The Red City
Aemon Targaryen's POV
69 AC — Approaching Astapor, Slaver's Bay, Essos
(Near 25 days into the Faith Reckoning month)
The Narrow Sea had taken three days.
Aemon had crossed it on Caraxes, flying ahead of the fleet, and the difference between crossing by ship and crossing by dragon was the difference between reading about a storm and standing in one. He could feel the wind in his teeth. He could see the curve of the world from up high. He slept strapped to the saddle on rocky outcrops along the old Valyrian coast, wrapped in his riding cloak, and woke each morning to Caraxes already restless beneath him, neck stretched toward the east, impatient.
The first thing he noticed about Essos was the roads.
He had heard Baelon talk about them enough times — the old dragonroads, Valyrian-built, running straight as sword blades across the continent regardless of what the land wanted to do. From the air they looked almost impossible. A raised stone causeway cutting clean through marshland that should have swallowed it. A bridge spanning a river gorge with three elegant arches, still standing after the Doom, after everything. The fused stone gleaming faintly even from this height, pale against the brown and green of the land around it.
Nothing in Westeros looked like this. Not even close.
He thought of the Blackroads project Baelon had been working on since he was old enough to argue the Small Council into funding it, and suddenly understood why his brother had seemed so quietly frustrated with the pace of it. He was trying to build what had already existed here, with people who had forgotten it was possible.
Caraxes banked east and the coast of Slaver's Bay opened up below them.
…
The fleet was already anchored in the bay when Aemon brought Caraxes down on the headland north of the city walls — ten ships under the Velaryon seahorse, oars shipped, riding easy on the flat morning water. He spotted Lord Daemon Velaryon's flagship by its size, and by the man himself standing at the rail as Aemon descended the rocky path from the headland toward the dock.
Daemon was somewhere north of fifty and looked it the way a good sword looks its age — worn, reliable, nothing soft about it. He had been sailing since before Aemon was born and had the sort of permanent squint that came from forty years of reading weather on open water.
"My prince." He gave a short nod. "I'd have thought a man with a dragon wouldn't need a naval escort."
"The dragon can't carry eight thousand soldiers," Aemon said.
"Mmm." Daemon looked past him toward Astapor, visible in the distance, red and flat along the bay. "I've been to this city before. Younger, Didn't like it then."
"Has it changed?"
"Places like this don't change. They just keep going." He turned back. "How do you want to play this, my prince? We go in with numbers, or you go in quiet first?"
Aemon had already thought about this. Baelon had talked him through it the night before he left — sitting in the map room of the Red Keep, the two of them alone, Baelon tracing routes on the table with his finger the way he always did when he was thinking out loud. 'Don't arrive with the whole fleet. They'll see merchant opportunity and double the price. Go in as a prince making a purchase. The fleet is logistics, not a threat — let them figure that out afterward.'
"I go in first," Aemon said. "Small group. Ser Ryam, Edwell for translation. We agree terms. Then you bring the ships in for loading."
Daemon nodded slowly. "And if the masters try something clever?"
Aemon glanced back toward the headland where Caraxes had settled, coal-red against the rock, one eye half-open, watching the bay with the patient attention of an animal that never fully stopped being dangerous.
"Then I have Caraxes."
Daemon Velaryon followed his gaze. "Fair enough," he said.
…
They entered through the main gate on horseback — Aemon, Ser Ryam, Edwell, and two knights of the escort — and the city responded to them like a stone dropped into still water.
It started at the gate. The guards there were hard men, the kind who spent their days deciding who was worth a second look and who wasn't. They took one look at Aemon's silver-gold hair and the violet eyes and the Targaryen sigil on his chest and they stepped back. Not a bow, not a greeting — just a step back, quick and automatic, like men who had just noticed they were standing too close to something.
Inside the walls, it spread.
He watched it move through the crowd ahead of them as they rode down the main street — heads turning, conversations stopping mid-word, people nudging each other and pointing. Not at him the way they pointed at curiosities. At him the way they pointed at something that shouldn't exist.
A Valyrian dragonlord.
Here. In Astapor. In the flesh.
An old woman near a market stall touched her forehead with two fingers and muttered something he couldn't hear. A merchant in expensive robes stopped mid-haggle and just watched them pass, mouth slightly open. Three children ran alongside their horses for half a block before a woman pulled them away, scolding in rapid Ghiscari.
Aemon kept his face neutral and his back straight, the way he had been taught. But he felt it — the weight of it. The Doom had been over hundered years ago. 108 years since Valyria fell, since the dragonlords died, since the blood of the Forty became something people spoke about in the past tense. And here he was, riding through an Essosi city with his silver hair and his purple eyes and his dragon sitting on a rock two miles north of the gate.
