POV- Stannis Baratheon
Davos came aboard Fury an hour after dawn, climbing the rope ladder from his skiff with his shortened fingers hooked through the rungs, and Stannis knew what he had seen before he opened his mouth.
"How many?"
"I stopped counting at a hundred and sixty, my lord." Davos wiped the salt from his beard with the back of his wrist. " Grapes on almost all of them. Lord Paxter's brought most of the Arbor with him, and the rest fly the lion. They're coming up out of Blackwater Bay with the wind at their backs. They'll be on us before the noon meal."
Stannis looked south. Mist still lay on the water, grey on grey. The Gullet was a narrow place, the long green hump of Driftmark to the east and the rocky arm of Massey's Hook to the west,the sea between them running fast and choppy with the tide. He could see nothing through the murk. That meant nothing. Davos had always had eyes like a gull's in fog.
"And ours?"
"Hundred and twelve, counting Lord Monford's," Davos said.
Ser Justin Massey barked a laugh at that, and swallowed it when Stannis turned his head. Massey had grown up on the Hook. He had talked half the night through about currents and shoals, as though knowing the name of every rock would keep a man from drowning on one.
"We cannot outrun them," Stannis said.
"No, my lord. Not with the wind where it is, and not with the Pride of Driftmark taking water the way she is." Davos hesitated. He rarely did that anymore. He had learned long ago that Stannis would rather have bad news than careful news. "We could beach the worst of ours on Driftmark and fight from the shore. Lord Monford's people know every cove on that island."
"And leave Dragonstone open behind us," Stannis rebuked.
Davos said nothing.
"The king must have had word of it," Massey said. "That Reed boy must have told him. If we can hold the Gullet until he's here, my lord, the dragon will do the rest."
"If." He hated that word. Stannis had spent a year inside Storm's End eating rats on the strength of that word. "We hold the Gullet because it is our duty to the king, not because we are waiting on anyone. Davos, take the Black Betha and the Swordfish to the Hook side. The Velaryon galleys go into the Driftmark shallows. Redwyne cannot bring all his ships to bear at once in the narrow pass. If Redwyne's great cogs chase them there, they'll run aground. Massey, signal Lord Monford."
"My lord." Davos touched his good hand to his heart, an old habit, and turned for the ladder. He stopped with one foot over the rail.
"If it goes badly, my lord." The man hesitated.
"It will not go badly."
"If it does." Davos's eyes were steady. "Marya's at Cape Wrath with the younger boys. She'll want to hear it from you. Not from a raven."
Stannis ground his teeth. It was a foolish thing to ask on a morning like this, and more foolish still to answer. "She will hear it from you, onion knight. Go and see to your ship."
Davos smiled at that, the small crooked smile he had worn more often since Storm's End, and went down the ladder into his skiff.
The Redwyne fleet came out of the mist at midmorning in a long, ragged crescent, and the sound arrived before the ships did: the groan of oars in their locks, the thin shriek of the stroke pipes. Then the sails, purple grapes on blue, dozens upon dozens, with the four-decked bulk of the Arbor Queen at the heart of the line and Lannister crimson running along her flanks.
Stannis stood at Fury's prow with his hands locked behind his back and watched them come.
It went the way sea fights went, which was badly for everyone. Fury's ram took a Lannister galley amidships with a crunch Stannis felt in his teeth, and the enemy's oars snapped like kindling along her whole length, and men went into the water screaming. Fire arrows came arcing over the rail in lazy red curves. One struck the mainmast a yard above his head and hung there, burning, until a boy scrambled up and knocked it into the sea.
"Lord Monford's signalling, my lord." Massey had to shout it over the din, one hand clamped on the rail. "He's lost the Lady Alyssane. Rammed and boarded. He asks leave to fall back on the shallows."
The Lady Alyssane. Monford had named her for his daughter and bragged of her speed at every supper since Maidenpool. "Tell him he has it," Stannis said. "The shallows, and not a yard further."
