The Breaker of the Oceans, Chapter 43

Hela returned to the cedar-shadowed benches with the taste of Otto’s words still like old coins on her tongue. She had not expected the Hand to come to her, let alone to speak as if they were two ferrymen sharing the river between their boats, but then, most days surprised her now. The world had quickened without asking her leave. Banners moved in the sea breeze, each a memory of some distant city: the deep azure tassels of Yi Ti, the hammered bronze disks of Volantis, one ridiculous Qartheen banner that looked as if a perfumed shawl had taken offense at the wind and decided to sulk about it.

Tyla Greyjoy—formerly Lannister—sat where Hela had left her that morning: elbows tucked in, knees together, hair pinned with a kraken of blackened silver that had, despite the effort of its teeth, already released two strands. She was not reading—no book in her lap, no parchment tucked into her sleeve—yet she wore the expression of a reader in pause, gaze softened as if she were half-turned inward, listening to the quiet voices of things other people did not hear: the creak of rope, the counting of steps, the logic inside a wheel.

Hela took her seat. She did not think of it as beside Tyla, merely adjacent, like two stones on a shore.

It struck her—an oddness she’d never taken the trouble to look at directly—that she had never truly spoken with Tyla. They had exchanged nods, had endured each other’s presence during dinners, had touched in passing when Hela reached for a cup and Tyla moved a dish to make space without looking up. But that she should sit here with the girl as if they were kin, as if some thread tied them that was not inked on paper—this was strange.

Of course, the stranger thing was the girl herself. There was always something absent-minded to how Tyla moved, as if a mild wind inside her head kept rearranging the furniture. She had Lannister hair, that much was certain—even the sea could only steal so much from a gold-threaded mane. Yet she wore grey now and a kraken, and the little triangular smile she turned on Hela as Hela settled felt more like a sail shaking itself awake than a greeting.

“How has your day been?” Tyla asked, voice even, as if the question were a stone set square into a wall.

Hela looked out at the arena. The sand had been raked between bouts, the rake’s mark crosshatched like a net laid over the water. The crewmen doing the work were Einherjar by the look of their braids—brown and pale hair bound back in stiff ropes; they policed their own order with the exactness of men who had hammered discipline into themselves and found it good, heavy as an anchor and twice as useful. At the far end, where canvas made a shadowed mouth out of the entryway, horses clinked in harness. Someone was singing to them, soft and tuneless.

“Quiet,” Hela said.

“Oh?” Tyla folded her hands, patterning her fingers as if she were laying out a game. She had ink on the side of her forefinger: a stain that never washed entirely clean. “Quiet is…well. It’s an observation. I prefer when people answer with weather.”

“Weather?” Hela asked, not because she was curious but because silence had the wrong gravity near Tyla—you couldn’t sink into it; it had little springs inside.

Tyla nodded. “Some days are rain even when the sky is blue. Some are heat despite snow. It says more, if you’re allowed to be imprecise.”

“And do you take imprecision as a habit?” Hela asked, hearing in her own voice the edge her father disliked but had never asked her to dull. Let others soften their words and sell the rounded shapes for coin; Hela’s tongue had always kept its corners.

Tyla seemed delighted. “In questions, always. In answers…only if the person asking doesn’t want to hear the truth.”

“And do you think I don’t?”

Tyla tilted her head, watching Hela as if she were a chart to be read by lamplight. “I think you don’t ask. Which is different.”

“Quiet is what the day has been,” Hela said. “No more and no less. Quite boring, in fact, almost dreary.”

“That’s not weather,” Tyla said. “But it’s good.” \

She leaned forward, eyes bright. “Ser Otto is very tall, did you notice? Not in literal inches, but in how his shadow reaches. He speaks to you and you remember when he’s gone that you stood in the cool. Did he offer anything?”

“Stupidity.” Hela shrugged. She stared at her palm, opening and closing it, wondering how easy it would be now to kill the king and every member of the royal family and crown herself sovereign. At her current state, quite impossible. She wasn’t strong enough yet.

