A Feast for Dragons

maester as they had for Urrigon. He died raving, and
Lord Quellon’s third wife followed soon thereafter, as the midwife drew a
stillborn daughter from her womb. Aeron had been glad. It had been his axe that
sheared off Urri’s hand, whilst they danced the finger dance together, as
friends and brothers will.
    It shamed him still to recall the years that followed Urri’s
death. At six-and-ten he called himself a man, but in truth he had been a sack
of wine with legs. He would sing, he would dance (but not the finger dance,
never again), he would jape and jabber and make mock. He played the pipes, he
juggled, he rode horses, and could drink more than all the Wynches and the
Botleys, and half the Harlaws too. The Drowned God gives every man a gift, even
him; no man could piss longer or farther than Aeron Greyjoy, as he proved at
every feast. Once he bet his new longship against a herd of goats that he could
quench a hearthfire with no more than his cock. Aeron feasted on goat for a
year, and named the longship Golden Storm, though Balon threatened to
hang him from her mast when he heard what sort of ram his brother proposed to
mount upon her prow.
    In the end the Golden Storm went down off Fair Isle
during Balon’s first rebellion, cut in half by a towering war galley called Fury when Stannis Baratheon caught Victarion in his trap and smashed the Iron Fleet.
Yet the god was not done with Aeron, and carried him to shore. Some fishermen
took him captive and marched him down to Lannisport in chains, and he spent the
rest of the war in the bowels of Casterly Rock, proving that krakens can piss
farther and longer than lions, boars, or chickens.
    That man is dead. Aeron had drowned and been reborn
from the sea, the god’s own prophet. No mortal man could frighten him, no more
than the darkness could . . . nor memories, the bones of the soul. The sound
of a door opening, the scream of a rusted iron hinge. Euron has come again. It did not matter. He was the Damphair priest, beloved of the god.
    “Will it come to war?” asked Greydon Goodbrother as the sun
was lightening the hills. “A war of brother against brother?”
    “If the Drowned God wills it. No godless man may sit the
Seastone Chair.” The Crow’s Eye will fight, that is certain. No woman
could defeat him, not even Asha; women were made to fight their battles in the
birthing bed. And Theon, if he lived, was just as hopeless, a boy of sulks and
smiles. At Winterfell he proved his worth, such that it was, but the Crow’s Eye
was no crippled boy. The decks of Euron’s ship were painted red, to better hide
the blood that soaked them. Victarion. The king must be Victarion, or the
storm will slay us all.
    Greydon left him when the sun was up, to take the news of
Balon’s death to his cousins in their towers at Downdelving, Crow Spike Keep,
and
Corpse
Lake
. Aeron continued
on alone, up hills and down vales along a stony track that drew wider and more
traveled as he neared the sea. In every village he paused to preach, and in the
yards of petty lords as well. “We were born from the sea, and to the sea we all
return,” he told them. His voice was as deep as the ocean, and thundered like
the waves. “The Storm God in his wrath plucked Balon from his castle and cast him
down, and now he feasts beneath the waves in the Drowned God’s watery halls.”
He raised his hands. “ Balon is dead! The king is dead! Yet a king will
come again! For what is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and
stronger! A king will rise! ”
    Some of those who heard him threw down their hoes and picks
to follow, so by the time he heard the crash of waves a dozen men walked behind
his horse, touched by god and desirous of drowning.
    Pebbleton was home to several thousand fisherfolk, whose
hovels huddled round the base of a square towerhouse with a turret at each
corner. Twoscore of Aeron’s drowned men there awaited him, camped along a grey
sand beach in sealskin tents and shelters built of driftwood. Their hands were
roughened by brine, scarred by nets and lines, callused from oars and picks and
axes, but now those hands gripped driftwood cudgels hard as iron, for the god
had armed them from his arsenal beneath the sea.
    They had built a shelter for the priest just above the
tideline. Gladly he crawled into it, after he had drowned his newest followers. My god, he prayed, speak to me in the rumble of the waves, and tell
me what to do. The captains and the kings await your