The air stank of burnt canvas and wet smoke and the iron smell of blood on hot planks. Somewhere to the east, two of Redwyne's great cogs chased the Velaryon galleys into the Driftmark shallows and ground to a halt on the sandbars with their masts swaying, just as Stannis had said they would, and for the better part of an hour the Gullet held.
Then the dragons came.
He heard them before he saw them, a shriek from the west, over the Hook, high and savage, answered by another. Every head on Fury turned. Two shapes came in low over the grey water, one black as a burned roof beam and one green, and they were smaller than the red beast he had watched sit on the fields outside Storm's End, but that made no difference at all to a ship made of wood.
The green one struck first. It came across the Velaryon line from north to south, and its fire rolled out in a long yellow sheet, and three galleys went up one after another like torches in a sconce. Stannis saw the Pride of Driftmark take the fire full across her deck. He saw men in sea-green leap from her rail with their clothes burning. He did not see Monford Velaryon among them.
The black one turned toward the Hook.
"Davos," Massey said, startled by the dragon's direction.
The Black Betha was a small ship. That was what Stannis knew. He understood how small she looked from Fury's prow with the black shape sliding down the sky toward her. He could see the tiller. He could see a man at it, hauling hard, trying to turn her into the smoke of a burning Redwyne galley for cover. He could see the man's face turn up.
The fire was black and red together, like no fire Stannis had ever seen, and it went down the length of the Black Betha from prow to stern in the time it took to draw a breath. Her sail went up in one sheet. Her mast went. When the wind tore the smoke away there was nothing standing on her deck, and she was already settling by the stern, and the sea around her hissed and steamed.
He had taken four joints from that man's fingers, once. He did not take his eyes off the ship now.
"My lord." Massey had hold of his arm. "My lord, the Swordfish is still afloat. We could..."
"Bring us about," Stannis said. His own voice sounded to him like someone else's. "Get the men off the Swordfish. Get them off anything that's still floating."
Men began shouting orders along the deck. Stannis stayed where he was. Fury heeled over into the turn, and spray came over the prow and soaked him to the knees, and he did not move.
A roar came down from the north.
It was nothing like the shrieks of the young ones. It was deeper and older and it came up through Fury's timbers into the soles of his boots, and every man on the deck stopped what he was doing to look. The red dragon came out of the grey over Driftmark with her wings spread wide enough to shadow three ships at once, and behind her, smaller, pale as old ivory, came a fourth.
Along Fury's rail, men had begun to cheer. Stannis looked at the steam rising where the Black Betha had been, and did not cheer.
POV- Daenerys Targaryen
She had burned four ships before she let herself look at what she was burning.
Drogon's fire struck the water and the water shrieked back at it, great gouts of steam boiling up white around the hulls. Men jumped. She saw them jump. Some of them were burning when they went over, and they went under burning, and they did not come back up. The smell rose after her through the smoke, pitch and wet wood and the other smell, the one she had first learned on the Dothraki Sea and had never once gotten used to.
The small black galley on the western edge of the fight had been the worst. The man at its tiller had not jumped. He had turned his face up to her as Drogon came down, and she had been close enough to see that he was not young, that he had a grizzled beard and a hand that looked wrong somehow as he threw it up against the fire. Then there had been nothing to see.
Burn them at sea, Tywin had said, in the tent, in that voice that never rose. Burn them at sea and Dragonstone falls without a siege.
Dragonstone was out there somewhere, east beyond the smoke and the green hump of Driftmark. She had been born there in a storm. She had not thought about that until this morning, and now she could not stop.
"Aegon!" She had to scream it, and the wind took it away regardless.
He was below her and to the south, Rhaegal diving and diving again on the Velaryon galleys in the shallows. He was laughing. She could see his mouth open. He had been laughing like that since they arrived at the Gullet, loud and quick and with nothing in it. He had not looked up at her afterward.
Then the roar came out of the north, and she knew it before she turned. The red dragon came over Driftmark low and enormous, her wings stretched so wide they looked to be covering the Gullet from one side almost to the other, and the pale shape that followed her made Daenerys's hands go numb on Drogon's spines.