“Hmmm.” Tyla’s gaze slid to Hela’s palm as if she could see the memory printed there. “I read a treatise once on tempering. ‘On Heat and Memory’—Myrish, I think. The author claimed steel remembers the shape it likes and tries to return to it. Men are the same.”

“You think men are steel?”

“Only sometimes,” Tyla said cheerfully. “Other times, they’re rope. Or sealed jars. Or knives with no sheaths. It varies.”

Hela allowed herself the smallest of smiles—a twitch, nothing more. Tyla noticed anyway; the girl was scatterbrained, but her scatter did not mean she failed to pick things up. It meant she picked them up and carried them to unexpected shelves. She was annoyingly intelligent, but also annoyingly absentminded. 

“What does my father see in you?” Hela asked, almost surprised at herself. The thought had been spinning like a coin in her head since the day Tyla first sat with them under the company’s banner, since she noticed how quiet the girl could be when men were weighing each other’s names.

“Ah.” Tyla unfurled her fingers and then refolded them. And then, she smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll just have to ask him that.” 

“And what do you see in you?” Hela asked, not because she wanted an answer but because she wanted the girl to show her the shape of her mind again.

“Salt,” Tyla said immediately. Then, at Hela’s look, she laughed—a breathy sound that tumbled into the space between them and made it less sharp. “I was born too far from the sea for it to be habitual, but I’ve grown a taste. I see…the pattern that waves make when they run up a beach. The way some shells take each retreat and do not break. The way crabs run in the sand and into the water. But it is impossible for me to see myself for my eyes hardly ever turn inwards. I suppose the same is true for most folk.” 

She met Hela’s eye. “You’ve never asked me about myself before.”

“I have not wanted to know.”

Tyla accepted that with the same unruffled grace with which she accepted being a Greyjoy now—the lion cut out of her name like a page excised and refilled with a new illumination. 

“That seems practical,” she said. “I like practical things. Did you know the Azure Guard breathe in fours? Their drillmasters teach it early. In, two three four; hold two three four; out two three four; hold two three four. It keeps the heart from running off like an untied pony.”

Hela did know that, in fact. And, unlike Tyla, who learned it from books, Hela learned it from her visit to Yi Ti.

“You’ve been watching them,” Hela said.

“I’ve been watching everyone.” Tyla shifted, leaning her shoulder lightly, almost hesitantly, against Hela’s. Such a small weight. 

Beneath them, the sand gave a sigh as a rake set right the last of the scuffs. The sea murmured beyond the harbor wall. When the Company’s trumpets sounded, they did it the way all such trumpets do: announcing not just steel but the uncoiling of expectation, the promise that something would happen here worth carrying away in the mouth and mind.

Tyla turned her face to the arena. 

“The free-for-all first,” she said, almost to herself, and then, more briskly, “Ten fighters. I’ve counted them twice. Four Westerosi knights: one Reach, one Stormlands, one Crownlands, and a Dornishman with more spear than sense. Two Einherjar—brothers, I think, by the way they stand. Two Azure Guards from Yi Ti—blue lacquer, the tassels knotted to show the regiment and the general’s favor. A Braavosi water-dancer of good birth—he keeps glancing at the rain cloth we’ve none of, poor thing; he’s looking for patterns to cut through. And Prince-Kin Tregar of Volantis—tiger blood by his nose and the way he bites the words in his mouth.”

“And the last?” Hela asked, because it was a test and because Tyla would pass it.

Tyla’s smile turned conspiratorial. “Daemon Targaryen.”

—

Daemon Targaryen stepped from the shade onto the sand and the crowd opened its throat and sang his name. The sound hit him like the first breath outside after being too long in a stifling room—sharp, dizzying, necessary. He let it wash over him without turning his head to the stands. He would not look at her. Not because his self-mastery faltered, not because the scar she had put on his pride smarted when touched by sight, but because he refused to give that particular wound any more of his attention than it already demanded.

