The Breaker of the Oceans, Chapter 36

The yard was too loud and too quiet all at once.

Rhaenyra stood where she had fallen back, her fingers still slack around the leather grip of her sword. The world seemed narrowed to the sound of her own breath. Too fast. Too shallow. Her tongue tasted of iron and ash. She could still feel the echo of the blow—Hela’s blade striking hers with such certainty that the steel had rattled her teeth. She had thought herself ready.

Gods, she had thought—

She closed her eyes for a heartbeat and saw her life stretched backward. Hours upon hours spent in the practice yard, under sun and under torchlight. Ser Harrold barking at her to keep her feet planted, to use her hips when she struck. The blisters across her palms hardening into calluses. The weight of chainmail digging into her shoulders until she could run in it.

She had worked for this.

All of it.

And yet Hela Greyjoy had made her look like a child with a stick.

The voices in the yard swelled and fell, the clang of steel and the scuff of boots on stone carrying from the ring where Daemon now faced the Lady Reaper. Rhaenyra’s gaze drifted to them without meaning to, but her mind would not leave the moment before.

She remembered hearing of Hela before she ever saw her—sailors’ tales whispered in taverns and harborfront inns. Stories of the Doom, the black warship that had broken the back of the pirate fleets east of Pentos. How the Stepstones were quieter now, not because of royal decree or treaties, but because one woman’s flag on the horizon had sent corsairs scattering for the far side of the world.

She laughed then. Dismissed them as embellishment, the way men loved to speak of rare beauties and rare things whenever they ventured out of Westeros.

But she had heard more.

Hela the Lady Reaper. Breaker of the Oceans. Stygian Queen. Peerless Under Heaven. The Red Death. 

It had lodged in her like a splinter—the idea that someone else, not of her blood, not with dragonfire in her veins, could wield that much fear, that much respect.

And now, standing in the shadow of Pyke’s rebuilt walls, she felt the whole shape of that splinter.

Her breath was still uneven.

She had wanted to prove something today. Not to the court. Not to Daemon. But to herself. That she could stand beside this woman, even match her in the ring if not yet in war. That Visenya’s blood was still in her somewhere, the blood of the dragon–the blood of Valyria.

One strike had stripped it bare.

She could still feel the weight of Hela’s emerald gaze when their eyes met, the unbothered certainty in it. And then the proverbial killing strike, when the whole world seemed to disappear and, in just a blink, there was a sword poised to slice through her forehead.

The world had tilted. The ring had seemed too small, the air too thin. 

Now her hands felt cold despite the heat in the yard. She flexed her fingers and watched Daemon circle Hela. His stance was loose, coiled. Hela moved differently—less like a knight and more like a predator on unfamiliar ground, unbothered by the stone beneath her boots, her weapon turning slowly in her grip.

They exchanged words, though she could not hear the words over the pounding in her ears. She caught flashes of expression. Daemon’s narrowed eyes. Hela’s lips barely moved.

Rhaenyra’s throat felt tight. She had dreamed herself a warrior queen since she first held a wooden sword in the yard at the Red Keep. She had seen herself armored, her hair streaming in the wind as she led fleets and hosts. She had told herself that she would not only rule, but conquer and lead armies, that she would be remembered as more than a daughter who inherited the throne, more than a mother, more than a name in a line. To achieve that, she trained so hard that her hands bled. And she maintained that training even after she became the ruler of Dragonstone.

Now she could not banish the image of Hela’s blade a hair’s breadth away from her forehead, ready to split her head in twain had it been a true duel. 

The balance between them was all wrong.

Her chest rose faster. She tried to draw a slow breath and it caught halfway, stuttering into something shorter. The space around her seemed too close. Faces turned toward the ring. Einherjar. No one was watching her, and yet she felt as though they all knew of her sound defeat. 

Daemon lunged. Steel rang. Hela did not step back. She turned her wrist and the blades briefly locked, the sound of it sharp as breaking ice.

Rhaenyra’s nails bit into her palm. She told herself to stop staring, to look anywhere else, but her gaze stayed fixed on them. On the way Daemon leaned in, his shoulder driving forward, his sword angled for the kill. On the way Hela twisted, her body moving as if the strike had already missed before it began. 

She was not watching a sparring match. She was watching an ant trying to rile up a dragon–only, her lover and uncle, Daemon Targaryen, was not at all resembling a dragon at that moment. 

The air between them seemed to sharpen. Daemon feinted, his weight shifting low, and Hela avoided it with a step so precise it looked like she had been waiting for it since the first moment. The sound of their blades clashing again cut through the murmur of the yard. 

The thought sat heavy, and she hated it. Was she strong only because she had a dragon? Was that the extent of her power? If she burned down an entire army, could she claim the glory or would Syrax claim it in her stead.

