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Fury came on them like a predator out of the driving rain and mist off Fair Isle. Aeron shouted in alarm to his oarsmen, but far too late. The ram of the warship hit them broadside. The timbers screamed, and for a second, Aeron was frozen, a hiccup of breath stuck in his throat. It’s the salt, he thought fast, the salt gets in the hinges, but there were no hinges here, and the seasick lurch of the deck tipped him back to the present.
Fury backwatered and broke away, leaving a jagged hole like a shark bite in Golden Storm’s side. Sea poured into the open wound, and the blood of unlucky oarsmen swirled in the water. Aeron threw out a hand, found the rudder paddle and clung while men around him jumped from the slanting deck. He should jump too, he knew, and swim before he got trapped or dragged under, but his numb-cold fingers kept on clinging until the paddle splintered. The heavy part of the wood fell with him and slapped him hard on the back of the head as he hit the water.
He sank, the sounds of battle shut off, and his clumsy arms thrashed without strength. The weight of the water above him became a wall. He breathed out a stream of bubbles and sucked in mouthfuls of cold and salt which he couldn’t get rid of. He was filling up like a skin, his limbs growing heavy, his stomach distending. The pain made him kick for a moment, but it passed. It was dark below him and light above, and there were shapes in the water, men and fish and parts of his ship, but they broke apart and faded as he sank deeper.
He was going to die, then. With the thought came a heavy kind of peace. He waited, and marked the seconds, thinking that it was no great loss. It must be now, he thought, or now, but his consciousness lingered, even as all sense of his body passed away. He had time to think long slow thoughts like a leisurely swimmer.
He mourned for Golden Storm, his good little ship, the one thing in his life he had won, however ignoble it was to piss for victory.
He hoped Balon would never find out that he was drunk when she went down.
He saw rainbows over Pyke, and whales breaching, and himself as a boy, lying in bed and listening as the sea battered on the cliffs and climbed his tower. He saw Urrigon laugh and flex his arm to show off his oarsman’s muscles. Urri had gone to sea with Victarion the year before his
death, and when he came back, he thought he was a man.
Aeron saw himself with his brothers, standing on the broken headland, Balon beside him, Victarion beyond, Euron a silent presence behind. Urri was there too, a wrapped shape on a litter of driftwood, misshapen where the green land maester had taken his arm off. The priest intoned and Aeron answered, speaking with the others, what is dead can never die. He felt stifled and small, his anger wrapped up tight inside him.
He saw Balon’s face set into lines by grief. He’d had few words for Aeron, few words for anyone, since he’d returned as Lord Reaper, having left their father with the Drowned God. He’d come home just in time to see them give Urri to him too. A god who takes, Aeron thought, and takes and takes. The wind on the headland was merciless, touching him all over. He curled his fingers into fists and swallowed his tears down in a solid lump.
In the water, his hand closed weakly. Time ebbed and flowed. Urrigon and Euron should have looked alike; they were both lean and handsome with laughing eyes, but somehow, they never had. Not even before Euron had come back from reaving with his patch.
The Crow’s Eye, they had called him then. Aeron thought of the eyeball being pecked and jelly running out while Euron’s smile never faltered. Euron would not say what had happened, and rumours had whistled round Pyke that some sorcerer had taken his eye for a spell. Worse, that Euron had let him. Aeron believed everything and nothing; trick or truth, the real story was bound to be vile. Euron was a force like a storm, a hole in nature that sucked everything in.
Shame settled in his stomach and he sank deeper. But Euron was there, even there, a shark in the waters. No one can say I don’t love my brothers. Aeron tasted tears on his lip and the door hinge screamed, and he smothered himself with his pillow. His legs were cold, sticking out above the covers.
He saw Urrigon laugh bravely, a bloody cloth wrapped around the stumps of his fingers.
Salt spray washed the deck and the sails snapped. A wench he’d once known in Lordsport sung him to sleep.
Euron snuffed a candle out on his chest, spread his legs like a girl’s, and used the blunt end.
He hung in the water, a dying weight.
His eyes rolled up to the sunlight.
The sea spat him out. Lannisport fishermen found him on the shore and marched him in chains up to Casterly Rock. Aeron vomited and staggered all the way on salt-cracked feet. Tywin Lannister was less than impressed with him, the least of Balon Greyjoy’s brothers. Victarion would have been the better prize.
His high birth should have afforded him more gentle treatment, but the Ironborn were being taught their place, and so Aeron was cast into the dungeon. He slept in chains and burned with a fever. His lungs felt like nothing alive. Their maester gave him something for his cough, but he poured it away and kept coughing. He was not going to die here. The Drowned God had not sent him back to be chained in a pit and drowned in his own snot. This conviction was the surest thing that Aeron had ever felt, and it grew as each day passed, even as he pissed out blood and oozed salt tears.
His fever dreams were bitter and sharp. Sometimes he thought he must still be drowning. Waking and sleeping, visions swam before his eyes; his brothers were with him, his father, the dim image of his half-remembered mother. Krakens with reaching arms writhed in his cell and fish darted past in silver flashes. Euron came and lifted his patch and showed Aeron the hole where his soul had been. His cell door had a rusty hinge, and Aeron choked on his silence until his throat all but closed.
