3rd Person POV
69 AC — The Narrow Sea, then Essos
(Near 25 days into the Faith Reckoning month)
The Narrow Sea had taken three days.
Aemon had crossed it on Caraxes, flying ahead of the fleet, and the difference between crossing by ship and crossing by dragon was the difference between reading about a storm and standing in one. He could feel the wind in his teeth. He could see the curve of the world from up high. He slept strapped to the saddle on rocky outcrops along the old Valyrian coast, wrapped in his riding cloak, and woke each morning to Caraxes already restless beneath him, neck stretched toward the east, impatient.
He had done this crossing before in his 15 year life— twice by ship, which had been slow and smelled of salt rot and confined men. By dragon it was something else entirely. The sea below was enormous in a way that ships made you forget, the water going from green near the coast to a deep blue-black in the middle crossing that had no bottom you could imagine. Halfway across, in the dead hours before dawn, he had looked down and felt genuinely & completely alone for the first time in years.
' Not a feeling he planned to repeat. '
Caraxes had no such concerns. The Blood Wyrm flew as if the Narrow Sea were an inconvenient puddle, powerful wingbeats eating the miles in long, rhythmic surges. He only landed when Aemon asked him to, and even then with the air of a creature performing a favour.
The first thing Aemon realized about Essos was that his riding leathers had become a personal torment.
In the Seven Kingdoms, a man wore leather to keep out the damp. Here, it was merely a way to ensure he was slowly simmered in his own sweat. "Gods be good," he muttered, tugging at his collar as Caraxes banked over the coastline. "The sun isn't a god here; it's a butcher."
In Westeros, even in the height of summer, the wind carried the damp, green scent of forests or the sharp bite of the salt spray. Here, the air was thick and heavy, tasting of sun-baked dust, ancient brick, and a dry, baking heat that seemed to seep through his riding leathers.
Then, he saw the veins of the giant.
He had heard Baelon talk about them often enough — the old dragonroads, Valyrian-built, running straight as sword blades across the continent regardless of what the land wanted to do beneath them. From the air they looked almost impossible. A raised stone causeway cutting clean through marshland that should have swallowed it whole. A bridge spanning a river gorge with three elegant arches, still standing after the Doom, after a century of abandonment, after everything. The fused stone gleaming faintly even from this height, pale grey-gold against the brown and green of the land around it.
Nothing in Westeros looked like this. Not even close.
He thought of his brother Baelon, currently drowning in Small Council ledgers back in King's Landing, trying to convince old Lord Beesbury to fund a single mile of decent road. If Baelon saw this, he'd weep, Aemon thought with a wry grin. Then he'd find a way to steal the stones. It wasn't the "grandeur of the Freehold" that struck him now—it was the sheer, beautiful convenience of not having to haul a wagon through knee-deep Westerosi mud.
…
69 AC — Volantis, the Long Bridge, the Dragonroad
He landed Caraxes on the east bank of the Rhoyne three days into Essos, where the old dragonroad touched the edge of Volantis's territory and the Long Bridge began.
The fleet had not yet arrived — they were still rounding the southern coast, beating against the summer winds. Aemon had a day to spend. He spent it on foot, with Ser Ryam at his shoulder and Edwell beside him, walking the Long Bridge of Volantis for the first time in his life.
The bridge was a city unto itself. Shops, taverns, temples, a slave market the size of a Westerosi village — all of it crammed onto a structure of pink-grey stone that had been standing since before Valyria fell. It took an hour to walk from one end to the other. He did it in silence, mostly, watching.
He had known, in an abstract way, that Essos had slavery. He had known it the way you knew that fire was hot before you stood next to one. On the Long Bridge, he stood next to the fire.
The slave markets were — organised. That was what struck him first. Not chaotic, not cruel in any visible, dramatic sense. Just organised. Men and women on low wooden platforms, collars of bronze around their necks, being examined by buyers the way a horse-trader examined teeth. The buyers asked questions in rapid Valyrian or Ghiscari. The slaves answered or didn't answer. Price was negotiated. A transaction completed. The next one began.
An old man — sixty, grey-bearded, well-fed enough to have been a house slave for years — stood on a platform while a buyer examined his hands. Checking for calluses, presumably. The old man's face showed nothing. He had the eyes of someone who had learned, over a very long time, that showing anything was not worth what it cost.
Aemon kept walking.
"How many?" he asked Edwell, quietly.
Edwell understood what he meant. "In Volantis? Three to one. Slaves to free men. Some say more."
Three to one.