He had slept poorly, the memory of steel bending in ways it shouldn’t—effortless, indecent—replaying with the regularity of a heartbeat. He had seen strong men. He had been one. He had seen women carve their place in a world that was happier when they took what it gave. He had never seen someone by their hands alone take a sword and wring it as if it were wet cloth. In that impossible motion lived a truth he did not want to admit: there are always rules you do not know you are obeying until someone breaks them perfectly.

The sand had a particular grind to it under boot. The blunted longsword he carried—a good tournament blade, thick-edged, balanced with honest skill—felt heavier than Dark Sister. He had left the Valyrian steel at his tent. No need to carry an old friend to watch him cheat on her with poorer companions.

The other fighters took their places. He counted them without seeming to: the Reach knight in green and gold with a sunflower crest that promised a cheerful brutality; the Stormlander in black-and-yellow, antlers cresting his helm like guilt; the Crownlands man with his oiled mustache and the cheap confidence of one who had spent last night telling stories about himself; the Dornishman in light mail and bright scarf, spear in hand, too proud of being out of place in this assembly of swords. The two Einherjar—tall, broad, quiet—held their axes as if they were cradling sleeping children they did not mean to wake too soon. The Azure Guards in azure lacquer moved as if the space around them had been measured and bought; their sabers were curved like smiles that knew secrets Daemon did not care to hear. The Braavosi water-dancer looked almost naked in his supple leather and unadorned vest, his blunted bravo’s blade a needle beside the clubs other men carried. The Volantene princeling—Tregar—wore scale worked to resemble a tiger’s pelt. The craftsman who had made it had been good. The man wearing it held himself as if he thought he were better than that craftsman, which was a mistake Daemon promised himself he would correct.

Ten men, then. Ten reputations jostling for space in the same box. Ten pathways through an hour whose shape none could know.

The arena master’s staff fell. The world contracted to speed and angle and rhythm.

Daemon did the only sensible thing in a melee with blunted steel and too much pride: he moved left, away from the crush, away from the heaviest heaves of men wanting to make their mark early. He kept his blade low and his eyes higher. He saw how the Einherjar brothers set their backs to one another, axes held out like a wheeled gate. He saw how the Azure Guards fanned into a shallow crescent with two precise paces between them, making space as if they were a hinge waiting for the door of the melee to swing into it. He saw the Reach knight make for the Dornishman with eager contempt, and the Dornishman smile a tight-lipped little smile that would end in blood if these were not blunted edges.

Daemon let his first opponent find him—the Crownlands man with the oiled mustache, eager to win coin by breaking Daemon’s nose. A feint. A real cut with a fake blade. The man telegraphed every intention, as if his arms had written letters to be read by any who cared to look. Daemon knocked the overhand blow aside, stepped inside the man’s reach, and put the pommel of his sword twice into the same spot at the man’s ribs. The Crownlander staggered, grip weakening. Daemon hooked his ankle behind the man’s heel and introduced him to the sand. 

“Up,” Daemon said, not because he wanted mercy but because he wanted the man to consider whether he wanted humiliation. Pride chose bruises over exit. Good. Pride made men predictable.

Sand spat underfoot as the Reach knight and the Dornishman met—not spear to sword, but shield to shield. The Dornishman used the reach of his spear and his feet, dancing along the edge of the other man’s temper. He had the right idea and would eventually run out of room. Daemon filed that away. The Einherjar brothers were still unbloodied, their world a circle two men could carry. The Azure Guards had found their first dance partner: the Stormlander, who came on in heavy strokes, impatient at how their curved blades turned his strength aside. Daemon saluted the Braavosi as the man slid in, a quick flicker of a blade angling for Daemon’s wrist. The quick are always proud of being quick. Pride is brittle.

