Pre-Chapter A/N: More chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio. Experimenting with two chapters a week, we'll see how long I can keep this up for.
Uncaring for who might be watching or what they might say, Corlys swept me into his arms the second I landed, holding my head between his right arm and his chest like it was an egg he was scared he would crack while seeming to be doing his best to shatter my ribs at the same time. I did my best to return the hug.
"Well done. That was very well done. Haven't seen flying like that since your mother," he said, and that was high praise. Rhaenys was pretty much universally accepted as the best flier of her generation. She was better in the air than even Daemon was. It showed in canon where she fought both Vhagar and that beast Sunfyre at the same time and managed to wound the latter so severely that he was pretty much out for the count in the war. Two against one with the two being battle-eager adult dragons, and she'd managed to take one with her—no small feat.
"Thank you, Father," I whispered into his chest before he let me go. I turned to the men that had ferried me here, Callum and Willam, and gave them nods to thank them for their service before I followed Corlys as he walked forwards, towards something on the deck.
"Laenor, meet the one they call Lungpiercer," he said, gesturing towards the pirate that was clad in irons and forced to his knees on the deck. Borros was standing next to him looking smug as all hells. Probably his capture, then. I would have to ask someone how he'd managed that when it seemed that no actual combat would be taking place from what I had seen.
"Well met, Lungpiercer," I said, walking towards the man. Instead of a civilized reply, he spat in my direction. His spit was shockingly well-aimed, splattering against my cheek before I could even think about dodging. I forced myself to remain still, not to react like I wanted. I left the spit there even as much as I wanted to scream and wipe it up before jumping into the shower for the next year. But these were sailors around me. I'd lose their respect and just be seen as another soft Lordling if I did so I left the spit there, instead walking forward and smashing my boot right into his face.
"Nice one," I heard Borros say with a chuckle as the pirate's head snapped back.
He tried to force himself to his feet and attack me, but then Borros was there, wrestling him down and adding a few kicks to his lungs for good measure. "May I question him, Lord Baratheon?" Corlys asked, coming to stand next to us.
"Nah. If anyone's going to get the truth out of this bastard, it'll be me. I captured him after all." Corlys nodded like that was a fully logical argument and that prisoners were not in fact his by right as the Captain of the Fleet. He stepped back and left Borros to wrestle the struggling man, who against the massive Baratheon might as well have been a mewling kitten, to the brig.
"Follow him and make sure we get something useful out of the pirate before he gets bored and kills him," Corlys said in a whisper to make it clear I was the only one supposed to hear my orders.
"Squireee!" I heard Borros' voice from the distance, and Corlys nodded for me to proceed.
Lungpiercer shrieked like a cat being strangled as Borros landed another punch against the man's face, sending some teeth loose. He hadn't even asked the man a single question. He was just beating him bloody. Corlys would probably have wanted me to step in here to prevent him from killing the prisoner, but I had come to learn Borros' nature more than anyone else. It was just a matter of time. He punched him a few more times in the midsection, and the man struggled, moving against the chair I'd tied him to, but he could do nothing but take the hits as they came. And come they did.
Just like I had predicted, it had taken the great Borros Baratheon only a few minutes to get bored of hitting someone who couldn't hit him back. The Baratheon man was a sadistic bastard on the best day, but he was far from cruel. Or at least far from being needlessly so. So he stepped back and went to his cabin.
"Permission to ask him a few questions, Ser?" I asked only when he was close to the door. He turned to me with a savage smile on his face.
"Want to get your own licks in, eh? Yeah, enjoy yourself then turn him over to your father and tell him I'm feeling generous," he said. I nodded. He probably thought I just wanted to torture the bastard for torture's sake, just like he did. It would have been cute that he was letting me if the subject-matter was not the torture of a man.
"So, Lungpiercer, eh? What's your actual name?" I asked.
"Kiss my arse!" he said.
"Interesting. You speak the common tongue surprisingly well for Essosi scum. Almost like you visited the Seven Kingdoms a lot?" I asked, watching his expression.
"Oh no. Not visited, then. Grew up in." He flushed and struggled against his ropes.
"And that accent I heard there. Could swear it sounded almost… Dornish," I tried, and just like expected, I got my answer on his face.
"Are you a witch?"
"Sadly not. Let's just say I know a few things no one else does, and I'm very good at putting two and two together. So let's see what's going to happen now. I have like a hundred different means of torture dancing around this head of mine. Things involving rats, insects, maybe even snakes like you Dornish are obsessed with. But all of them are messy and to be honest, I probably don't have the stomach for them. So we'll try something a bit more tame. Please don't disappoint," I said, moving to tie him down further.