Aemon didn't say anything else. He kept his face the way his father had taught him — neutral, attentive, giving nothing away. But something cold and heavy had settled in his chest, and it stayed there.
…
The Triarchy's welcome came the next morning.
Three men arrived at his camp outside the city walls while Caraxes was still sleeping — representatives of the three great families of Volantis, he was told, which meant representatives of the Triarchs who ruled the city. One from the Tiger faction, one from the Elephant, and a third who introduced himself only as speaking for "all reasonable men of Volantis," which Aemon suspected meant he was neither.
They brought gifts. A bolt of Myrish lace. A Volantene chest of spiced wine sealed with black wax. A book — old, hand-copied in High Valyrian — that one of them presented with both hands and a careful smile, explaining it was a history of the Forty Families. Of which, he said, Aemon's own ancestors had of course been the most honoured.
"Of course," Aemon said.
Daemon Velaryon, the Master of Ship for his father, who had arrived at dawn with the fleet's scouting galley while the main ships continued south, sat to Aemon's left and watched all three of them with the mild expression of a man watching a performance he had already seen and found less impressive than advertised.
The Tiger man — broad, military bearing, a scar running through one eyebrow — spoke in High Valyrian about the importance of Valyrian blood in the world. About how Volantis had always kept the flame of the Freehold's legacy alive. About how it was an honour without equal to host a dragonlord after so long, and how Volantis stood ready to be a friend to House Targaryen in any future the gods might design.
"He means the Tigers want Targaryen support for expanding their slave trade into the Disputed Lands," Edwell murmured in his ear, no need for translating as Aemon understood high valyrians fine enough, just speaking low to guide the young hier.
Aemon didn't move his face. "And the Elephant?"
"Merchants. They want a trade agreement. Preferential tariffs through the Stepstones."
The Elephant man was thinner, rings on every finger, and smiled more than the Tiger man and meant it less. He spoke warmly about peace. About commerce. About how the smallfolk of Volantis had always looked toward Westeros with admiration, and how a prince of Targaryen blood walking the Long Bridge was a sight that had brought tears to the eyes of many.
Aemon doubted that very much.
He thanked them. He accepted the gifts. He told them the Iron Throne valued Volantis's friendship and would be happy to discuss trade in time, through the proper channels of the Small Council.
Aemon watched the three Volantenes retreat, their silken robes sweeping the dust of the camp like colorful brooms. Once they were well out of earshot, he let his shoulders drop, the "princely mask" slipping away to reveal a young man who was mostly just tired.
"Baelon was right," Aemon muttered, rubbing his jaw. "He told me once that a prince's most vital skill isn't swordplay or dragon-riding, but the ability to say absolutely nothing while sounding as though you've promised the world. He called it the 'sweet-tongued lie.'"
Daemon Velaryon snorted, leaning back in his camp chair until the wood groaned in protest. He reached out a calloused finger and poked at the bolt of Myrish lace as if it might bite him. "Your brother has the soul of a maester and the tongue of a septon when he wants to. It's a useful gift. Keeps the blood off the carpets."
He gestured vaguely at the wine chest. "The book is real enough—parchment that old has a particular stink of dust and dead men. The lace will sell for a fortune in King's Landing. But the wine? I wouldn't let a dog lap at it until we've seen a servant finish a cup and stay upright for an hour."
Aemon managed a weary grin. "You truly think they'd poison a guest within sight of a dragon?"
"Not poison, perhaps. Just... prepared," Daemon said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "A little something to make the head swim and the heart grow fond. They don't just have watchers, Prince; they have men whose only job in life is to count the scales on a dragon's belly and report back to their masters."
Aemon looked at him. "You've been here before in your travels, my lord."
"Twice," Daemon said, his voice softening. "Once when I was young and thought the world was a treasure chest waiting to be opened, and once when I was less young and realized the chest was usually empty. Volantis is a city of ghosts, Aemon. They hate Valyria for dying and leaving them behind, yet they wrap themselves in its rags to feel important. They're like children playing in their father's armor—it's too big for them, and it smells of the grave, but they love the way it clanks. The Long Bridge. The roads. The trade. They'd never say it plainly, but they were relieved when the Doom came. They thought it meant they could be the greatest city in the world without anyone to overshadow them."
"Tigers and Elephants," Aemon mused. "One wants to conquer the world, the other wants to buy it."
"And both would sell their own mothers for a single hatchling," Daemon countered. He leaned forward, his face losing its playful edge. "They looked at the Blood Wyrm this morning with a hunger that would put a starving wolf to shame. They don't see a dragon, Prince. They see a key. A key to a door they've been scratching at for a hundred years. Key and wine to use it, if you understand."