He gave ground. He let the Braavosi almost touch him. He altered the rhythm, his and the other man’s, with the smallest hesitation at the moment the other man expected speed. They crossed once, twice, thrice, and on the fourth pass Daemon stamped into the sand to throw a fan of grit toward the man’s eyes—not much, just enough to force a blink. The Braavosi, disciplined, turned his head and closed his left eye to save it, but in that beat Daemon struck his shoulder with a flat blow and used the rebounding move to clip the back of the man’s calf. The water-dancer did not fall. He flowed down and up again in a single coil, smiling. Daemon found himself smiling back despite himself. Not all pride was foolishness.

A roar drew his head—an involuntary twitch he regretted the moment it began. But the noise was not…her. It was the Reach knight knocking the Dornishman’s spear from his hands with a smart smack of a shield rim. The Dornishman pivoted, letting the spear go, using the reach knight’s own momentum to yank him forward and into a short hook to the lower edge of the breastplate. Blunted or not, a strike there will rattle a man. The Reach knight recovered, planted his feet, and the two of them were lost again in the percussive rhythm of heavy armor conversation.

Daemon set his spacing, kept his back to the open and his eyes on the developing lines. The Crownlands man came back—because of course he did—leading with his shield. Daemon slid left. The shield passed. Daemon smacked the back of the man’s helm with the flat of the blade. The man stumbled, his breath a grunt that said he had not expected to be mocked. Daemon pivoted around him, using the man as a barrier between himself and the Volantene prince-kin, who was stalking forward with a guisarme too long for this kind of fight. Idiot. Polearms were beautiful in formations, in lines, in the clean art of war where men pretended they were machines. In a melee they were invitations to have your arms dragged into a knot.

The Braavosi pressed again, insisting on quick touches. Daemon parried, parried, let one slide, let another slide, and then drove his shoulder forward in a short, brutal movement that took the Braavosi off the line of his own balance. A knee. A shove. The man skidded, checked himself, bowed—not mockingly, truly. Daemon bowed back with the smallest fraction of his spine.

Someone bellowed, one of the Einherjar, and then the sound cut off in a grunt as a Stormlander’s mace glanced off his shoulder. The brother with the darker hair stepped over, not quite breaking their circle, turning a blow meant for ribs into a clang against a raised axe haft. Good. They had trained for this. Daemon placed them in his mental map as a single moving fortress. He would not waste his strength there. Not yet.

The Azure Guards had drawn blood—figuratively; the Stormlander’s pride, again, had taken a cut. Their blunted sabers, with their thick backs, punished mistakes with wrist-stinging smacks. They moved in harmony, one stepping when the other circled, their footfalls the same length, their breath invisible and measured. Daemon admired them and felt a prick of discomfort at how their discipline had an edge different from Westerosi knighthood’s swaggering honor. They had made themselves into instruments. He wondered if they would sing when struck.

The Crownlands man tried a third time. Enough. Daemon rolled his shoulder, stepped inside the man’s swing again, caught the shield’s rim with his free hand, and yanked. As the man came forward, off-balance, Daemon’s knee rose into the joint of the man’s cuisses. Pain makes cowards of men who are brave in simpler ways. The man collapsed, swore, tried to rise. Daemon rapped his helm. 

“Yield,” he said. The man spat sand and did, shame hot on his cheeks even through steel.

The Braavosi had engaged the Volantene prince-kin now, and Daemon almost pitied Tregar. Almost. The water-dancer made the long guisarme look like a drunk man’s story, always in danger of becoming something it should not be. When Tregar overcommitted—because men like him always overcommitted when faced with contempt—they ended up chest to chest, where the polearm was a burden. The Braavosi tapped his chest with the flat and then flicked, clever, the end of his blade at Tregar’s wrist. Not enough to break, but enough to make the hand open. The guisarme kissed the sand. The Braavosi kicked it away as one might a snake. Tregar roared and grabbed for the Braavosi’s throat. The Bravo turned his shoulder. They slipped apart, circled, and met again.

