A Feast for Dragons

time.
    Instead the wound had festered, until Victarion began to
wonder whether Serry’s blade had been poisoned. Why else would the cut refuse
to heal? The thought made him rage. No true man killed with poison. At Moat
Cailin the bog devils had loosed poisoned arrows at his men, but that was to be
expected from such degraded creatures. Serry had been a knight, highborn.
Poison was for cravens, women, and Dornishmen.
    “If not Serry, who?” he asked the dusky woman. “Could that
mouse of a maester be doing this? Maesters know spells and other tricks. He
might be using one to poison me, hoping I will let him cut my hand off.” The
more he thought on it, the more likely it seemed. “The Crow’s Eye gave him to
me, wretched creature that he is.” Euron had taken Kerwin off Greenshield,
where he had been in service to Lord Chester, tending his ravens and teaching
his children, or perhaps the other away around. And how the mouse had squealed
when one of Euron’s mutes delivered him aboard the
Iron Victory
,
dragging him along by the convenient chain about his neck. “If this is his
revenge, he wrongs me. It was Euron who insisted he be taken, to keep him from
making mischief with his birds.” His brother had given him three cages of
ravens too, so Kerwin could send back word of their voyaging, but Victarion had
forbidden him to loose them.
Let the Crow’s Eye stew and wonder
.
    The dusky woman was binding his hand with fresh linen,
wrapping it six times around his palm, when Longwater Pyke came pounding at the
cabin door to tell him that the captain of
Grief
had come
aboard with a prisoner. “Says he’s brought us a wizard, Captain. Says he fished
him from the sea.”
    “A wizard?” Could the Drowned God have sent a gift to him,
here on the far side of the world? His brother Aeron would have known, but
Aeron had seen the majesty of the Drowned God’s watery halls below the sea
before being returned to life. Victarion had a healthy fear of his god, as all
men should, but put his faith in steel. He flexed his wounded hand, grimacing,
then pulled his glove on and rose. “Show me this wizard.”
    Grief
’s master awaited them on deck. A small
man, as hairy as he was homely, he was a Sparr by birth. His men called him the
Vole. “Lord Captain,” he said when Victarion appeared, “this is Moqorro. A gift
to us from the Drowned God.”
    The wizard was a monster of a man, as tall as Victarion
himself and twice as wide, with a belly like a boulder and a tangle of
bone-white hair that grew about his face like a lion’s mane. His skin was
black. Not the nut brown of the Summer Islanders on their swan ships, nor the
red-brown of the Dothraki horselords, nor the charcoal-and-earth color of the
dusky woman’s skin, but
black
. Blacker than coal, blacker than
jet, blacker than a raven’s wing.
Burned
, Victarion thought,
like
a man who has been roasted in the flames until his flesh chars and crisps and
falls smoking from his bones
. The fires that had charred him still
danced across his cheeks and forehead, where his eyes peered out from amongst a
mask of frozen flames.
Slave tattoos
, the captain knew.
Marks
of evil
.
    “We found him clinging to a broken spar,” said the Vole. “He
was ten days in the water after his ship went down.”
    “If he were ten days in the water, he’d be dead, or mad from
drinking seawater.” Salt water was holy; Aeron Damphair and other priests might
bless men with it and swallow a mouthful or two from time to time to strengthen
their faith, but no mortal man could drink of the deep sea for days at a time
and hope to live. “You claim to be a sorcerer?” Victarion asked the prisoner.
    “No, Captain,” the black man answered in the Common Tongue.
His voice was so deep it seemed to come from the bottom of the sea. “I am but a
humble slave of R’hllor, the Lord of Light.”
    R’hllor. A red priest, then
. Victarion had
seen such men in foreign cities, tending their sacred fires. Those had worn
rich red robes of silk and velvet and lambswool. This one was dressed in faded,
salt-stained rags that clung to his thick legs and hung about his torso in
tatters … but when the captain peered at the rags more closely, it
did appear as if they might once have been red. “A pink priest,” Victarion
announced.
    “A demon priest,” said Wulfe One-Ear. He spat.
    “Might be his robes caught fire, so he jumped overboard to
put them out,” suggested Longwater Pyke, to general