"Until someone tips the balance."
He met Aemon's gaze, his eyes hard as Valyrian steel. "They want dragons, my prince. They want the fire, They have the Old Blood."
Aemon felt the sudden, crushing weight of it—the realization that he was a lone spark in a city made of tinder. He straightened his shoulders, the Targaryen pride rising in him like a physical heat.
"They are not fit to claim such a legacy," Aemon said firmly. "The Forty Families are ash and memory. Valyria is a ghost. It is House Targaryen that remains, and House Targaryen alone. There is only one House of the Dragon in this world, my lord. The rest are merely playing at being men."
Daemon watched him for a long moment, then gave a slow, approving nod. "Aye. Just so. Though if I were you, I'd still stick to the water for tonight. The Volantene 'friendship' usually comes with a very long hangover."
Aemon laughed, the sound genuine and human. "Water it is, then. But tomorrow, we find a cellar that serves something that wasn't a 'gift.'"
It was the most words they had exchanged in three days of sailing together. Aemon found he didn't mind the man's silences. There was no performance in them.
…
69 AC — The Old Dragonroad, east of Volantis
He flew the old dragonroad east from Volantis, following its straight line across the hills and dried riverbeds of the eastern territory, and the fleet went south around the Valyrian peninsula to meet him at Astapor.
On the second day he stopped at a waystation — an old Valyrian rest post, the fused stone still intact, a well still drawing clean water from somewhere deep underground, the drainage channels still functioning after a century of no maintenance. A small settlement had grown up around it: thirty or forty people, free and slave both, who lived off travellers on the road.
He ate there with Ser Ryam and Edwell. Caraxes landed on the ridge above and the settlement went very quiet for the first half hour, everyone finding reasons to be inside. By the time Aemon had finished eating, a few children had crept to the doorways to look.
The woman who ran the waystation brought something in her covered hands herself rather than sending a slave to do it. She was Valyrian-blooded — distant, diluted, her hair a dark gold rather than silver-white, her eyes brown with a faint violet cast that might have been a trick of the light. She looked a decade older than Aemon, though in this heat, Essosi years often counted for double.
Ser Ryam Redwyne shifted, his armor clanking like a blacksmith's shop. His hand hovered near the pommel of his longsword, his eyes narrowed at the covered bundle in the woman's hands. It was only after Edwell murmured a few words in the local dialect—soothing the knight's suspicion—that Ryam stepped aside to let her pass.
She did not sit; she knelt, her eyes fixed firmly on the dust at Aemon's boots.
"Zaldrīzesbuzdari," she whispered. Dragonlord. The High Valyrian was thick with the accent of the Rhoyne, heavy and syrupy.
Aemon did not answer immediately. He watched her gnarled hands tremble as she uncovered a small, wooden box. Inside lay shards of jagged black glass, gleaming like frozen night.
Obsidian. Baelon had told him once that dragonglass was a rarity in the world, found only where the fires of the earth had once vented their rage. Aemon thought of Dragonstone, where the black stone was so common it was used for paths and masonry. Here, in the shadow of a crumbling waystation, it was treated like a king's ransom.
"Please, my lord," she said, her voice small. "Accept this humble offering of fire-stones. We found them stashed beneath the floorboards, left by those who came before. I... I apologize that we have nothing more worthy of your brilliance. If you desire anything else, we are yours to command. We have no spare slaves, but..."
She trailed off, her meaning hanging in the air. Aemon looked at her properly then—the way her tunic was pulled tight, the way she offered herself with the flat resignation of a woman who expected to be used.
He sighed, The dragonlords of old had not just demanded gold and stone; they had demanded flesh. They had taken what they wanted—pleasure, labor, lives—and called it their birthright. This village had looked at her hair and her eyes and decided she was the only tribute that might sate a dragon's rider.
A dull ache throbbed behind Aemon's eyes—a "dragonlord's headache," he mused.
"I desire nothing from your people," Aemon said, his voice ringing harder than he intended. "Keep your stones, they serve me no better than common flint. Return to your people."
She stood, clutching the box to her chest, her breath coming in a ragged hitch of relief. She turned to flee, but her feet snagged in the dirt as she looked past him, up toward the ridge.
High above, Caraxes sat, The Blood Wyrm had his long, serpentine neck craned low, his golden eyes fixed on examining the settlement's goat pen with what Aemon hoped was only academic interest.
