The Breaker of the Oceans, Chapter 44

Stefan Shield

He had been stretching his hamstrings when the commotion began. He did not stop at once. He counted to ten on the left leg, then switched and counted to ten on the right because leaving things even mattered in his head. Then he straightened and looked toward the noise.

Men had gathered near the great open pit where the cooks turned spits. The pit was lined with stones and ringed with trestles. Slabs of meat hung from iron, fat dripping into the fire. Smoke went up in a short tower before the wind took it. The air was full of it. The smell cut through the smells of horses and sweat and leather, set against them.

There were men of Westeros and men from lands farther than that. He knew his fellow Westerosi by their features; those of higher stations had their houses stitched to their cloaks or painted on their shields—even here, they could not lay down being from somewhere. A Riverlander with a heron on his sleeve; a Northman with a pale mountain sewn in rough wool on dark; a lowborn knight from the Crownlands whose surcoat bore only a clean field and a short tear where it had caught on a nail. Others wore no marks that Stefan knew. A man of small stature from a land where they inked their skin in patterns that told stories he could not read. A huge fellow whose beard grew in two long braids tied with bone. A woman in loose black trousers and a coat cut close at the waist, her hair braided tight at the scalp and her face marked with a line of paint down the nose.

Stefan had seen the Einherjar carried past earlier on, and the sight had quieted talk for a time. Now tongues had loosened again. Someone laughed and patted a companion on the back. A wine skin went around. So did bread, hard on the outside and warm within.

“Shield!” The call came from a Braavosi sellsword with whom Stefan had spoken to two days ago. The man’s nose had been broken twice in his life, and each time it had made a new decision about what his face should be. “Don’t lurk. Come. Sit. Listen.”

Stefan went. He found a place on a low bench between the Crownlands knight and a boy whose helmet sat not on his head but in his lap, as if he kept it there to assure himself it was real.

They were telling stories. 

A man in a wolfskin cloak spoke of a winter hunt that had gone wrong and how he had learned to take a stag apart with a knife no longer than a hand. He did not boast. He spoke as if he were reciting a recipe that might matter to someone else one day. He had scars on his hands arranged like a map of patience.

A small man from Yi Ti with the ink showed the inside of his arm where the lines formed a dragon that did not look like any dragon in Stefan’s childhood drawings, because it looked more like a snake. He said the dragon had been supposed to watch him. He said it had not watched carefully enough because here he was, spending his last coin on entry to a foolish tournament. He grinned when he said it, but it was a true thing.

The woman in the close-cut coat told them she had crossed a sea on a ship that had not known the word for storm and had learned it in the hardest way. She had not set foot on land for six weeks. When she had stepped down onto the wharf, her legs had shaken as if the earth were water.

A heavy-shouldered man with rings in his ears said nothing for a long time, then began to talk as if the words had filled him and finally overflowed. He said he was from the Summer Islands. He spoke of being banished from his homeland after forcing himself on a priestess. He did not look at anyone while he spoke. When he finished, he wiped his nose on his sleeve and took the wine skin and drank for a long time.

It went on like that. Small stories, then larger ones. People laughed in the right places. No one pressed to make a sorrow sound more noble than it was.

When the turn came round to the boy with the helmet in his lap, he had nothing to say that was not of his father and the mill and the flood that had taken the lower field and the pig pen. He had come because he wanted his father to look at him as if the field mattered less. When he finished, he stared at the fire as if something in it could give him what he wanted.

An older warrior from Essos, grey stubble scuffed across his chin, spoke of a marriage that had ended not with death but with an armistice. He said he did not know how to explain the kind of grief that was not clean. He had come to fight men so he could learn to stop wanting to fight her. Everyone nodded. They understood wanting to turn an ache into something with edges and a place to put it.

Someone cut meat and handed plates with greasy fingers. The cooks were too busy with the spits to mind, and the men were too hungry to be careful. The bread went round again. A skin of beer followed. The smoke made Stefan’s eyes water, but he did not mind.

“Stefan,” said the Braavosi, when a lull came at last. He pointed with his chin. “You. Speak. Tell us your story.”

Stefan had thought he might sit and listen the whole time. He did not think his voice would carry well in a crowd. He took a breath and discovered his chest willing enough. He had been to fairs where storytellers gestured with wide arms and made jokes with preplanned laughter. He had no gift for that.

“My name is Stefan Shield,” he said. He did not add any house. He had none that the world cared about. He actually didn’t have one at all. Shield was a surname he gave himself. “I was an assistant of a blacksmith. I trained with a man who taught me to move my feet before I moved my hands. I learned late. I was slow at most things before that. I am not so slow now.”

The Braavosi smiled and tipped his chin as if to say, yes, I learned the same way.

“I signed up because I wanted to prove to myself that I’m the man I want to be.” Stefan spoke the words and found that saying them made them more true but also made them more naked. He went on because if he stopped here he would feel as if he had taken a run at a wall and then turned aside at the last moment. “That’s all of it. I’m not chasing coin. I’m not chasing a name anyone else has. There’s a picture in my head of a man who does not step back when he needs to step in. I keep failing to draw it right. I thought that if I stood with men like you, I might learn to outline it.”

There were nods. That surprised him less than it might have when he was younger. Older men had their own pictures they kept private and revised after dark.