No wonder they stared.
"They think you're a legend." Edwell murmured from his left.
"A dangerous ghost, my prince." He completed
The street opened into a wide plaza of red stone, and Aemon saw the slaver compound ahead — high walls, bronze doors, the harpy of Astapor carved into the lintel. Already there were men on the steps waiting for them. Word had clearly run ahead.
…
There were three of them.
Kraznys mo Nakloz was the one in front — broad, richly dressed, wearing the expression of a man who had met many powerful buyers and knew exactly how to handle them. Behind his left shoulder stood a leaner man introduced as Grazdan zo Rhazdar, who had the eyes of someone doing sums while other people talked. Behind his right was an older man, Harzoo mo Eraz, with white hair and the careful stillness of someone who had survived in this business long enough to know when to say nothing.
All three of them bowed. Not the slight, performative bow men gave to wealthy merchants. A real bow — the kind that came from somewhere genuine.
Kraznys spoke first. Edwell translated: "The Good Masters of Astapor welcome the Prince of Westeros. They are honoured beyond words to receive a son of the blood of Old Valyria."
"Tell them I'm here to buy Unsullied."
Edwell translated. Kraznys spread his hands and smiled and spoke at some length. "He says Astapor has the finest Unsullied in Slaver's Bay, trained to the highest standard, and the Good Masters would be honored to discuss terms with —"
"All of them."
Silence.
Edwell translated. The three masters looked at each other — just a glance, quick — and Aemon watched what it meant move between them. Kraznys's smile stayed in place but didn't quite reach his eyes anymore. Grazdan's sums got more complicated. Harzoo went very still.
Kraznys spoke carefully. "He asks how many the Prince requires. Currently available for purchase are eight thousand, two hundred and forty men, full complement, with —"
"I said all of them."
Another look between the three. Harzoo said something quietly to Kraznys from behind his shoulder. Kraznys answered without turning his head.
"They are asking about payment," Edwell murmured.
"I know," Aemon said. "Tell them I have it."
Kraznys studied him for a moment. Then he spoke again and Edwell translated: "The Good Masters would be grateful for proof of that before they proceed."
Aemon reached into his riding coat and produced a sealed document — a letter of credit from the Iron Bank, brokered through a Braavosi contact Baelon had spent six months cultivating after opening an account in name of House Targaryen in Iron Bank. He held it out.
Grazdan leaned in first, the sums-man, and his expression as he read it shifted so quickly it was almost funny — surprise, calculation, a kind of cautious excitement he was trying to keep off his face and failing at.
Kraznys took it next. Read it. Then looked up at Aemon with the expression of a man recalibrating everything he had prepared to say.
"They will need a day to confirm," Edwell translated.
"They have until evening."
…
While the masters conferred, they gave him a tour.
The training yard was the part Baelon had warned him about. Not in words exactly — more in the way he had gone quiet for a moment before he'd said, "You'll see things there that'll bother you. Let them bother you. Just don't let it stop you finishing the job." At the time Aemon had wondered what his brother meant. He understood now.
Two hundred Unsullied stood in the midday sun without shade or water, still as stone, sweating in perfect silence. Their spears were at identical angles. Their faces were forward and blank in a way that wasn't quite like a soldier's face and wasn't quite like anything else either.
Kraznys walked him down the first row with the pride of a man showing off something he had built. He talked the whole time — Edwell translating in pieces — about discipline, about the training process, about the ten years it took to produce a finished Unsullied soldier.
Then he snapped his fingers.
An overseer said something to a man in the third rank. The man stepped forward, drew a blade, and put a clean cut across his own forearm. He stepped back into line. He didn't make a sound. He didn't look at the wound.
Kraznys smiled and gestured as if to say: you see?
Behind Kraznys, a slave — a man who had been standing nearby throughout, holding a parasol against the sun for the master — looked at that cut for just a moment. One blink. Then his eyes went back to nothing.
Aemon watched him.
That one blink. That was the thing.
"Tell him that's enough," Aemon said.
"My prince?"
"Tell him I've seen enough of the demonstration. I'm satisfied."
He turned back toward the compound before Kraznys could arrange another one.
…
The paperwork took the better part of the afternoon. The three masters sat across a long table from Aemon and Edwell, trading Ghiscari back and forth in rapid, tense bursts. Lord Velaryon arrived an hour in, having been signaled to bring the fleet into the inner bay, and he pulled up a chair beside Aemon without being invited and looked at the documents with the expression of a man who had signed a thousand contracts and trusted approximately none of them.
"The harbour fees they're adding on page three," he said, pointing without touching the tablet. "That's not standard. They're adding a Slaver's Bay levy. It doesn't exist."