"My grandmother told me stories of one," she said. "A dragonlord, I mean. Before the Doom. She said the lord rode low over the valley — she could see the rider's silver hair from the ground." She paused. "She said it was the most beautiful thing she ever saw. And then the Doom came, the world broke, and she never saw of such beauty again.
Aemon didn't know what to say to that.
"There are stories," she said, after a moment. "In the villages east of here. Old ones. About what happens when the dragonlords return."
"What kind of stories?"
She tilted her head. "Good ones and bad ones. Some say a dragonlord will come from the west and burn every slave collar from here to Yunkai. Some say a dragonlord will come and take slaves by the thousand to rebuild Valyria. Some say—" she paused, as if deciding whether to say this, "—some say the dragons never died. That they're sleeping under the sea, and the dragonlords are in their dreams. And when the dragonlords wake, the dragons wake."
Aemon looked at her for a moment. She said it plainly, not with superstition, just with the same tone she might use to explain which wells in the valley were safe to drink from.
"Which version do your people believe?"
She smiled — small, private. "We believe whichever one seems most useful at the time."
He thought about that for a long time afterward, flying east.
…
The further east he flew, the more the reaction changed.
Near Volantis, the response to Caraxes overhead had been awe — people stopping in the fields and roads to look up, some kneeling, some simply standing with their hands shading their eyes. A dragon. An actual dragon. Something out of the stories their grandparents had told.
Closer to the Ghiscari cities, it was different.
He noticed it first near a small Ghiscari trading town two days east of Volantis — a cluster of square, sun-baked buildings around a market square, and a road that fed into the old dragonway. He flew Caraxes low over it, not deliberately, just following the road's line. Below, the market square emptied. Not with the chaos of panic — with the deliberate, controlled movement of people deciding to be somewhere else.
Not awe. Not reverence. Wariness. The wariness of a people who remembered the dragonlords not as legends but as rulers. Conquerors. Men who had controlled their cities, taxed their trade, conscripted their workers for Valyrian building projects, and called it civilisation.
"They don't love us," Aemon said, when Edwell translated, what he guessed was something between bastard Valyrians and mongreal Ghiscari, what a trader had said at the next stop — something about dragonlords and the old yoke, the words spat not shouted.
Aemon mostly understood bastard Valyrian, but the heavy ghiscari mix is difficult to follow, but his father insisted upon Edwell, a traveler for translation and his knowledge of Free Cities. Aemon found the man useful.
"No, my prince." Edwell agreed. "The Ghiscari cities remember the Freehold differently than Volantis does. Volantis chose to model itself on Valyria. The Ghiscari were conquered by it. Old Ghis fell to dragonfire. Their empire was broken." He paused. "They rebuilt. Slowly. And the Freehold fell while they were still rebuilding, which they considered justice from their gods."
"And a Valyrian dragonlord flying over their market square?" He paused turning towards people watching them and,
"...is a Reminder that justice can be undone," Edwell said.
Aemon flew higher after that.
…
69 AC — The Bay of Astapor, Slaver's Bay
The fleet was already anchored in the bay when Aemon brought Caraxes down on the headland north of the city walls — ten ships under the Velaryon seahorse, oars shipped, riding easy on the flat morning water. He spotted Daemon Velaryon's flagship by its size, and by the man himself standing at the rail as Aemon descended the rocky path from the headland toward the dock.
Daemon was exactly where Aemon expected him to be, doing exactly what Aemon expected: standing with his hands behind his back, looking at Astapor with the expression of a man working out a problem he'd seen before.
"My prince." A short nod. "Good flying?"
"Informative."
"And Volantis? Did they send you off with the proper songs and flatteries?"
"Three men with gifts and a conversation that meant nothing."
"That is Volantis being polite," Daemon said, a ghost of a smirk playing on his salt-worn face. He turned his back to the sea, gesturing toward the looming shadows of the coast. "Astapor will be the same. They will bring you sweets and spiced wine and call you 'Your Radiance' until your ears bleed. You are a dragonlord, after all. The first to grace these sun-bleached bricks in a hundred years. They have forgotten the fire, but they remember the fear."
Aemon stood beside him and looked at the city properly for the first time.
Red. Everything about it was red — the brick of its walls, the dust of its roads where they met the shoreline, High above the ramparts, the Great Pyramid loomed, topped by a colossal bronze harpy that shimmered in the heat haze, her wings spread in a cruel, faded relief. The harbour smelled of brine and something else beneath it, something that had nothing to do with the sea.
"It smells of the grave," Aemon murmured.
"It smells of Astapor," Daemon corrected him. "In the Stepstones, you smell the spray. In King's Landing, you smell the sh*t. Here, you smell the history. And in this city, history is written in red."