The Braavosi lifted his cup to him. So did the others, after a pause. The boy with the helmet looked at Stefan as if something about those words had put a hand on his shoulder. Stefan gave him a short smile because it cost nothing and was not false.

The wood around the pit cracked in the heat. Fat hissed when it dripped. A pair of Summer Islanders with beads in their hair argued good-naturedly over whether salt should be put on meat before or after. A Westerlands sellsword held out his plate for another slice and said if he did not fight again today he might sleep this good until the first snow. The woman with the line of paint down her nose had wiped it away with the back of her wrist now, leaving a black smear like a mark of her own thumb.

They asked a man with a scar on his throat who had given it to him, and he tapped twice above it and then his chest, as if to say: me, and also a mistake. Laughter rolled and died quick, not unkind.

Stefan ate. He realized halfway through the slab of meat that he had been hungrier than he knew. His hands shook slightly after the fights he had already done today, and the food steadied them. He looked up through the smoke and could see the top of the kings’ dais above the lists. The crown caught light even with a simpler circlet. People were still milling there. He could not pick out faces.

He thought of Prince Daemon—how the man fought with a focus that was not rigid but did not soften either. He had watched the end of the bout, the way the prince’s feet had chosen a line that seemed wrong until it was the line that led to victory. Stefan tried to hold that in memory. His teacher always said that he had a knack for learning combat eerily quickly. Already, Prince Daemon’s movements were recorded in his mind. He’d never seen a better swordsman.

A wind came through and shifted the smoke and made the flames lean. It dragged a new smell across the camp, one that sat under the rest. Stefan had learned to notice that smell. It was the copper in blood and the sour of old wounds and the clean of fresh bandages. The physicians’ tent was not far, and they had opened it wider to take a body. 

“Anyone ever seen that Hela Greyjoy woman fight?” A young warrior from Lys asked. “I’ve heard stories of her.” 

“Better not mention her name here, fool.” An Ironborn answered. “She is of the Drowned God’s blood, a goddess in mortal form. For your own sake, speak not of her.” 

“But I was just–”

“Don’t.” 

Stefan listened to the exchange and quietly agreed. That Hela Greyjoy was a monster in human flesh was not something anyone argued, especially not those who’ve seen the aftermath of her work. Stefan hadn’t seen anything for himself and, frankly, he was glad for that. The stories about sailors passing by wrecks left behind by her rampage and how the seas turned red for weeks was enough to make his stomach churn. The Ironborn worshipped her and were deathly afraid of her at the same time. She had statues all over the island of Pyke. 

The Lyseni kept talking anyway and Steffan tuned him out of his hearing. 

Another story began from another warrior. Stefan let it run over him. It was about a father who had never been pleased and a son who had tried to become what could not be pleased, and how that had not worked. The telling was fine because it did not pretend that work had not been done. It simply admitted it had been for the wrong reward.

“Heard they’ll set a team from Asshai against a sellsword company before the day’s end,” someone said.

“Asshai’s here?” another asked, incredulous and excited as if that were news of a traveling show, not a city’s sons. “Don’t they worship Hela Greyjoy? I heard she conquered their whole city by her lonesome."

“I saw a banner black as the inside of a glove,” the first said. “That could be anything. But the men under it had their eyes lined and did not squint at the sun, so I thought—”

A horn sounded.

It cut cleanly across talk and smoke and the soft crackle of the pit. It was not one of the small horns that summoned a single fighter to a single task. It was the deep, round note that called the field to attention. Everyone stopped the way dogs stopped when the master whistled at a pitch they could not ignore.

The noise of the rest of the camp bled into quiet and then began to build again in a different shape, the shape of feet moving toward the lists and voices saying, “Come, come,” and, “Who’s next?” and, “I heard—”

The Braavosi clapped Stefan on the shoulder. “That’s us.”

“Not all at once,” the Crownlands knight grunted, rising, his joints protesting. “But the tide pulls all boats.”

Stefan stood. He wiped his hands on his trousers, then wiped them again because there was grease in the creases of his fingers. He set his helmet on his head but did not fasten the chin strap yet. The leather of the strap had cracked when he bit it yesterday, breathing hard too close to the end of a bout. He would oil it tonight or it would bite him back.

The boy with the helmet put his on too. It sat a little crooked. Stefan reached out without thinking and tugged it straight. The boy looked surprised and then grateful in a way that made him look younger. Stefan felt the shape of the man he wanted to be standing for a moment where he could see it.

They walked toward the lists in a moving knot that absorbed others and then was absorbed in turn. The horn sounded again, its second note echoing the first. On the dais the marshals moved to their places. The master of the games had changed his cloak; it flapped as he climbed the steps.

Stefan took a breath that filled his chest easy. He could feel the last of the meat sitting warm there, the weight of food and the weight of choice together. He did not know which of them would be called next—him or someone else—but the horn had the same say either way.

The crowd settled into a held silence. The flags along the rails nodded. A drum rapped twice, then stopped, leaving the space open for the bell that would follow. It did, a clear ring carried along the rails and into the faces of the men waiting to be other men if they could.

The bell finished its stroke. In the heartbeat of quiet after it, Stefan put his hand to the strap of his helmet and drew it tight. Then the master of the games raised his staff and the day moved forward again.