Edwell translated. Grazdan looked at Daemon with something that wasn't quite respect but was close to it — the look of one man who works in coin recognizing another — and after a short exchange the line came out.
"Lord Velaryon," Aemon said quietly.
"My prince."
"Has the cargo hold situation been sorted?"
"We're not carrying eight thousand soldiers in cargo holds," Lord Velaryon said, with the tone of a man correcting a misconception he found professionally offensive. "They'll be billeted on deck and in the lower rowing galleries. Tight but workable. Ten days to the Stepstones, weather holding."
"And if the weather doesn't hold?"
"Then we sail slower and they get wet." He paused. "These men have survived ten years in those yards, my prince. I doubt rain is what finishes them."
Aemon almost smiled. "No. I don't think it is."
By the time the sun touched the walls of the city, the last seal was pressed. The gold was confirmed against the letter of credit. The transaction, in the eyes of Astapor and its Good Masters, was complete.
Eight thousand, two hundred and forty men. Purchased.
…
The three masters had already begun to disperse when Aemon stood in front of the formation in the fading light of the plaza and spoke.
He kept it short because he had never trusted long speeches and because these men had probably heard enough words in their lives from people who wanted things from them.
"You were sold to me today. That is the last time anyone sells you. You're free — every one of you, as of right now."
Silence. Eight thousand men standing in it.
"I'm asking you to choose to serve. Come west with me, take wages, take the oath of the Iron Throne. Not as slaves. As soldiers. If you want to walk away instead, no one will stop you."
He waited.
The first spear-butt came down in the third rank — a single hard crack against the stone. Then the next man. Then the next. It moved through the formation the way a strong wind moves through tall grass, not all at once but unstoppably, each strike picking up the one before it until the sound was rolling off every wall in the plaza and Aemon could feel the vibration through his boots and up through his spine.
Behind him, Lord Velaryon said nothing for a moment.
Then: "Well. That answers that."
"Yes," Aemon said. "It does."
…
He left the loading to Lord Velaryon, who had been organising the movement of men and cargo in difficult ports since before Aemon was old enough to ride a horse, and climbed back to the headland where Caraxes was waiting.
The Blood Wyrm had not moved from his rock. He was watching the bay with that permanent half-lidded patience that Aemon had come to understand was not laziness — it was the attention of an animal that could afford to wait because nothing below him posed a threat worth hurrying for.
When Aemon reached him, Caraxes turned that long serpentine neck and looked at him with one gold eye, and made a sound low in his throat that wasn't quite a purr and wasn't quite a growl — the sound he made, Aemon had decided, when he was willing to depart.
"I know," Aemon said. "Give it a moment."
He sat down on the rock and looked out at the bay. The ten Velaryon ships were moving in formation now, repositioning to receive passengers, their lanterns starting to come on one by one as the sky went dark. Below in the plaza, he could just make out the Unsullied breaking ranks properly for the first time — not the mechanical dispersal of soldiers following an order, but men moving with something slightly different in how they held themselves. Something small. Something that would probably grow.
He thought about Baelon then. About the night before he'd left — the two of them in the map room, Baelon tracing the Slaver's Bay coastline with one finger and talking through the plan the way he always talked through plans: quietly, as though the details were obvious and he was only saying them out loud to be thorough. 'The Unsullied are the thing we're missing. Men who answer to the crown and nothing else. No house, no maester whispering in their ear, no lord they grew up serving. It's the one gap in everything I'm trying to build, and it's a bad one.' Then he had looked up and said, with the particular flat certainty he used when he had already decided something: 'You're the only one I'd send for this, Aemon. Not because you're my brother. Because you'll actually finish it.'
Standing in that plaza this evening, watching eight thousand men choose — choosing, because he had given them the word and meant it — Aemon had understood what his brother meant. Not just about the soldiers. About all of it. The roads he was building, the Faith campaign being planned, the slow unglamorous work of making a kingdom actually hold together.
Baelon saw the shape of things before they happened. He had always been like that — even as a child, even when no one was listening. Aemon had learned years ago to listen.
Eight thousand free men who were, even now, choosing to sail west. He thought his brother would be quietly pleased about that.
Caraxes shifted beneath him, restless now, and Aemon pulled on his gloves and climbed up. The saddle settled around him with a familiarity that still hadn't worn out its welcome after years of riding.
They lifted off the headland in a long banking arc, Caraxes finding the night wind easily, and the Red City fell away below — the lights of it coming on in the dark, red stone glowing amber where the torches caught it, the ships in the bay like a small ordered fleet of fireflies.
Aemon looked back at it once.
Then Caraxes stretched his wings full, found his heading west, and flew.