"You've been here before too," Aemon said.
"Once. Twenty years ago." Daemon didn't elaborate immediately. Then: "I was younger and I thought I'd seen everything the world had to offer. I was wrong by about Astapor."
"What changed your mind?"
"The training yards," he said. "You'll see them. Don't let it stop you."
It was the same thing Baelon had said. Almost the same words. Aemon filed that away.
"How do you want to proceed, my prince?" Daemon asked. "We go in with fleet, or you go in quiet first?"
Baelon had talked him through this exact question the night before he left — sitting in the map room of the Red Keep, the two of them alone, Baelon tracing routes on the table with his finger the way he always did when he was thinking out loud.
'Don't arrive with the whole fleet. They'll see merchant opportunity and double the price. Go in as a prince making a purchase. The fleet is logistics, not a threat — let them figure that out afterward.'
"I go in first," Aemon said. "Small group. Ser Ryam, Edwell for translation. We agree terms. Then you bring the ships into the inner harbor for loading."
"A slave army." Lord Daemon leaned against the rail, the salt air tangling his silver-grey hair. He spoke softly, a man sharing a secret with the sea. "In all my years on the waves, from the Stepstones to the Shadow Lands, I never thought to see the day a Prince of the Blood came to market for meat on the hoof."
"You heard my father's command and my brother's counsel, my lord," Aemon replied, his voice hardening like cooling steel. "They will not be slaves. Not once they stand upon Westerosi decks."
"They may be free men in your heart, Prince, but it will not make them cheap in the Lord Beesbury's ledgers," Daemon countered. He turned, his eyes like polished flint. "The Blood Wyrm may cow them, but greed is a sturdier thing than fear. The slave trade has not seen such a glut since the Doom. These new khalasars are screaming across the grass, driving thousands into the pens of the Slaver's Cities. The supply is high, yet the Good Masters still price every soul as if it were carved from jade."
"The Iron Throne has gold enough to buy every shack and hovel in this gods-forsaken bay," Aemon said, his hand tightening on the pommel of his sword. "It is not the coin I begrudge. It is the thought of filling the purses of these silk-clad butchers so they may buy more whips. I find the taste of their commerce as foul as the stench of their city."
Daemon nodded. "And if the masters try something clever?"
Aemon glanced back toward the headland where Caraxes had settled, coal-red against the rock, one eye half-open, watching the bay with the patient attention of an animal that never fully stopped being dangerous.
"Then I have Caraxes." Dragon as if in response let out a low growl.
Daemon looked at the dragon for a moment. "I watched three of their harbour guards get off a boat this morning and see him for the first time," he said. "Two of them went pale. The third one knelt."
"They knelt?"
"Old habit. Hundred-year-old habit." He turned back. "These cities remember what a dragon means. Use that how you will."
…
They entered through the main gate on horseback — Aemon, Ser Ryam, Edwell, and two knights of the escort — and the city responded to them like a stone dropped into still water.
It started at the gate. The guards there were hard men, the kind who spent their days deciding who was worth a second look and who wasn't. They took one look at Aemon's silver-gold hair and the violet eyes and the Targaryen sigil on his chest and they stepped back. Not a bow, not a greeting — just a step back, quick and automatic, like men who had just noticed they were standing too close to something.
Inside the walls, it spread.
He watched it move through the crowd ahead of them as they rode — heads turning, conversations stopping mid-word, people nudging each other and pointing. Not at him the way they pointed at curiosities. At him the way they pointed at something that shouldn't exist.
A Valyrian dragonlord.
Here. In Astapor. In the flesh.
An old woman near a market stall touched her forehead with two fingers and muttered something he couldn't hear. A merchant in expensive robes stopped mid-haggle and just watched them pass, mouth open. Three children ran alongside their horses for half a block before a woman pulled them away, scolding in rapid Ghiscari. But it wasn't all reverence — he caught other faces too. A man who spat after they passed. A woman who watched from a doorway with her arms crossed, expression flat. Two dock workers who saw Aemon's hair and leaned close to each other, whispering, and neither of them looked awed.
Aemon kept his face neutral and his back straight, the way he had been taught. But he felt it — the weight of it. The Doom had been over hundered years ago. 171 years since Valyria fell, since the dragonlords died, since the blood of the Forty became something people spoke about in the past tense. And here he was, riding through an Essosi city with his silver hair and his purple eyes and his dragon sitting on a rock two miles north of the gate.