Viserion. Cream and gold. The same cream and gold she had held in her lap in the Dothraki Sea and the Red Waste when he was no bigger than a cat, feeding him charred horsemeat from her own fingers. A woman sat between his spines now with a red lacquered mask where none should be, and he carried her as easily as if he had been born for her.
Four dragons in the sky. She counted them twice, like a child counting her fingers. Drogon under her. Rhaegal climbing now to meet the red one, Aegon still laughing on his back. The red queen with the pretender upon her. And her own lost son with a stranger riding him.
Viserion folded his wings and dove, and her heart leapt, and then she saw where he was going. He came down on Rhaegal's flank, on his own brother, with his jaws open and his pale fire already building in his throat, and Daenerys heard herself scream, a raw, wordless sound.
And after her, the red dragon roared.
This roar was closer and harder than the first, and it rolled across the Gullet like a slammed door, and Viserion flared his wings so hard he nearly tumbled out of the sky. He broke off. He climbed away, crying, high and thin, and circled at the edge of the fight like a hound called to heel. When he dove again, it was not at his brothers. He came down on the Redwyne line instead, on the Arbor Queen and the ships around her, and the pale gold fire went across the purple grapes and turned them black.
She did not have time to understand it, for the red one was on them.
Drogon screamed and went at her, and Rhaegal came up from below, and for a moment it seemed possible. Two against one. Her children were fast and young and savage, and the red one was old. But Rhaegal's fire splashed across the red dragon's wing and rolled off it like water off oiled leather. Drogon raked her flank with every claw he had, and Daenerys felt the shudder of it through his whole body, and heard his talons shriek across those ruby-red scales the way a blade shrieks across plate. They left nothing behind but bright scratches. The red dragon did not so much as flinch.
Then the red one turned her head and caught Drogon's wing in her jaws.
The world tipped. Daenerys clung with both arms. She heard the membrane tear, a wet ripping sound, like a sail splitting in a gale, and Drogon shrieked and wrenched himself free and fell. They fell together. The sea came up grey and huge and she thought, this is how it ends, and then Drogon's torn wing caught the air and he pulled out of it, lopsided and heaving, a hundred feet above the waves.
She could feel him. She had always been able to feel him, a little, as she could feel the sun on her back without looking up. What she felt in him now was more fear than rage.
"No," she said. "No, no, Drogon, we can go, we can go..."
He dove.
Down and down, until the swells were close enough that the spray soaked her silks and stung her eyes. He leveled out over the water. He was going so slowly. He never went slowly. Then he rolled his shoulder, gently, deliberately, the way he used to shrug off Irri's hands when he was tired of being fussed, and Daenerys slid.
She caught a spine. He shook himself, once, carefully, and her fingers opened. The sea was so cold it stopped her heart.
She went under in a roar of bubbles and came up choking, her skirts dragging at her legs like hands. Salt burned her nose and throat. She kicked. She came up again, and above her Drogon hung in the air on his torn wing, one great eye turned down toward her in the smoke.
Then he beat his wings and climbed, back up into the grey, toward the red one.
"Drogon!" She screamed it until there was no voice left. "Drogon!"
He did not look back. A broken mast floated past her, charred at one end. She caught it and held on. The water was full of things, wood and rope and a dead man face down with his cloak spread out around him like a lily pad. Somewhere close a ship was burning. She could hear the roar of the flames and men shouting over it. She saw the stern of it through the smoke, fire running up the rigging, and a banner hanging limp from the masthead. A crowned stag.
A boathook caught in the back of her gown, and someone swore. Rough hands took her under the arms and hauled her up against the side of the hull and over the rail, and she landed on the wet planks on her hands and knees and vomited seawater.
"Silver hair," someone said above her. "By the seven hells, it's her."
Boots stopped in front of her, and she looked up.
The man was tall and gaunt, his beard cropped close along a jaw that looked as if it had been clenched for twenty years. She had seen him across the hall at Harrenhal.