Daemon pressed the attack. Steel flashed in the sun. Hela met him stroke for stroke, neither yielding an inch, their movements tightening into a rhythm that was both too quick and too deliberate to mistake for chance. However, it was frighteningly clear from their faces that only one of them was taking this seriously. Daemon gritted his teeth and attacked with the fervor of someone in a true battle. Hela seemed utterly at ease, perhaps even serene, though she seemed entirely annoyed by something unrelated to the spar. 

Somewhere beyond the walls, the sea boomed against the cliffs.

She stood very still.

The yard seemed to hold its breath with her.

—

Daemon shifted left and felt the yard tip under him as if the stones were set on ship timbers. The wind had died. Only breath and leather and steel remained. Hela’s blade met his and the shock of it traveled through bone. He rolled his wrist to slide off the bind and she was already gone, not with speed he could see, but with the absence of weight where he had sworn she would be.

He reset. Hands light. Feet light. Point forward. The old lessons rose without voice: never chase steel, chase the man. He did. He pressed her shoulder, her hip, the bend of her knee, looking for angles, for the fine seam in a living guard. She rotated, a turn so narrow it was nothing more than a breath shifting from one lung to the other. The point of his sword cut air.

He changed measure. In close now. Pommel high. He drove the short jab for the mask though she wore none. It was the trick that won him fights in the Stepstones when decks pitched and men skidded and all guards failed. She let it slide past as if the strike lived in some other day. Her blade rang on him once. Twice. The third time took nothing from either of them. He became aware of the noise inside his skull, a fine hissing like salt poured on coals.

He feinted low. The old Braavosi step. He dropped the shoulder and cut upward for the belly as his front foot swept sand. She did not even answer with steel. She moved her weight from left heel to right, and the cut rose into nothing.

He heard a voice somewhere in the yard. Laughter. The Einherjar did not move. They stood like posts driven into low tide clay, their dark weapons turned down. Beyond them he knew Rhaenyra stood. He kept his eyes away from her. He felt the drag of her gaze. Heat and shame. He cut again to silence it.

A thrust into a cut, a cut into a thrust. Half-steps folding into full measures. He shifted grips mid-swing and brought the crossguard down on her wrist the way he’d done to a Myrish bravo once, crushing bone through the glove. Hela rotated the arm that wasn’t struck and placed her sword between them like a door that had always been there. He hit the doorframe and jarred his shoulder and his fingers tingled and his teeth met hard enough to bite his tongue.

He drew blood. His own.

He tasted iron and spat once to the side. The spit sizzled on stone. Or maybe it didn’t. The yard had narrowed so it might well have been cooking him inside his mail.

He went to the shoulder fake that never failed on men who led with the eyes. She did not lead with the eyes. She did not seem to lead with anything. She existed where she needed to be in the instant when he arrived. It made his belly feel hollow.

He tried a different hand on the hilt. Left hand down, right hand high. He became a stranger to his own balance and in that strangeness sometimes a man will show the way past himself. Not here. Her answer came in the smallest notch of blade upon blade and his oddness died on contact.

He backed away two paces and listened to his breath. The wheeze was there. He hated it. He pushed it down with a long draw and felt the air stop midway. He looked for Caraxes in his mind. The old fire came but it did not steady his hand the way it had on the Stepstones when the blood smoked and the beach went red. The woman in front of him ate steadiness.

“Is this your best?” he said. The words came out thin. He had meant to throw them like a gauntlet. They fell like a glove.

She tilted her head. Sweat darkened his tunic between breast and belly. She had not broken a sweat that he could see. The light caught her hair and her eyes were neither kind nor cruel. They were present.

“You said you would try,” he said. “I have not seen you try.”

“I am trying,” she said. “To keep you from falling on your face.”

Heat rose through him like a rogue wave. He drove it into his legs and closed. Edge to edge. He went to binds and wracks and the close work he loved where a cut of three inches will do what a cut of three feet cannot. He hooked her blade with his quillons and wrenched. Her wrist did not move. It felt like prying at iron set in stone. He stepped in farther and slammed shoulder to shoulder. She gave him the inch a wall will give when a cart hits it. He fell out of it.

He turned it to a roll, came up on a knee, cut across. She hopped the cut. Not an athlete’s hop. A sidestep lifted from a woman stepping over a puddle in a market street. He hated that hop.

He changed tempo. The old tourney cadence. False slow. Then whip-quick. The kind that draws a parry early and punishes the empty air after. She did not parry early. She did not parry late. She placed steel only when steel would meet steel. It took something from him that he could not name.

He dragged her toward the edge of the circle and tried to crowd her over uneven stone, toward the place where boot heels slip and men make mistakes to hide their fear. There were no mistakes in her. The stone refused to betray her feet. He wondered if the stone feared her too.

His right forearm cramped. He shook it once and felt the tremor run to the fingers. He switched hands again. He thought of breaking the rules he set for himself. The little stabs with the left-hand dagger that were more for taverns than for yards. He had tucked no dagger. Good. Because he would have used it and he would have hated himself after.

He heard his heart now. A low drum that wanted to be a hammer.