Sometimes, Euron Crow’s Eye had been kind. This was the truth that sunk its teeth into Aeron’s bones. Euron would come to his old tower bedroom, and when the brute shoving and pushing was done, sometimes Aeron would crawl into his lap. Euron would stay with him and stroke his head and stare into the flickering candle, his thoughts oceans away. Aeron felt cold and lonely when Euron had gone, and sometimes he missed him.
That boy had been too weak to swim. His shame had been heavy, and it had dragged him down to drown with a mouthful of salt. Aeron Greyjoy had died; it was true, he saw it now, his eyes alive and weeping tears. The ghosts in his cell of the living and dead all agreed.
He dreamed of a funeral; Urri’s, again, and how after they cast him to the waves, Aeron had lingered, thinking that some final rite must remain to plug the hole inside him. Urri would come in the night sometimes too, to share warmth and jests and secrets, as Aeron’s closest brother. On those nights, Aeron would lie awake long after Urri slept, refreshed by relief, the silence inside him scrunched up small and forgotten.
At the funeral feast, Aeron had jested with the men as Urri would, growing louder and louder as the evening progressed, drinking everything in reach. He drank until he was sick, and as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, Qarlon Harlaw slapped his back and said he was a man now.
Euron never touched him after that. Perhaps Aeron had finally sunk deep enough to shame even him.
But the Drowned God had given Aeron back. He couldn’t make sense of it at all; why him, when far mightier krakens had gone to the deep
and had stayed there. At first, he remembered nothing except floating, bunged up with salt water, his lungs a useless burden in his chest. But as his fever grew, Aeron remembered more; seeing shafts of light, hearing voices calling. Finally, one fiery night as he thrashed in his chains, he remembered seeing great halls beneath the ocean. His father lived there, and his brothers – Harlon, Quenton and Donel, who he’d never known; Urrigon, whole and unafraid. The clumsy cruelty of the world was trapped above the water.
Aeron was moved to a cell with a bed. Their maester fussed while he raved, and tried to force potions down his throat.
“The salt water has sent you mad,” he said, but he was a weak, fat fool, a soft man from the green lands. One of his kind had killed Urri, through the unnatural practise of sewing his severed fingers back onto their stumps. Aeron spat in his face. The maester sighed.
“You should know,” he said, “Your cause is lost. Balon Greyjoy has surrendered. Your nephews Maron and Rodrik are dead.”
“What is dead can never die,” Aeron told him.
“We’ll see,” the maester said. The door screamed as he left. Salt in the hinges; the damp air as hard on iron as it was on men. The sea broke
everything in the end; it had even broken Pyke into pieces. It had broken Aeron, but he had risen again. One day, he and Urri would drink
together in those ocean halls, washed clean of guilt and shame, but the Drowned God had given him back for a purpose. He had swallowed the strength of the sea. Balon had lost his sons, and had need of his brothers – his godly brothers, of which he only had two left.
Aeron prayed aloud until the turnkey banged on his door and told him to shut up.
Aeron prayed even louder and the turnkey left him alone.
The wind whistled round the ribs of Nagga, the great sea dragon. To Aeron’s ears, it still carried the taint of that terrible horn. Better any man; better Asha even, than Euron Crow’s Eye, and yet the Crow’s Eye wore the driftwood crown. Aeron’s own hands had crowned him; his traitor’s hands, feeling clumsy and used, as Euron had so often left him.
Aeron knelt in the chamber of Nagga’s belly, and prayed. His drowned men were on the shore, and he had stayed alone on the headland, surrounded by the scars of fires and tents left by the kingsmoot. He’d been so sure the god had called Victarion’s name, but the Crow’s Eye confounded even his faith.
If only Euron would come to the shore to be drowned, as a godly king should. For a moment, Aeron let himself relish the dream; holding Euron’s head under, feeling him kick. No one would ever blame him. Every priest will lose a man from time to time.
But Euron was too cunning to be so easily taken. He must have sent a spell amongst them at the kingsmoot, seducing men with his talk of dragons. It was blasphemy and worse that Euron would bring among them. The Ironborn had never tamed dragons, only slain them, and those were sea dragons besides. These three that Euron coverted were beasts of the air, and beasts of the air belonged to the Storm God.
The touch of the wind made Aeron shiver at the thought, so he rose from his knees and went down to the sea. He waded out to his waist, spread his arms and prayed out loud. His words were whipped from his mouth and dashed on the rocks. He heard nothing except the breakers, felt nothing except cold, and a boy’s sharp grief for Balon and his other lost brothers. He thought he’d been given a purpose, but perhaps he’d been thrown back unwelcome from the Drowned God’s halls.
He filled his skin and drank the sea, taking it down in great salty gulps until his vision swam. The wind screamed around the headland but the waves rose up to meet it. No other man had seen Euron Crow’s Eye as he had; known him in the shuddering moments of his pleasure, as a weak man who craved flesh. The sea would break everything in the end, except that which was already broken.
Aeron ducked his head beneath the water, swallowed salt and silence, and waited for his god to speak.