A Dance With Dragons

well: fishing boats, lumbering merchantmen, proud galleys with their oars lashing the waves into white foam. But once they struck out into deeper waters, there was only sea and sky, air and water. The water looked like water. The sky looked like sky. Sometimes there was a cloud. Too much blue.
    And the nights were worse. Tyrion slept badly at the best of times, and this was far from that. Sleep meant dreams as like as not, and in his dreams the Sorrows waited, and a stony king with his father’s face. That left him with the beggar’s choice of climbing up into his hammock and listening to Jorah Mormont snore beneath him, or remaining abovedecks to contemplate the sea. On moonless nights the water was as black as maester’s ink, from horizon to horizon. Dark and deep and forbidding, beautiful in a chilly sort of way, but when he looked at it too long Tyrion found himself musing on how easy it would be to slip over the gunwale and drop down into that darkness. One very small splash, and the pathetic little tale that was his life would soon be done. But what if there is a hell and my father’s waiting for me?
    The best part of each evening was supper. The food was not especially good, but it was plentiful, so that was where the dwarf went next. The galley where he took his meals was a cramped and uncomfortable space, with a ceiling so low that the taller passengers were always in danger of cracking their heads, a hazard the strapping slave soldiers of the Fiery Hand seemed particularly prone to. As much as Tyrion enjoyed sniggering at that, he had come to prefer taking his meals alone. Sitting at a crowded table with men who did not share a common language with you, listening to them talk and jape whilst understanding none of it, had quickly grown wearisome. Particularly since he always found himself wondering if the japes and laughter were directed at him.
    The galley was also where the ship’s books were kept. Her captain being an especially bookish man, she carried three—a collection of nautical poetry that went from bad to worse, a well-thumbed tome about the erotic adventures of a young slave girl in a Lysene pillow house, and the fourth and final volume of The Life of the Triarch Belicho, a famous Volantene patriot whose unbroken succession of conquests and triumphs ended rather abruptly when he was eaten by giants. Tyrion had finished them all by their third day at sea. Then, for lack of any other books, he started reading them again. The slave girl’s story was the worst written but the most engrossing, and that was the one he took down this evening to see him through a supper of buttered beets, cold fish stew, and biscuits that could have been used to drive nails.
    He was reading the girl’s account of the day she and her sister were taken by slavers when Penny entered the galley. “Oh,” she said, “I thought … I did not mean to disturb m’lord, I …”
    “You are not disturbing me. You’re not going to try to kill me again, I hope.”
    “No.” She looked away, her face reddening. “In that case, I would welcome some company. There’s little enough aboard this ship.” Tyrion closed the book. “Come. Sit. Eat.” The girl had left most of her meals untouched outside her cabin door. By now she must be starving. “The stew is almost edible. The fish is fresh, at least.”
    “No, I … I choked on a fish bone once, I can’t eat fish.”
    “Have some wine, then.” He filled a cup and slid it toward her. “Compliments of our captain. Closer to piss than Arbor gold, if truth be told, but even piss tastes better than the black tar rum the sailors drink. It might help you sleep.”
    The girl made no move to touch the cup. “Thank you, m’lord, but no.” She backed away. “I should not be bothering you.”
    “Do you mean to spend your whole life running away?” Tyrion asked before she could slip back out the door.
    That stopped her. Her cheeks turned a bright pink, and he was afraid she was about to start weeping again. Instead she thrust out her lip defiantly and said, “You’re running too.”
    “I am,” he confessed, “but I am running to and you are running from, and there’s a world of difference there.”
    “We would never have had to run at all but for you.”
    It took some courage to say that to my face. “Are you speaking of King’s Landing or Volantis?”
    “Both.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “Everything. Why couldn’t you just come joust with us, the way