Not everyone here had the old reflex Daemon had described. Some of them remembered the dragonlords the other way.
Aemon kept his back straight and his face neutral.
"They think you're a legend," Edwell murmured from his left.
"Some of them," Aemon said quietly.
"The dangerous kind," Edwell agreed. "Both sorts."
The street opened into a wide plaza of red stone, and Aemon saw the slaver compound ahead — high walls, bronze doors, the harpy of Astapor carved into the lintel. Already there were men on the steps waiting for them. Word had clearly run ahead.
…
There were three of them.
Kraznys mo Nakloz was the one in front — broad, richly dressed, wearing the expression of a man who had met many powerful buyers and knew exactly how to handle them. Behind his left shoulder stood a leaner man introduced as Grazdan zo Rhazdar, who had the eyes of someone doing sums while other people talked. Behind his right was an older man, Harzoo mo Eraz, with white hair and the careful stillness of someone who had survived in this business long enough to know when to say nothing.
All three of them bowed. Not the slight, performative bow men gave to wealthy merchants. A real bow — the kind that came from somewhere genuine. Somewhere old.
Kraznys spoke first in High Valyrian, still Edwell translated: "The Good Masters of Astapor welcome the Prince of Westeros. They are honoured beyond words to receive a son of the blood of Old Valyria."
"Tell them I'm here to buy Unsullied."
Edwell translated. It was a farce, they knew it. What sort of dragonlord didn't speak its mother tongue. They however often pride themselves on their ability to speak High Valyrian as a sign of refinement and status, even if they prefer their native "mongrel" dialect for daily use.
Kraznys spread his hands and smiled and spoke at some length. "He says Astapor has the finest Unsullied in Slaver's Bay, trained to the highest standard, and the Good Masters would be honoured to discuss terms —"
"All of them."
Silence.
Edwell translated. The three masters looked at each other — just a glance, quick — and Aemon watched what it meant move between them. Kraznys's smile stayed in place but didn't quite reach his eyes anymore. Grazdan's sums got more complicated. Harzoo went very still.
Kraznys spoke carefully. "He asks how many the Prince requires. Currently available for purchase are eight thousand, two hundred and forty men, full complement, with —"
"I said all of them."
Another look between the three. Harzoo said something quietly from behind Kraznys's shoulder. Kraznys answered without turning his head.
"They are asking about payment," Edwell murmured.
"I know. Tell them I have it."
Kraznys studied him for a long moment — trying, Aemon thought, to decide whether this was a bluff or something stranger. Then he spoke again and Edwell translated: "The Good Masters would be grateful for proof of that before they proceed."
Aemon reached into his riding coat and produced a sealed document — a letter of credit from the Iron Bank, brokered through a Braavosi contact Baelon had cultivated over six months, the account opened in the name of House Targaryen. He held it out.
Grazdan leaned in first — the sums-man — and his expression as he read it shifted so quickly it was almost funny. Surprise, calculation, a cautious excitement he was trying to keep off his face and failing at.
Kraznys took it next. Read it. Then looked up at Aemon with the expression of a man recalibrating everything he had prepared to say.
"They will need a day to confirm," Edwell translated.
"They have until evening."
…
While the masters conferred, they gave him a tour.
The training yard was the part both Baelon and Daemon had warned him about, without either of them describing it directly. He understood why, walking into it. Some things were harder to prepare someone for than others.
Two hundred Unsullied stood in the midday sun without shade or water, still as carved figures, sweating in perfect silence. Their spears were at identical angles. Their faces were forward and blank in a way that wasn't quite like a soldier's face and wasn't quite like anything else.
Kraznys walked him down the first row with the pride of a man showing off something he had built. He talked the whole time — Edwell translating in pieces, not that he needed it— about discipline, about the ten-year training process, about what exactly was done during those years to produce this. He said the last part plainly, without shame or hesitation, because in his understanding there was nothing to be ashamed of. It was a production method. These were the results.
Aemon listened. He kept his face neutral. Inside, something had gone very quiet and very cold.
Then Kraznys snapped his fingers.
An overseer said something to a man in the third rank. The man stepped forward, drew a blade, and put a clean cut across his own forearm. He stepped back into line. He didn't make a sound. He didn't look at the wound.
Kraznys smiled and gestured as if to say: you see?
Behind Kraznys, a slave — a man who had been standing nearby throughout, holding a parasol against the sun for the master — looked at that cut for just a moment. One blink. Then his eyes went back to nothing.
Aemon watched him.
That one blink. That was the thing.
