northern faith of Westeros might be a surviving branch of something much older, worn down by migrations, wars, Andal conquest and finally centuries of political pressure until only the parts nobody could quite erase remained. He could not prove that the Targaryens or the Citadel had ever formally forbidden the older practices, and he was careful not to claim they had, but he had never believed formal bans were necessary when neglect could accomplish the same thing over generations.
"Aegon and the kings after him needed the Faith, and they needed the Citadel," Jinx said, his voice low enough that it would not carry beyond the room. "Nobody had to write down that some northern rite was forbidden if every lord who wanted peace at court learned not to perform it in front of septons, and every son after him was taught a little less than his father knew."
That possibility sat poorly with Eddard, although he did not argue with it immediately. Rickard had never taught them anything resembling the rites Jinx described, and neither had Maester Luwin, which did not prove that knowledge had been deliberately stripped away so much as prove that whatever had once existed was already gone long before either man had been born. Jinx suspected Ned understood that distinction, because his discomfort was aimed more at the emptiness than at finding someone to blame for it.
The blood was harder to explain without sounding as though Jinx had begun sorting men like horse stock, but once he had noticed it at the docks he had not been able to stop seeing it. The foreigners carried features and builds that appeared often enough in old northern families to feel familiar without being identical, and the resemblance went deeper than hair or eyes; their bodies had endured a voyage that should have killed more of them, and even starved nearly senseless there was a physical stubbornness in them Jinx associated with bloodlines that had remained close to the First Men for a very long time.
"They are not like us," he said, glancing between his brothers before Brandon could misunderstand him. "Stark blood is something else, and the Umbers and Glovers have their own old strains running through them, especially when the Umbers somehow manage to stumble into giant blood every few generations, but these people are closer to the First Men than most ordinary folk I've seen in the last three hundred years of records."
Brandon's mouth moved at the comment about the Umbers, though he managed not to laugh loudly enough to disturb the sleepers. Jinx continued before the joke could become a conversation of its own, explaining that he did not mean untouched or pure in the absurd Valyrian sense of the word, only that these people seemed to have mixed less with later populations than common folk across most of Westeros. Their language strengthened the suspicion, because the Old Tongue should not have survived in something so recognizable this far from the North unless there had once been some connection.
Eddard remained quiet for several moments, studying Ragnar with a different expression now that the pieces had been placed together. "So when you heard England today, you remembered the dream," he said, and Jinx was relieved that Ned phrased it as a conclusion rather than another question he would have to dodge.
"That, and him," Jinx admitted, although he left the meaning deliberately vague. "The dream showed me people from that northern land too, and his face was one of the things that stayed with me."
That was as close as Jinx intended to come to admitting that Ragnar was not merely familiar but remembered.
Brandon glanced toward him, clearly hearing the part Jinx had chosen not to explain, but for once he let it remain there. Whatever else he wanted to know could wait until the strangers woke, because neither dream nor memory could tell them why Ragnar had sailed west looking for England, how far his homeland lay from Westeros, or what had driven a ship built for coasts and rivers into Blackwater Bay.
Jinx stayed beside the bed after his brothers fell quiet again, watching Ragnar breathe while the last light outside the narrow windows began to soften. He had given them enough to explain his reaction and enough truth that he would not have to build another lie on top of this one, but the questions he had kept for himself were already multiplying faster than the answers.
For now, Ragnar was still unconscious, and Jinx preferred it that way for at least a little longer.