A Feast for Dragons

Lannisport. Sweep in from the sea and smash them,
then take the girl and race for home before the Volantenes descend upon us.”
Victarion was no craven, but no more was he a fool; he could not defeat three
hundred ships with fifty-four. “She’ll be my wife, and you will be her maid.” A
maid without a tongue could never let slip any secrets.
    He might have said more, but that was when the maester came,
rapping at the cabin door as timid as a mouse. “Enter,” Victarion called out,
“and bar the door. You know why you are here.”
    “Lord Captain.” The maester looked like a mouse as well,
with his grey robes and little brown mustachio.
Does he think that makes
him look more manly?
Kerwin was his name. He was very young,
two-and-twenty maybe. “May I see your hand?” he asked.
    A fool’s question
. Maesters had their uses,
but Victarion had nothing but contempt for this Kerwin. With his smooth pink
cheeks, soft hands, and brown curls, he looked more girlish than most girls.
When first he came aboard the
Iron Victory
, he had a smirky
little smile too, but one night off the Stepstones he had smiled at the wrong man,
and Burton Humble had knocked out four of his teeth. Not long after that Kerwin
had come creeping to the captain to complain that four of the crew had dragged
him belowdecks and used him as a woman. “Here is how you put an end to that,”
Victarion had told him, slamming a dagger down on the table between them.
Kerwin took the blade—too afraid to refuse it, the captain judged—but he had
never used it.
    “My hand is here,” Victarion said. “Look all you like.”
    Maester Kerwin went down to one knee, the better to inspect
the wound. He even sniffed at it, like a dog. “I will need to let the pus
again. The color … lord Captain, the cut is not healing. It may be
that I will need to take your hand.”
    They had talked of this before. “If you take my hand, I will
kill you. But first I will tie you over the rail and make the crew a gift of
your arse. Get on with it.”
    “There will be pain.”
    “Always.”
Life is pain, you fool. There is no joy but
in the Drowned God’s watery halls
. “Do it.”
    The boy—it was hard to think of one so soft and pink as a
man—laid the edge of the dagger across the captain’s palm and slashed. The pus
that burst forth was thick and yellow as sour milk. The dusky woman wrinkled
her nose at the smell, the maester gagged, and even Victarion himself felt his
stomach churn. “Cut deeper. Get it all. Show me the blood.”
    Maester Kerwin pressed the dagger deep. This time it hurt,
but blood welled up as well as pus, blood so dark that it looked black in the
lantern light.
    Blood was good. Victarion grunted in approval. He sat there
unflinching as the maester dabbed and squeezed and cleaned the pus away with
squares of soft cloth boiled in vinegar. By the time he finished, the clean
water in his basin had become a scummy soup. The sight alone would sicken any
man. “Take that filth and go.” Victarion nodded at the dusky woman. “She can
bind me up.”
    Even after the boy had fled, the stink remained. Of late,
there was no escaping it. The maester had suggested that the wound might best
be drained up on deck, amidst fresh air and sunlight, but Victarion forbade it.
This was not something that his crew could see. They were half a world away
from home, too far to let them see that their iron captain had begun to rust.
    His left hand still throbbed—a dull pain, but persistent. When
he closed his hand into a fist it sharpened, as if a knife were stabbing up his
arm.
Not a knife, a longsword. A longsword in the hand of a ghost
.
Serry, that had been his name. A knight, and heir to Southshield.
I
killed him, but he stabs at me from beyond the grave. From the hot heart of
whatever hell I sent him to, he thrusts his steel into my hand and twists
.
    Victarion remembered the fight as if it had been yesterday.
His shield had been in shards, hanging useless from his arm, so when Serry’s
longsword came flashing down he had reached up and caught it. The stripling had
been stronger than he looked; his blade bit through the lobstered steel of the
captain’s gauntlet and the padded glove beneath into the meat of his palm.
A
scratch from a little kitten
, Victarion told himself afterward. He had
washed the cut, poured some boiled vinegar over it, bound it up, and thought
little more of it, trusting that the pain would fade and the hand heal itself
in