He thought of the man on the Long Bridge in Volantis. The one with the grey beard and the careful eyes who had held his hands out while a buyer checked them. He thought of the woman at the waystation who had said — we believe whichever version seems most useful at the time.
"Tell him that's enough," Aemon said.
"My prince?"
"Tell him I've seen enough of the demonstration. I'm satisfied." He felt his blood boil, he felt Caraxes taking to sky.
He turned back toward the compound before Kraznys could arrange another one of his demonstration. Before, he let Caraxes have its own demonstration.
…
The paperwork took the better part of the afternoon. The three masters sat across a long table from Aemon and Edwell, trading Ghiscari back and forth in rapid, tense bursts. Daemon arrived an hour in, having been signalled to bring the fleet into the inner bay, and he pulled up a chair beside Aemon without being invited and looked at the documents with the expression of a man who had signed a thousand contracts and trusted approximately none of them.
"The harbour fees they're adding on page three," he said, pointing without touching the tablet. "That's not standard. They're adding a Slaver's Bay levy. It doesn't exist."
Edwell translated. Grazdan looked at Daemon with something that wasn't quite respect but was close to it — the recognition of one man who works in coin meeting another — and after a short exchange the line came out.
Kraznys tried twice more over the next hour. Daemon caught both of them.
"Lord Velaryon," Aemon said, after the third.
"My prince."
"How many times have you done this?"
Daemon thought about it. "Negotiated a large purchase in an Essosi slaving port where the sellers assumed I was too foreign to read their accounting properly?" He picked up his wine cup. "A few times."
"And they always try the same things?"
"They try what works. Most buyers don't read the fees." He nodded toward Grazdan. "That one's clever, though. He stopped when he realised I'd read the contract before I sat down. Some of them keep pushing even then, out of habit."
Grazdan, who clearly didn't understand Common Tongue, was watching them with the patient attention of a man trying to read a conversation from the body language alone.
"Has the cargo situation been sorted?" Aemon asked.
"We're not carrying eight thousand soldiers in cargo holds," Daemon said, with the tone of a man correcting something he found professionally offensive. "They'll be billeted on deck and in the lower rowing galleries. Tight but workable. Ten days to the Stepstones, weather holding."
"And if the weather doesn't hold?"
"Then we sail slower and they get wet. These men have survived ten years in those yards." He glanced back toward the compound. "I doubt rain is what finishes them."
By the time the sun touched the walls of the city, the last seal was pressed. The gold was confirmed against the letter of credit. The transaction, in the eyes of Astapor and its Good Masters, was complete.
Eight thousand, two hundred and forty men. Purchased.
…
The three masters had already begun to disperse — Kraznys speaking with Grazdan in low rapid Ghiscari — when Aemon stood in front of the formation in the bright light of the plaza and spoke.
Aemon looked down at the Harpy's Finger, the physical token of ownership of this Slave Army. He kept it short because he had never trusted long speeches, and because these men had heard enough words from people who wanted things from them to last several lifetimes.
The air in the Plaza of Punishment was thick with the scent of hot dust and old blood, but the silence that followed Aemon's words was heavier still. It was a silence born of eight thousand heartbeats, frozen in the sweltering heat.
"You were sold to me today. That is the last time anyone sells you. You are free — every one of you, as of right now."
Silence. Eight thousand men standing in it.
Behind him, he heard Kraznys stop mid-sentence. The Good Master's face, oiled and fleshy, contorted as if he had been slapped.
"I'm asking you to choose to serve. Come west with me. Take wages. Take the oath of the Iron Throne. Not as slaves. As soldiers. If you want to walk away instead — into this city, or anywhere else — no one will stop you."
He waited. He let the offer hang in the shimmering heat. He let the harpy's finger, slip from his hand and stomped on hard on its grip, filling the silence in the plaza to fill with a sharp crack.
Kraznys let out a sharp, jagged cry in the tongue of Old Ghis, before shouting in High Valyrian, his voice cracking with a frantic, ugly authority. Edwell did not need to translate the rage. "They are chattel! It is purchased and paid for! You cannot simply—"
"The gold has changed hands, and the whip has been broken," Aemon cut him off, his tone chillingly calm. "The transaction is finished. They are mine. And I say they are free."
The Good Master stepped forward, his silk tokar rustling, his face turning a bruised purple. "This is a madness! To free the slaves is to spit upon the laws of Ghis and the traditions of Valyria itself! You shall find yourself—"
The rest of his threat was drowned out by a sound that tore the sky.