He took the breath and drove three combinations that had ended princes and sellswords and men with long lists of names and longer lists of dead. Cut to thigh. Thrust to shoulder. Reverse to throat. She took them like a shoreline takes small waves. The water comes. The water goes. The land remains.

His vision narrowed. A ringing began at the back of his head like a blacksmith striking a cold anvil. He lost count of his own strikes. The counting had always lived with him. Today it slipped the leash and ran off somewhere among those dark-helmed men who did not blink.

He heard himself snarl. He had not meant to make a sound. He put his foot behind her ankle and swept. The sweep landed. She did not fall. He did not understand the geometry of that.

He wanted to hurt something then. He did not pick. He cut high and low and down the middle. She leaned an inch and the cut missed. She turned the blade forty degrees and the low cut merely kissed iron. The center strike met the flat of her sword and went dead like a knife in a loaf.

He heard his name. Daemon. He did not look. If he looked and saw Rhaenyra he would think of softness and that would kill him. If he looked and saw Valon he would think of coin and contempt and that would kill him too. He did not look.

He drove forward again and met her at the edge of his own balance. She tapped his blade as if she meant only to remind him where it was. He stumbled a half-step and it felt like a man missing a stair in the dark.

He swallowed and his mouth was dry as chalk. He pressed his tongue to his teeth and found the cut there again and the taste of the iron steadied him more than any prayer he ever said as a boy.

“You’re lying,” he said. The voice came out low. “You’re not trying.”

She watched him. A gull cried somewhere beyond the wall. The sea hit rock and pulled away.

“I promised I’d do my best,” she said.

“And this is it?”

She looked past him then, to the Einherjar, or to the door Hela had broken with her fist earlier in the day, or perhaps to some place he could not see at all. When her eyes returned to him they were the same as before. Calm water that held cold under the skin.

“It is better for the both of us if it is,” she said.

He felt something split that was not bone. He did not name it.

He screamed into his teeth and did not let the sound out. He let the scream become motion. He reached for the old cruelty and found it. He stamped for the instep. He slashed for the fingers. He drove the crossguard for the temple.

She turned her hand and let his crossguard slide over the crown of her head and the blow died against air and what hair met iron did not even lift. She rotated the wrist and his slash at her fingers cut only light. He stamped and found stone. He imagined he felt the stone complain at his presumption.

His breath broke into pieces. He gathered it, hands shaking, and he knew then that she had not broken sweat because she did not need to. That she had not cut him because she did not want to. That he might not touch her even if she closed her eyes and counted to ten.

He heard the old voice in him say draw Dark Sister and be done with this. Another voice said do it and lose more than a match. He knew what Valyrian steel meant. He also knew he would not put that blade in front of this woman and watch it fail, because if it failed he would never be right again.

He did not move to his hip. He kept the yard sword in hand. His knuckles shone white.

“Again,” he said, and could not stop the word from sounding like a plea.

Her mouth curved then. It was a small thing. It had teeth in it. She took one step back. She turned her blade once in her hand as if testing weight, as if she had not already measured the blade to the last ounce of it, and then she let it drop.

The sword hit the ground with a flat ring. Dust jumped. She stood with empty hands and raised them.

“Keep attacking,” she said. “I am not yet bored.”

The yard made no sound at all. Even the sea seemed to pause and listen. Daemon felt the heat rise through him the way a fire rises when a man throws oil on it and then leans too close. He tasted bile. He stepped in and brought the cut that had ended the biggest man he ever faced, a giant from the Basilisk Isles who had smiled through a broken jaw, and Hela lifted her hand.

She took hold of the blade.

Not the hilt. Not the flat.

The edge.

His mind prepared for the recoil—hands sheared to the bone, tendons parted—and found none of it. Her fingers closed on steel and the sword sighed into her grip as if it had been made to be held there.

Blood did not jet. He understood it then that he could not make this woman bleed unless she permitted it.

She twisted.

The hilt flew from his hand. He tried to hold it anyway. His fingers refused him. Pain lanced up the forearm and he let the sword go because the other choice was to fall to his knees in front of her, and he would do many things in his life but not that.

She had the blade now as a man would hold a stick of kindling. She brought her other hand to it and set both palms upon the steel. The sound it made when it bent was not the sound of steel at all. It was an animal sound, a low groan from the gut of the thing.

She folded it once. Twice. She made a figure from it. A bent thing like a pretzel sold in a market fair. She regarded it the way a buyer regards a trinket unworthy of the stall that displayed it. Then she cast it aside. The metal clanged once. It jounced. It lay where it fell, obscene.

He saw his own hands open in front of him and did not know them. He flexed the fingers and they answered, slow. The hurt bloomed in the tendons now that the fight had left them. It moved up his arm like frost.

He looked at her. There was nothing in her face he could use. She had not made a sound. She had not struck him. She had not taken a step she did not need. He had tried to break her and she had not even allowed him the dignity of an exchange.

He became aware of Rhaenyra at the edge of his vision, a pale shape. He did not look. If he saw pity he would hate her. If he saw awe he would hate himself.