Chapter 14: The Two Swords
The return from the Vale felt like crossing a threshold. The pact with Jeyne Arryn was a cold, hard certainty in my pocket, a shield for our eastern flank. But the welcome on Dragonstone was not one of celebration. It was one of grim necessity.
Rhaenyra met me on the dock, her face etched with a tension I hadn't seen since the days following our mother's death. Without a word, she handed me a scroll. The seal was broken, but I recognized the sigil pressed into the wax—the twin towers of House Hightower.
"It came for you," she said, her voice tight. "From the Citadel. Addressed to the 'Scholar-Prince of Dragonstone.' A courtesy copy was sent to the Red Keep, no doubt to ensure Father saw it."
I unrolled the scroll. The language was florid, dripping with false praise, but the message was a masterfully crafted blade. It was a critique, a peer review of the "revolutionary" ship designs that had "so captivated the realm's imagination." The anonymous archmaester—though his identity was painfully obvious—picked apart the Leviathan design with surgical precision.
He questioned the structural integrity of the iron-cladding over long voyages, citing "fundamental principles of naval architecture" that my design "brazenly ignored." He theorized, in excruciating detail, how the weight distribution would make the ship "unmanageable in a high swell," likely to "capsize its own vanity." The Swift-class trader was dismissed as an "interesting theoretical exercise" whose sail plan was "unworkable in practice," doomed to be "torn to shreds by the first true storm."
It was a declaration of war. Not with swords, but with ink and reputation. Otto wasn't trying to sink my ships; he was trying to sink their credibility before they ever touched water. He was using the supposed neutrality and authority of the Citadel to paint me as a reckless fool, a boy playing with concepts he didn't understand, wasting the realm's resources on vanity projects.
The cold fury that rose in me was not my own. It was the Cannibal's, a black wave of rage at this indirect, cowardly challenge. I felt the dragon stir on his perch, sensing my anger. I forced it down, the effort leaving me breathless.
"He seeks to isolate you," Rhaenyra said, her eyes blazing. "To make the lords think you're a madman, not a visionary. To make them doubt the source of our power."
"I know," I said, my voice dangerously quiet. I crushed the scroll in my hand. "He plays the game he knows. Letters. Whispers. Reputation." I looked out at the sea, where the skeleton of the first Leviathan was still visible in the White Harbor shipyard across the water. "We will play ours."
---
The next morning, I didn't send a rebuttal to the Citadel. That would be playing on Otto's field. Instead, I went to the training yard. The Dragon's Teeth halted their drills as I approached. I didn't address them. I walked to the weapon rack and drew two practice longswords, their edges blunted but their weight real.
I tossed one to Ser Erryk, the commander of my guard. He caught it, surprise on his face.
"Show me," I said.
"My prince?"
"The style. The one I taught you. Show me how you would disarm a knight in full plate. How you would use his weight against him. How you would end a fight before it truly began."
He hesitated for only a second before nodding. He launched into a series of movements that were nothing like the broad, honorable sweeps of a tourney knight. They were brutal, efficient, and utterly without mercy. A low kick to the knee, a redirect of momentum, the pommel driven into a vulnerable gap in the armor. It was a language of violence translated from my memories into Westerosi reality.
When he finished, I nodded. "Good. Now, show everyone."
I spent the next week in the yard, not as a prince, but as a drillmaster. I refined their techniques, demonstrating with my own enhanced speed and precision. I showed them how to fight in tight formation, to use their surroundings, to turn a lord's finely wrought armor into a cage. I didn't just teach them to fight. I taught them to win, by any means necessary.
This was my answer to Otto's scroll. He could have his letters. I would have my knives.
---
But a ruler cannot wield only a knife. He must also wield a pen.
I summoned Yohanna to the design room. The criticized schematics were spread out before us.
"The archmaesters are not entirely wrong," I admitted, tapping the Leviathan's hull. "About the strain. They just lack imagination for the solution."
I unrolled a new parchment. "We need a new kind of beam. Stronger than oak. Lighter than iron." I began to sketch, my mind pulling concepts from a world of steel and carbon fiber, translating them into something possible with Westerosi technology. "We laminate it. Thin strips of ironwood and steel, bonded with a resin I will have the alchemists develop. It will be a spine that cannot be broken."
For the sails of the Swift-class: "The archmaester is a fool about the sail plan. But he is right about the wind tearing them. So we weave the canvas with a thread of thin, flexible wire. It will be heavier, but it will not shred."
Yohanna watched, her eyes wide as the impossible designs evolved into the improbably plausible. "The cost... the time..."
"Tell Lord Manderly and the Arbormasters the first Leviathan is now a prototype. A test bed for these new ideas. The next one will be the true ship. And the next one after that will be his." I looked at her. "We will not just build a ship, Yohanna. We will build a new way of building. And we will do it out here, where the grey rats of the Citadel cannot see, until it is too late for them to criticize."
I was fighting a war on two fronts. One with steel and ruthless efficiency, preparing a blade no one saw coming. The other with knowledge and innovation, building a future so advanced my enemies wouldn't recognize it until it was sailing into their harbor.
Otto Hightower had thrown down a gauntlet of parchment and dogma. My answer was taking shape in a shipyard and a training ground: a sword for my sister's hand, and a fleet to carry her to victory. The game had changed again. It was no longer about claims and successions. It was about the future itself. And I intended to build it first.