A Feast for Dragons

sodden canvas, but whether they were trying to raise the
sail again or pull it down he never knew. Whatever they were doing, it seemed
to him a very bad idea. And so it was.
    The wind returned as a whispered threat, cold and damp,
brushing over his cheek, flapping the wet sail, swirling and tugging at
Moqorro’s scarlet robes. Some instinct made Tyrion grab hold of the nearest
rail, just in time. In the space of three heartbeats the little breeze became a
howling gale. Moqorro shouted something, and green flames leapt from the
dragon’s maw atop his staff to vanish in the night. Then the rains came, black
and blinding, and forecastle and sterncastle both vanished behind a wall of
water. Something huge flapped overhead, and Tyrion glanced up in time to see
the sail taking wing, with two men still dangling from the lines. Then he heard
a
crack. Oh, bloody hell
, he had time to think,
that had
to be the mast
.
    He found a line and pulled on it, fighting toward the hatch
to get himself below out of the storm, but a gust of wind knocked his feet from
under him and a second slammed him into the rail and there he clung. Rain
lashed at his face, blinding him. His mouth was full of blood again. The ship
groaned and growled beneath him like a constipated fat man straining to shit.
    Then the mast burst.
    Tyrion never saw it, but he heard it. That
crack
ing
sound again and then a scream of tortured wood, and suddenly the air was full
of shards and splinters. One missed his eye by half an inch, a second found his
neck, a third went through his calf, boots and breeches and all. He screamed.
But he held on to the line, held on with a desperate strength he did not know
he had.
The widow said this ship would never reach her destination
,
he remembered. Then he laughed and laughed, wild and hysterical, as thunder
boomed and timbers moaned and waves crashed all around him.
    By the time the storm abated and the surviving passengers
and crew came crawling back on deck, like pale pink worms wriggling to the
surface after a rain, the
Selaesori Qhoran
was a broken thing,
floating low in the water and listing ten degrees to port, her hull sprung in
half a hundred places, her hold awash in seawater, her mast a splintered ruin no
taller than a dwarf. Even her figurehead had not escaped; one of his arms had
broken off, the one with all his scrolls. Nine men had been lost, including a
mate, two of the fiery fingers, and Moqorro himself.
    Did Benerro see this in his fires?
Tyrion
wondered, when he realized the huge red priest was gone.
Did Moqorro?
    “Prophecy is like a half-trained mule,” he complained to
Jorah Mormont. “It looks as though it might be useful, but the moment you trust
in it, it kicks you in the head. That bloody widow knew the ship would never
reach her destination, she warned us of that, said Benerro saw it in his fires,
only I took that to mean … well, what does it matter?” His mouth
twisted. “What it really meant was that some bloody big storm would turn our
mast to kindling so we could drift aimlessly across the Gulf of Grief until our
food ran out and we started eating one another. Who do you suppose they’ll
carve up first … the pig, the dog, or me?”
    “The noisiest, I’d say.”
    The captain died the following day, the ship’s cook three
nights later. It was all that the remaining crew could do to keep the wreck
afloat. The mate who had assumed command reckoned that they were somewhere off
the southern end of the Isle of Cedars. When he lowered the ship’s boats to tow
them toward the nearest land, one sank and the men in the other cut the line
and rowed off north, abandoning the cog and all their shipmates.
    “Slaves,” said Jorah Mormont, contemptuous.
    The big knight had slept through the storm, to hear him tell
it. Tyrion had his doubts, but he kept them to himself. One day he might want
to bite someone in the leg, and for that you needed teeth. Mormont seemed
content to ignore their disagreement, so Tyrion decided to pretend it had not
happened.
    For nineteen days they drifted, as food and water dwindled.
The sun beat down on them, relentless. Penny huddled in her cabin with her dog
and her pig, and Tyrion brought her food, limping on his bandaged calf and
sniffing at the wound by night. When he had nothing else to do, he pricked his
toes and fingers too. Ser Jorah made a point of sharpening his sword each day,
honing the point until it gleamed. The three remaining fiery fingers lit