A Dance With Dragons

said the captain, “we found this man in the Belly o’ the Whale, trying to buy his way off island. He had twelve dragons on him, and this thing too.” The captain put it on the table by the lord: a wide ribbon of black velvet trimmed with cloth-of-gold, and bearing three seals; a crowned stag stamped in golden beeswax, a flaming heart in red, a hand in white.
    Davos waited wet and dripping, his wrists chafing where the wet rope dug into his skin. One word from this lord and he would soon be hanging from the Gallows Gate of Sisterton, but at least he was out of the rain, with solid stone beneath his feet in place of a heaving deck. He was soaked and sore and haggard, worn thin by grief and betrayal, and sick to death of storms.
    The lord wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and picked up the ribbon for a closer squint. Lightning flashed outside, making the arrow loops blaze blue and white for half a heartbeat. One, two, three, four, Davos counted, before the thunder came. When it quieted, he listened to the dripping, and the duller roar beneath his feet, where the waves were smashing against Breakwater’s huge stone arches and swirling through its dungeons. He might well end up down there, fettered to a wet stone floor and left to drown when the tide came rushing in. No, he tried to tell himself, a smuggler might die that way, but not a King’s Hand. I’m worth more if he sells me to his queen.
    The lord fingered the ribbon, frowning at the seals. He was an ugly man, big and fleshy, with an oarsman’s thick shoulders and no neck. Coarse grey stubble, going white in patches, covered his cheeks and chin. Above a massive shelf of brow he was bald. His nose was lumpy and red with broken veins, his lips thick, and he had a sort of webbing between the three middle fingers of his right hand. Davos had heard that some of the lords of the Three Sisters had webbed hands and feet, but he had always put that down as just another sailor’s story.
    The lord leaned back. “Cut him free,” he said, “and peel those gloves off him. I want to see his hands.”
    The captain did as he was told. As he jerked up his captive’s maimed left hand the lightning flashed again, throwing the shadow of Davos Seaworth’s shortened fingers across the blunt and brutal face of Godric Borrell, Lord of Sweetsister. “Any man can steal a ribbon,” the lord said, “but those fingers do not lie. You are the onion knight.”
    “I have been called that, my lord.” Davos was a lord himself, and had been a knight for long years now, but deep down he was still what he had always been, a smuggler of common birth who had bought his knighthood with a hold of onions and salt fish. “I have been called worse things too.”
    “Aye. Traitor. Rebel. Turncloak.”
    He bristled at the last. “I have never turned my cloak, my lord. I am a king’s man.”
    “Only if Stannis is a king.” The lord weighed him with hard black eyes. “Most knights who land upon my shores seek me in my hall, not in the Belly of the Whale. A vile smuggler’s den, that place. Are you returning to your old trade, onion knight?”
    “No, my lord. I was looking for passage to White Harbor. The king sent me, with a message for its lord.”
    “Then you are in the wrong place, with the wrong lord.” Lord Godric seemed amused. “This is Sisterton, on Sweetsister.”
    “I know it is.” There was nothing sweet about Sisterton, though. It was a vile town, a sty, small and mean and rank with the odors of pig shit and rotting fish. Davos remembered it well from his smuggling days. The Three Sisters had been a favorite haunt of smugglers for hundreds of years, and a pirate’s nest before that. Sisterton’s streets were mud and planks, its houses daub-and-wattle hovels roofed with straw, and by the Gallows Gate there were always hanged men with their entrails dangling out.
    “You have friends here, I do not doubt,” said the lord. “Every smuggler has friends on the Sisters. Some of them are my friends as well. The ones who aren’t, them I hang. I let them strangle slowly, with their guts slapping up against their knees.” The hall grew bright again, as lightning lit the windows. Two heartbeats later came the thunder. “If it is White Harbor that you want, why are you in Sisterton? What brought you here?”
    A king’s command and a friend’s betrayal, Davos might have said. Instead he answered, “Storms.”
    Nine-and-twenty ships had set sail from the Wall. If