"Daenerys Targaryen," Stannis Baratheon said.
She got her feet under her, somehow. She was shaking so hard her teeth knocked together. "Lord Stannis. You knelt to a bastard."
"I knelt to my king." His eyes went past her, to the west, where smoke still rose from the water on the Hook side of the Gullet. "Your dragon burned the best man in this fleet not an hour past. His name was Davos Seaworth. You'll remember it."
She thought of a grizzled face turned up toward her. A hand that looked wrong. She wanted to tell him she had not known. She kept her mouth shut.
"Take her below," Stannis said to the men behind her. "Put her in my cabin and set a guard on the door. If she fights, chain her."
"I won't fight," Daenerys said. Her voice came out a croak.
And then above her Drogon screamed, and she looked up. She had dreamed this. Four dragons circling her ship, and the fourth one red, and so vast it swallowed the others. She had woken from that dream with her heart hammering and told herself it was false. Now it wasn't.
POV- Aemon Targaryen
Meleys had not taken a single wound. Rhaegal's fire had broken over her right wing and slid off it in a shower of sparks. Drogon's claws had skated down her flank and found nothing to bite on, only the scales she had been growing thicker for longer than any of the young ones had been alive. The heat that washed over her had not hurt her at all. It had hurt Aemon. The edge of the green dragon's fire had caught his left arm as it rolled past, and his cloak had gone up, and he'd torn it off and thrown it into the sea. Now the skin beneath his sleeve felt tight and smelled charred.
Shiera had caught him over Crackclaw Point, an hour out of Harrenhal. Viserion had slid out of a cloudbank off his left wing like a ghost, and when Aemon waved her back she had laughed at him. He had heard it over the wind. Now she was burning the Redwyne line from end to end, because Meleys would allow her nothing else.
He had felt that roar through his own bones when Viserion dove at Rhaegal. He did not know whether the old queen meant to spare the young one, or to keep the kill for herself. With Meleys, he suspected it was both.
Drogon had dropped away toward the sea a moment ago, after Meleys tore his wing. Aemon had lost him in the smoke. When the black dragon came up again, his back was empty.
Aemon searched the water below for silver hair and found only wreckage and fire. He had no time for more than that. Rhaegal came up from below.
The green dragon hit them in the belly with all four claws. The talons squealed across her underside without finding a gap, but the shock of it slammed Aemon forward against Meleys's neck so hard his teeth cut his lip. Meleys roared, more fury than pain. She curled on herself in the air like a cat with a hound at its back, and she caught Rhaegal's shoulders in her own claws and clamped down, and then the two of them were falling, locked together, spinning.
Rhaegal's back was below him, twenty feet down, turning. Aegon was on it.
The boy had lost his helm. His hair was plastered dark to his skull with blood from a cut above his eye, and he was strapped in between the spines and hacking uselessly at Meleys's claws with his sword, over and over, screaming something Aemon could not hear.
Aemon's hands went to his own straps before he had decided anything at all.
Try not to come alive next time after your death, Prince Aemon. He would not die, he convinced himself, and jumped. He hit Rhaegal's back between two spines, and the breath went out of him. His ribs flared white. He slid. The scales were slick with blood and hot as a griddle, and he slid sideways toward the edge of the green dragon's back with nothing below him but a long fall into grey water. His fingers found a spine. He hung there.
Rhaegal bucked under him, and Aemon got his knee up. Then his other knee, and he drew Blackfyre.
Aegon had turned. For a moment the boy only stared, as though Aemon were something that had climbed out of the sea.
"You!" Aegon screamed. The wind tore at it, but they were close now, close enough. "You took it! You took all of it! Connington, the throne, my crown, all of it!"
"Yield." Aemon had to shout. "Put him down on Driftmark. Put him down and live."
"I am Rhaegar's son!"
Rhaegal lurched. Above them Meleys was pulling up out of the fall with the green dragon still clamped in her claws, and the whole world swung sideways.