I'd heard things about waterboarding all through my first life. If that one guy on Reddit was to be believed, then it was the be-all, end-all of CIA torture, and if it was good for the CIA, then it was more than good enough for me, so I went ahead with it. First of all, I propped his chair back against a table so I didn't have to force him to keep his head tilted backward. Next came the rag. It was a nasty, dirty thing I found on the floor of the brig. Considering Lungpiercer's occupation, I doubted he would have many complaints. Pirates weren't exactly known for leading the most sanitary lifestyles.
Then I left the room for a few seconds to order a deckhand to fetch a jug of seawater. All through, Lungpiercer remained stubbornly quiet. That would change as soon as the water arrived, however.
"Before I begin, I will ask you two questions: one, what is your name? And the second, who sent you here?"
"Go to hell, sisterfucking scum!"
"I don't even fuck my sister. You know that, right? Lovely girl, but I promise you we haven't done any fucking at all," I said in response before I walked forward and tipped the jug over, cleanly, calmly.
Everything I'd seen or read on social media had done a grand and combined total of fuck-all to prepare me for the sounds he made. It only took a few seconds for him to begin to gasp for air, to struggle to breathe, to scream, to do anything. In a matter of seconds, he was practically begging me to stop.
I removed the rag. "Now, what is your name?" I asked.
"Quentin Sand," he said without hesitation.
"Now that wasn't so hard, Quentin, who sent you here?" I asked next. Was it Dorne? I needed to know that. Because if Dorne were moving this early in things, then there was a possibility that things were going to go much differently.
He went mute at the second question, almost like he had finally remembered just who held his loyalties. Interesting. I put the rag over his face despite his protests and struggles, and began to pour. This time, it was less than ten seconds before he began to plead that he would talk. I continued for another ten seconds regardless, driving home the point that I did not like to be disobeyed.
When I was done, the pirate looked more like a wet rat than a man.
"Who sent you here?"
"Tyrosh," he said.
"Why did they send you here?"
"I don't know. I'm just a pirate. I just go places, do what I'm told, and get paid."
"That doesn't sound like much of a pirate to me. Sounds like a sellsail to me, and a sellsail captain like you would not have committed your ships and men to a cause you did not fully understand. So answer my questions now before I lose my patience," I said, putting the rag over his face. I didn't even need to start pouring again before he began saying he'd speak.
—
"His name is Quentin Sand. He claims to be a Blackmont Bastard, and that he was hired by Tyrosh with the plan to kill a Dragon here," I said as I marched into the meeting room adjoined to Corlys' quarters aboard his flagship, the Queen Rhaenys. His eyes sharpened as he looked up from the sea charts he and his men had been pouring over.
"To kill a Dragon? Specifically that? Not to ambush our fleet as a whole, but to kill a dragon?" he asked.
"Yes, Father. According to him, their orders had been to let you pass if you presented no challenge and allowed them to go about their business. All their scorpions had been aimed towards the sky rather than straight ahead as would have made sense for a fleet that came to do naval battle. I think their plan had been to bog you down with numbers to force me or whatever dragonrider you had with you to take to the skies where they would have blocked the sun with the rain of a thousand bolts," I said, saying the last sentence with air quotes and my best impression of Quentin Sand's accent.
"I see," he said, and I could see the rage that lurked beneath the Seahorse right there and then.
"Leave us," he said, and his coterie of navigators, strategists, and advisers fled the room like there was fire on their arses.
"They knew you would be here."
"If not me, then another dragonrider."
"Your mother?"
"She would have burned them even faster than I did," I said, even as I felt the knot of worry tighten in my gut. She might have ended up tagging along for this thing. Igneel and I had gotten lucky. The only reason we were alive and those pirates weren't was because we had been luckier than they were. I did not feel comfortable with the thought that it could have been Mother in a similar situation.
"That she would have. But if they expected you here, then they surely knew I would be here," he said, and that was a fact that I had already come to terms with once I had spoken to Quentin Sand.
"Bet that there's nothing but driftwood left of our advance fleet?" I asked.
"A fool's bet," he said with a sigh.
"They knew we were here, and we never even heard a whisper of Tyrosh gathering so many sellsails and pirates to their banner," he said.
"We expected that they would challenge our rule of the Stepstones."
"Rule, yes. We expected that they would become a problem once we established ourselves on the Islands, but it's clear now that they do not mean to see us make landfall even."
"So what do we do?" I asked, and he stared out the porthole for a few seconds before his smile sharpened.
"There is no chance that Tyrosh is working against us on their own. Where they go, so do the other bastard daughters. They also would not have dared to make a move against a Westerosi effort without substantial support."
