A Feast for Dragons

the captain’s words into the Common Tongue of Westeros. The war for Meereen
was won, the captain claimed; the dragon queen was dead, and a Ghiscari by the
name of Hizdak ruled the city now.
    Victarion had his tongue torn out for lying. Daenerys
Targaryen was
not
dead, Moqorro assured him; his red god
R’hllor had shown him the queen’s face in his sacred fires. The captain could
not abide lies, so he had the Ghiscari captain bound hand and foot and thrown
overboard, a sacrifice to the Drowned God. “Your red god will have his due,” he
promised Moqorro, “but the seas are ruled by the Drowned God.”
    “There are no gods but R’hllor and the Other, whose name may
not be said.” The sorcerer priest was garbed in somber black, but for a hint of
golden thread at collar, cuffs, and hem. There was no red cloth aboard the
Iron
Victory
, but it was not meet that Moqorro go about in the salt-stained
rags he had been wearing when the Vole fished him from the sea, so Victarion
had commanded Tom Tidewood to sew new robes for him from whatever was at hand,
and had even donated some of his own tunics to the purpose. Of black and gold
those were, for the arms of House Greyjoy showed a golden kraken on a black
field, and the banners and sails of their ships displayed the same. The
crimson-and-scarlet robes of the red priests were alien to the ironborn, but
Victarion had hoped his men might accept Moqorro more easily once clad in
Greyjoy colors.
    He hoped in vain. Clad in black from head to heel, with a
mask of red-and-orange flames tattooed across his face, the priest appeared
more sinister than ever. The crew shunned him when he walked the deck, and men
would spit if his shadow chanced to fall upon them. Even the Vole, who had
fished the red priest from the sea, had urged Victarion to give him to the
Drowned God.
    But Moqorro knew these strange shores in ways the ironborn
did not, and secrets of the dragonkind as well.
The Crow’s Eye keeps
wizards, why shouldn’t I?
His black sorcerer was more puissant than
all of Euron’s three, even if you threw them in a pot and boiled them down to
one. The Damphair might disapprove, but Aeron and his pieties were far away.
    So Victarion closed his burned hand into a mighty fist, and
said, “
Ghiscari Dawn
is no fit name for a ship of the Iron
Fleet. For you, wizard, I shall rename her
Red God’s Wroth.”
    His wizard bowed his head. “As the captain says.” And the
ships of the Iron Fleet numbered four-and-fifty once again.
    The next day a sudden squall descended on them. Moqorro had
predicted that as well. When the rains moved on, three ships were found to have
vanished. Victarion had no way to know whether they had foundered, run aground,
or been blown off course. “They know where we are going,” he told his crew. “If
they are still afloat, we will meet again.” The iron captain had no time to
wait for laggards. Not with his bride encircled by her enemies.
The most
beautiful woman in the world has urgent need of my axe
.
    Besides, Moqorro assured him that the three ships were not
lost. Each night, the sorcerer priest would kindle a fire on the forecastle of
the
Iron Victory
and stalk around the flames, chanting prayers.
The firelight made his black skin shine like polished onyx, and sometimes
Victarion could swear that the flames tattooed on his face were dancing too,
twisting and bending, melting into one another, their colors changing with
every turn of the priest’s head.
    “The black priest is calling demons down on us,” one oarsman
was heard to say. When that was reported to Victarion, he had the man scourged
until his back was blood from shoulders to buttocks. So when Moqorro said,
“Your lost lambs will return to the flock off the isle called Yaros,” the
captain said, “Pray that they do, priest. Or you may be the next to taste the
whip.”
    The sea was blue and green and the sun blazing down from an
empty blue sky when the Iron Fleet took its second prize, in the waters north
and west of Astapor.
    This time it was a Myrish cog named
Dove
, on
her way to Yunkai by way of New Ghis with a cargo of carpets, sweet green
wines, and Myrish lace. Her captain owned a Myrish eye that made far-off things
look close—two glass lenses in a series of brass tubes, cunningly wrought so
that each section slid into the next, until the eye was no longer than a dirk.
Victarion claimed that treasure for himself. The cog he renamed
Shrike
.
Her crew would be kept for