A Feast for Dragons

you so far away? He does not mean for us to
return.”
    Victarion had thought the same when he met the first storm a
day out of Old Volantis.
The gods hate kinslayers
, he brooded,
elsewise
Euron Crow’s Eye would have died a dozen deaths by my hand
. As the sea
crashed around him and the deck rose and fell beneath his feet, he had seen
Dagon’s
Feast
and
Red Tide
slammed together so violently that
both exploded into splinters.
My brother’s work
, he’d thought.
Those were the first two ships he’d lost from his own third of the fleet. But
not the last.
    So he had slapped the Limper twice across the face and said,
“The first is for the ships you lost, the second for your talk of curses. Speak
of that again and I will nail your tongue to the mast. If the Crow’s Eye can
make mutes, so can I.” The throb of pain in his left hand made the words
harsher than they might have been elsewise, but he meant what he said. “More
ships will come. The storms are done for now. I will have my fleet.”
    A monkey on the mast above howled derision, almost as if it
could taste his frustration.
Filthy, noisy beast
. He could send
a man up after it, but the monkeys seemed to like that game and had proved
themselves more agile than his crew. The howls rang in his ears, though, and
made the throbbing in his hand seem worse.
    “Fifty-four,” he grumbled. It would have been too much to
hope for the full strength of the Iron Fleet after a voyage of such length … but
seventy ships, even eighty, the Drowned God might have granted him that much.
Would
that we had the Damphair with us, or some other priest
. Victarion had
made sacrifice before setting sail, and again in the Stepstones when he split
the fleet in three, but perhaps he had said the wrong prayers.
That, or
the Drowned God has no power here
. More and more, he had come to fear
that they had sailed too far, into strange seas where even the gods were
queer … but such doubts he confided only to his dusky woman, who had
no tongue to repeat them.
    When
Grief
appeared, Victarion summoned
Wulfe One-Ear. “I will want words with the Vole. Send word to Ralf the Limper,
Bloodless Tom, and the Black Shepherd. All hunting parties are to be recalled,
the shore camps broken up by first light. Load as much fruit as can be gathered
and drive the pigs aboard the ships. We can slaughter them at need.
Shark
is to remain here to tell any stragglers where we’ve gone.” She would need that
long to make repairs; the storms had left her little more than a hulk. That
would bring them down to fifty-three, but there was no help for it. “The fleet
departs upon the morrow, on the evening tide.”
    “As you command,” said Wulfe, “but another day might mean
another ship, lord Captain.”
    “Aye. And ten days might mean ten ships, or none at all. We
have squandered too many days waiting on the sight of sails. Our victory will
be that much the sweeter if we win it with a smaller fleet.”
And I must
needs reach the dragon queen before the Volantenes
.
    In Volantis he had seen the galleys taking on provisions.
The whole city had seemed drunk. Sailors and soldiers and tinkers had been
observed dancing in the streets with nobles and fat merchants, and in every inn
and winesink cups were being raised to the new triarchs. All the talk had been
of the gold and gems and slaves that would flood into Volantis once the dragon
queen was dead. One day of such reports was all that Victarion Greyjoy could
stomach; he paid the gold price for food and water, though it shamed him, and
took his ships back out to sea.
    The storms would have scattered and delayed the Volantenes,
even as they had his own ships. If fortune smiled, many of their warships might
have sunk or run aground. But not all. No god was that good, and those green
galleys that survived by now could well have sailed around Valyria.
They
will be sweeping north toward Meereen and Yunkai, great dromonds of war teeming
with slave soldiers. If the Storm God spared them, by now they could be in the
Gulf of Grief. Three hundred ships, perhaps as many as five hundred
.
Their allies were already off Meereen: Yunkishmen and Astapors, men from New
Ghis and Qarth and Tolos and the Storm God knew where else, even Meereen’s own
warships, the ones that fled the city before its fall. Against all that,
Victarion had four-and-fifty. Three-and-fifty, less the
Shark
.
    The Crow’s Eye had sailed halfway across the world, reaving
and plundering from