The Stormlander had tired of being cut apart by languid grace and went to find work more suited to his temperament. He made for the Einherjar. Poor choice. The brothers liked a man who came on with that kind of honesty. They took his blows: shuddering, then firming, then sending him back with less force than he needed to hold himself together. The Stormlander’s mace, blunted but heavy, kissed one brother’s forearm. The other brother answered by letting his axe’s flat bounce off the Stormlander’s pauldron. 

The Azure Guards drifted Daemon’s way like tides. Not to him specifically. To the center of where things were most interesting, which happened to be where he was because he made it so. They had the lightness of men who have trained where the air is hot and humid and heavy, the looseness of wrists that held weight all day until not even steel could surprise them. One with a darker braid met him first.

“Honored,” the Azure Guard said in decent Westerosi, breath even.

“Likewise,” Daemon said. He could be polite. His enemies always took this as a sign of weakness. It was a tactical error to assume courtesy and softness were cousins. In this case, however, he simply assumed these Azure Guards were akin to Kingsguard and so treated them as such.

They danced. That was the only word. The Azure Guard’s saber wanted to pull; Daemon’s longsword wanted to push. The difference made a color in the air between them. The Azure Guard’s partner kept the space clean, flicking small threats at anyone who wandered too near. Daemon felt himself smiling again—not the polite curve he wore like a glove, not the knife flash of contempt he saved for fools. A real smile. He did like to be tested.

The Reach knight, bored with his Dornish partner’s stubbornness, had battered him backward toward the boards, where space narrowed and choices fell away. The Dornishman stepped inside a shield rush and used the smaller man’s larger momentum to turn him. They swapped positions with the grace of men changing partners in a dance hall. They were good at this. Blunted steel made artists of men who were brutes with edges.

The Braavosi whom Daemon had bruised found him again at the periphery of the Azure Guard’s sphere, and Daemon let himself be pressed so he could be flanked, curious to know how they would coordinate—the Braavosi’s flicker matched to the Azure Guard’s measured pull. He had never fought exactly this combination. He had known a thousand such pairings. New flavors were welcome.

The Braavosi feinted left, real right. The Azure Guard did the opposite. Daemon took a hard parry on his left, let the blade slide, turned his wrist, answered the Braavosi with a quick backhand that pushed his point a fraction—enough that the dance misstepped. The Azure Guard flourished his saber with a little twist meant not to hurt but to distract. Daemon answered with a grin he did not mean and caught the man’s guard with his own, pressing down and across, making him choose between letting his wrist scream or letting his feet move.

The man moved. Smart. Daemon would have been disappointed otherwise.

He could feel the crowd’s attention moving like a school of fish. They reflocked around the loudest moments: the Reach knight’s shield dash, the Stormlander’s bellow, the Braavosi’s quicksilver taps. He knew where the noise was. He used it when he could. Sound covers intention. He heard himself laugh—a bark that made two men glance his way when they should not have. He turned that glance into an opportunity, stepped past the Azure Guard, and smacked the Braavosi’s upper arm—too light. 

Tregar of Volantis, freed of his stupid guisarme by the good sense of others, had acquired a blunted short sword. He did better with it, being forced by its limits into choices that required thought. His face was ugly with offense at how his day had gone and worse with determination. He set his jaw and went looking for someone he could break. He found the Dornishman. They made an ugly picture: red scarf and tiger scale, desert and jungle. They deserved each other.

Daemon slipped away from the Azure pair when it cost him the least and made for the Einherjar. Pride drew him. Ruby-hard, biting. He wanted to push. 

“Prince,” said the one with lighter hair as Daemon came near, his accent thick but intelligible.

“Brute,” Daemon answered, and the axes came all at once, one low, one high, a cross that would have cut him to ribbons if steel were honest here.

—

“I take it you’ve no fondness for the Rogue Prince?” Tyla chuckled. 

Hela snorted. “Not even a little bit.”