It was a scream that didn't just strike the ear; it rattled their bones. From the blinding glare of the sun, a crimson shadow plummeted. Caraxes. The Blood Wyrm descended like a falling star of fire and scale, his long, serpentine neck snapping forward as he leveled off mere yards above the plaza. The updraft of his leathery wings sent a swirl of grit and ash screaming through the air.
The dragon let out a final, chest-thumping roar at Aemon's silent command, the sound echoing off the harpy-crowned pyramids until it seemed the city itself was trembling.
Aemon turned then. Kraznys mo Nakloz was no longer standing; he had collapsed onto the red stones, his fine silks tangled beneath him as he stared upward with sightless, whimpering terror. Of the other masters, two had fallen back, unable to meet the Prince's violet gaze.
Aemon looked down at the shivering heap of a man who had claimed to own souls only moments before. Then, with a flicker of disdain, he turned his back on the masters and looked once more toward the eight thousand. Not a single Unsullied moved a inch, in the face of dragon, but you could see the effect it had on the men, who apparently felt nothing.
The silence returned, but this time it was the silence of a hammer held high, waiting to fall.
The first spear-butt came down in the third rank — a single hard crack against the red stone. Then the man beside him. Then the next. It moved through the formation the way a tide comes in — not rushed, not chaotic, but steady, inevitable, each strike picking up the one before it until the sound was rolling off every wall in the plaza and Aemon could feel the vibration of it through the soles of his boots and up through his spine.
Kraznys had gone very still.
Daemon Velaryon stood to Aemon's right and said nothing for a moment.
Then: "Well. That answers that."
"Yes," Aemon said. "It does."
…
He left the loading to Daemon, who had been organising the movement of men in difficult ports since before Aemon could ride, and climbed back to the headland where Caraxes was waiting.
The Blood Wyrm had not moved from his rock. He was watching the bay with that permanent half-lidded patience — not laziness, Aemon had long since decided, but the attention of a creature that could afford to wait because nothing below posed a threat worth hurrying for. When Aemon reached him, Caraxes turned his long neck and made the sound low in his throat that meant he was willing to go.
"Give it a moment," Aemon said.
He sat down on the rock and looked at the city. The ships were moving in formation, repositioning to receive passengers. The lanterns were coming on one by one. Below in the plaza, he could just make out the Unsullied breaking ranks for the first time — not the mechanical dispersal of soldiers following an order, but men moving with something slightly different in how they held themselves. Something that was not yet much of anything, but might become something, given time.
He thought about the journey. The Long Bridge in Volantis. The old man with the careful eyes. The woman at the waystation and her dragon legends. The empty market square when Caraxes's shadow crossed it. The face of the man in the training yard who had blinked once and put his eyes back to nothing. Three hundred years of history in these cities — the Freehold's shadow, long after the fire went out.
And then he thought about Baelon.
About the night before he'd left — the two of them in the map room, Baelon tracing the Slaver's Bay coastline with one finger, talking through the plan quietly as though the details were obvious and he was only saying them out loud to be thorough.
'The Unsullied are the gap. Men who answer to the crown and nothing else — no house, no maester, no lord they grew up serving. It's the one piece missing from everything our house, has its own army, and it's a bad one to leave open.'
Then he had looked up with the particular flat certainty he used when a thing was already decided:
'You're the only one I'd send for this. Not because you're my brother. Because you'll actually finish it.'
Eight thousand free men were, even now, walking toward the ships of their own choosing.
Aemon thought his brother would be quietly pleased. Which, from Baelon, was as good as anyone's celebration.
Daemon came up the path from the dock while Aemon was still sitting. He stood beside him and looked at the bay without speaking for a while.
"The loading will take until morning," he said eventually.
"I'll fly ahead. Meet you at the Stepstones."
"Good." Daemon was quiet for another moment. "I've been at sea for thirty years. Bought and sold cargo across a dozen ports." He didn't look at Aemon when he said it. "Never cargo like that." A pause. "I mean that in the better direction."
Aemon looked at him.
"I know what you mean," he said.
Caraxes had grown impatient. He stretched his neck and made the sound again, louder.
"Go," Daemon said. "I'll get them home."
Aemon climbed. The saddle settled around him with the easy familiarity of years. Caraxes coiled and launched in one movement — no ceremony, no warm-up, just the sudden massive surge of muscle and wing that always caught the breath even after all this time — and the Red City fell away below. The lights of it coming on in the dark, red stone glowing amber where the torches caught, the fleet in the bay like a small ordered constellation come to rest on the water.
Aemon looked back at it once.
Then Caraxes stretched his wings full, found his heading west, and flew.
— End of Chapter 21 —