A Feast for Dragons

Qarth to Tall Trees Town, calling at unholy ports beyond
where only madmen went. Euron had even braved the Smoking Sea and lived to tell
of it.
And that with only one ship. If he can mock the gods, so can I
.
    “Aye, Captain,” said Wulfe One-Ear. He was not half the man
that Nute the Barber was, but the Crow’s Eye had stolen Nute. By raising him to
Lord of Oakenshield, his brother made Victarion’s best man his own. “Is it
still to be Meereen?”
    “Where else? The dragon queen awaits me in Meereen.”
The
fairest woman in the world if my brother could be believed. Her hair is
silver-gold, her eyes are amethysts
.
    Was it too much to hope that for once Euron had told it
true?
Perhaps
. Like as not, the girl would prove to be some
pock-faced slattern with teats slapping against her knees, her “dragons” no
more than tattooed lizards from the swamps of Sothoryos.
If she is all
that Euron claims, though …
They had heard talk of the beauty of
Daenerys Targaryen from the lips of pirates in the Stepstones and fat merchants
in Old Volantis. It might be true. And Euron had not made Victarion a gift of
her; the Crow’s Eye meant to take her for himself.
He sends me like a
serving man to fetch her. How he will howl when I claim her for myself
.
Let the men mutter. They had sailed too far and lost too much for Victarion to
turn west without his prize.
    The iron captain closed his good hand into a fist. “Go see
that my commands are carried out. And find the maester wherever he is hiding
and send him to my cabin.”
    “Aye.” Wulfe hobbled off.
    Victarion Greyjoy turned back toward the prow, his gaze
sweeping across his fleet. Longships filled the sea, sails furled and oars
shipped, floating at anchor or run up on the pale sand shore.
The Isle
of Cedars
. Where were these cedars? Drowned four hundred years ago, it
seemed. Victarion had gone ashore a dozen times, hunting fresh meat, and had
yet to see a cedar.
    The girlish maester Euron had inflicted upon him back in
Westeros claimed this place had once been called ‘the Isle of a Hundred
Battles,’ but the men who had fought those battles had all gone to dust
centuries ago.
The Isle of Monkeys, that’s what they should call it
.
There were pigs as well: the biggest, blackest boars that any of the ironborn
had ever seen and plenty of squealing piglets in the brush, bold creatures that
had no fear of man.
They were learning, though
. The larders of
the Iron Fleet were filling up with smoked hams, salted pork, and bacon.
    The monkeys, though … the monkeys were a plague.
Victarion had forbidden his men to bring any of the demonic creatures aboard
ship, yet somehow half his fleet was now infested with them, even his own
Iron
Victory
. He could see some now, swinging from spar to spar and ship to
ship.
Would that I had a crossbow
.
    Victarion did not like this sea, nor these endless cloudless
skies, nor the blazing sun that beat down on their heads and baked the decks
until the boards were hot enough to scorch bare feet. He did not like these
storms, which seemed to come up out of nowhere. The seas around Pyke were often
stormy, but there at least a man could smell them coming. These southron storms
were as treacherous as women. Even the water was the wrong color—a shimmering
turquoise close to shore, and farther out a blue so deep that it was almost
black. Victarion missed the grey-green waters of home, with their whitecaps and
surges.
    He did not like this Isle of Cedars either. The hunting
might be good, but the forests were too green and still, full of twisted trees
and queer bright flowers like none his men had ever seen before, and there were
horrors lurking amongst the broken palaces and shattered statues of drowned
Velos, half a league north of the point where the fleet lay at anchor. The last
time Victarion had spent a night ashore, his dreams had been dark and
disturbing and when he woke his mouth was full of blood. The maester said he
had bitten his own tongue in his sleep, but he took it for a sign from the
Drowned God, a warning that if he lingered here too long, he would choke on his
own blood.
    On the day the Doom came to Valyria, it was said, a wall of
water three hundred feet high had descended on the island, drowning hundreds of
thousands of men, women, and children, leaving none to tell the tale but some
fisherfolk who had been at sea and a handful of Velosi spearmen posted in a
stout stone tower on the island’s highest hill, who had