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Arryn?”
    â€œI have heard your counsel, Cressen,” Lord Stannis said. “Now I will hear
hers. You are dismissed.”
    Maester Cressen bent a stiff knee. He could feel Lady Selyse’s eyes on his back
as he shuffled slowly across the room. By the time he reached the bottom of the
steps it was all he could do to stand erect. “Help me,” he said to
Pylos.
    When he was safe back in his own rooms, Cressen sent the younger man away and
limped to his balcony once more, to stand between his gargoyles and stare out
to sea. One of Salladhor Saan’s warships was sweeping past the castle, her
gaily striped hull slicing through the grey-green waters as her oars rose and

fell. He watched until she vanished behind a headland.
Would that my fears
could vanish so easily.
Had he lived so long for this?
    When a maester donned his collar, he put aside the hope of children, yet
Cressen had oft felt a father nonetheless. Robert, Stannis,
Renly . . . three sons he had raised after the angry sea
claimed Lord Steffon. Had he done so ill that now he must watch one kill the
other? He could not allow it,
would
not allow it.
    The woman was the heart of it. Not the Lady Selyse, the
other
one.
The red woman, the servants had named her, afraid to speak her name. “I will
speak her name,” Cressen told his stone hellhound. “Melisandre.
Her.
” Melisandre of Asshai, sorceress, shadowbinder, and priestess
to R’hllor, the Lord of Light, the Heart of Fire, the God of Flame and Shadow.
Melisandre, whose madness must not be allowed to spread beyond
Dragonstone.
    His chambers seemed dim and gloomy after the brightness of the morning. With
fumbling hands, the old man lit a candle and carried it to the workroom beneath
the rookery stair, where his ointments, potions, and medicines stood neatly on
their shelves. On the bottom shelf behind a row of salves in squat clay jars he
found a vial of indigo glass, no larger than his little finger. It rattled when
he shook it. Cressen blew away a layer of dust and carried it back to his
table. Collapsing into his chair, he pulled the stopper and spilled out the
vial’s contents. A dozen crystals, no larger than seeds, rattled across the
parchment he’d

been reading. They shone like jewels in the candlelight, so purple that the
maester found himself thinking that he had never truly seen the color
before.
    The chain around his throat felt very heavy. He touched one of the crystals
lightly with the tip of his little finger.
Such a small thing to hold the
power of life and death.
It was made from a certain plant that grew only
on the islands of the Jade Sea, half a world away. The leaves had to be aged,
and soaked in a wash of limes and sugar water and certain rare spices from the
Summer Isles. Afterward they could be discarded, but the potion must be
thickened with ash and allowed to crystallize. The process was slow and
difficult, the necessaries costly and hard to acquire. The alchemists of Lys
knew the way of it, though, and the Faceless Men of
Braavos . . . and the maesters of his order as well, though it
was not something talked about beyond the walls of the Citadel. All the world
knew that a maester forged his silver link when he learned the art of
healing—but the world preferred to forget that men who knew how to heal
also knew how to kill.
    Cressen no longer recalled the name the Asshai’i gave the leaf, or the Lysene
poisoners the crystal. In the
Citadel, it was simply called the strangler.
Dissolved in wine, it would make the muscles of a man’s throat clench tighter
than any fist, shutting off his windpipe. They said a victim’s face turned as
purple as the little crystal seed from which his death was grown, but so too
did a man choking on a morsel of food.
    And this very night Lord Stannis would feast his bannermen,

his lady wife . . . and the red woman, Melisandre of
Asshai.
    I must rest,
Maester Cressen told himself.
I must have all my
strength come dark. My hands must not shake, nor my courage flag. It is a
dreadful thing I do, yet it must be done. If there are gods, surely they will
forgive me.
He had slept so poorly of late. A nap would refresh him for
the ordeal ahead. Wearily, he tottered off to his bed. Yet when he closed his
eyes, he could still see the light of the comet, red and fiery and vividly
alive amidst the darkness of his dreams.
Perhaps it