"Support… or assurance," I said, fielding the thought that had been nagging my head since Quentin had made his confession. Tyrosh had known exactly where we would be. They had known we would have a dragon. That meant they had a spy. Of course, the spy could be someone on my father's council, but I was confident that he was too competent for something so blatant. And nearly all these men had grown up on Driftmark, beneath the banner and under the watchful eye of House Velaryon. They would not betray us. Especially for not something as crude as gold which was the best the Triarchy could offer, being honest.
So that brought the other possibility. The crown. Otto could have done it, I realized. He probably still saw House Velaryon as a threat to Viserys' rule. Especially now that Viserys had taken his daughter to wife and knocked her up.
"Hightower?," Corlys said the name first with a look on his face.
"I think sol."
"But would he do something so treasonous?"
"Only the King can work against the realm, as you taught me," I said, referencing one of his earlier lessons. It had been a lesson about how the greatest threat to a fiefdom was almost always its Lord rather than neighbors or foreign powers.
"I agree. But even so, for Hightower to move against us like this. He must know there would be consequences."
"Only if he fails, and we somehow manage to prove it. I doubt the King is going to move against his hand on our word alone. Even if we had a good standing with the crown, that would have been a tall task. Besides, should the Master of Whispers not have received some notice that this was happening? There was no way he did not notice the Triarchy of all people building up forces and hiring pirates in these numbers. And if he did, then why did he not inform us?" I asked the logical question even as I was still internally reeling. The truth was that I had expected Otto Hightower to come on side especially since there was no guarantee that we were going to support Rhaenyra's claim against Aegon's.
But then that had been shortsighted. What if he had just seen a chance to get us off the table as a threat entirely instead of having to worry about negotiating with us to back Aegon when the time came. The arrogant bastard probably even still thought he could get Viserys to change his mind before the fool croaked.
"Call your Uncle Vaemond in for me."
"Father?" My question need not be vocalized.
"If we cannot trust the crown to report to us what they learn, then we must make attempts to have spies of our own. This war will be more complicated than either of us anticipated, Laenor. Prepare yourself." I nodded, and then left the room to do as I'd been bid.
Just as expected, there was naught but driftwood where our advance fleet was supposed to be. Without a doubt, those ships had been captured almost to the vessel, and now our men, loyal Velaryon men, were either beneath this very sea or on their way to be sold into slavery at this very moment. Pirates did not keep prisoners, and the hunger the Triarchy had for the flesh trade was well known. That was why the expressions of the crew as we passed the fleet's remains were far from despairing as should have been the case—instead, they were wrathful.
That was good. Anger was bad most of the time, but in this situation, with ready outlets for the anger within reach and nothing stopping them from exercising that rage, the anger was good. Besides, while the masses were angry, within Corlys there was only a deadly calm. A calm that spoke of a vengeance more thorough than most would have expected. The old plan was gone. We didn't have the ships to thoroughly blockade and restrict the pirates like we had planned. And instead of pirates, we were being faced with sellsails, and soon we would have to fight men who bore the Triarchy's banner and flew its flag. We needed to strike at the Triarchy itself, and that was what Father intended. We just had to be smart about it.
So when we sailed past the island we were supposed to make landfall at and begin our resupplying, a good portion of the crew were surprised, but not enough to begin to question Father. Not when he was like this. Day and night he came out of his cabin and simply stared into the distance. In those moments I wondered what he carried in his mind. What burden he bore that was so great that he could not share it.
Whatever comfort I could have provided for the lost men was denied him by my duties as a squire. Borros Baratheon had finally found his sea legs, and his sea stomach, and now kept me busy for near every waking moment either sparring or doing his laundry under his watchful eye, or just doing some form of erranding for him. He was bored, and I seemed to be his primary form of entertainment—when he wasn't drinking himself into a stupor, that is.
That was part of why I felt anticipation building as day after day passed without us making landfall and we sailed past all the islands of the Stepstones. The day we sailed past Bloodstone in the distance had been the most noteworthy. For some reason, most of the crew thought we would be stopping there instead, but they were shocked when they received the order to go on. A shock that doubled when the order to stop finally came. We were in the open sea. There was nothing but barren islands for miles around, but the experienced sailors were already recognizing just what we had wondered next to.
"Tomorrow, we bleed Tyrosh," Corlys said at the beginning of the first true strategy meeting since we'd set sail. Captains under him—Vaemond and the likes—had come from their own ships to attend to him. Borros sat at the opposite end of the table and watched the whole thing with sharp eyes, aching for a fight.
"The Seasnake!" Vaemond hailed, and we all joined in.
A/N: Did ya see that coming? Next five chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)(same username as here and link in bio), support me there and read them early.