"Maybe you are," Aemon said, noncommittally. He watched the effect of his words on the boy. Aegon's face twisted, and he swung. It was a wild, looping cut, all fury and no craft, and Aemon took it on Blackfyre's edge and turned it. The spikes on Rhaegal's back held Aegon firm in his place, but Aemon had nothing holding him but his knees and one fist around a spine, and he knew he would not get a second chance.
He came in under the boy's arm and put Blackfyre straight through his neck. The Valyrian steel went in as easily as it went into anything. Aegon made a small sound. He looked down at the blade, and then past Aemon, toward the sea, toward the place where the black dragon had dropped away with its rider.
"Dany," he whispered.
Then his body fell down Rhaegal's neck. Rhaegal knew. Aemon felt the green dragon know his rider's death, felt the long shudder go through the whole beast from skull to tail, and heard the sound that came out of him, a long, high keening.
Aemon sheathed Blackfyre by feel. Meleys's claws were clamped over Rhaegal's shoulder an arm's length from his face, her talons sunk deep in green scale. Meleys then turned sideways, still holding Rhaegal in her claws, and came close enough for him to jump to her neck. He jumped, and then held on to her neck and settled himself between her spikes.
She felt him on her, and then she let go of Rhaegal with one claws, and turned her head, and closed her jaws on the green dragon's throat.
The fire she breathed then went into Rhaegal and not across him. Aemon saw the light of it through Rhaegal's scales, orange and then white, like a lantern behind a thin sheet. She burned everything blood and organ inside Rhaegal. Then she opened her jaws and let him fall.
Rhaegal went down burning, turning over and over. He struck the sea not far from where the Black Betha had gone down. The water rose white and loud around the fall, and when it settled there was only steam.
Drogon came out of the smoke a heartbeat later.
He came straight at them, riderless, his torn wing thrashing, screaming in a voice that made the hair stand up on Aemon's arms. He was fast and young and did not care anymore whether he lived. He struck her at the base of the neck and closed his jaws there, and Aemon felt the jolt of it through Meleys's body. Drogon's teeth ground against her scales like a millstone against rock, but they did not go through.
She twisted. She was old, far older than the black dragon, and she had fought her own kind before, in a war no one living remembered. She let him hold on. She let him bite. Then she rolled and caught the root of his good wing in her jaws and bit down, and Aemon heard the bones break.
They fell together. Meleys opened her wings at the last, but Drogon could not.
The black dragon hit the sea on his back beside the burning Swordfish. His head came up once out of the steam, jaws wide, and he screamed at the sky, at Meleys, at the whole grey world. Meleys closed on him, diving in low, and tore off his neck in one bite, taking it away with her. Then the sea closed over what remained of Drogon's body, the water turning red.
It was very quiet after that. There was only the wind and the crackle of burning ships and, somewhere high above the smoke, Viserion roaring.
Meleys brought him down on Driftmark's western shore as lightly as ever. She folded her wings, shook the salt spray from her head, and settled on the stones, the blood of two dragons drying on her jaws, none of it her own, and the neck of Drogon still in her jaws. Aemon slid down her neck, and his legs went out from under him when his boots touched the ground. He knelt on the wet stones with his burned arm held against his chest and breathed.
Viserion came down a little way off. Shiera slid from his back and walked across the shingle toward him, pulling off her gloves, and stopped in front of him.
"You'd have had me sit at Harrenhal and embroider," she said.
"I'd have had you guard it."
"It has walls and Randyll Tarly. You had neither." She crouched and took his burned arm in her hands and turned it to the light. Her mouth tightened behind the mask. "This will scar."
"Everything does."
She was quiet a moment, holding his arm. "The boy?"
"Dead." His throat was raw with smoke. "I did it myself."
"Good."
"He told me he was Rhaegar's son. At the end."
Shiera's eyes found his through the slits of the mask. "And what did you tell him?"
"That maybe he was."
She looked at him for a long time. The wind off the Gullet stirred the dark hair at her neck. "I don't know if that was cruel or kind, nephew."
"Neither do I."
Boats were coming in from the fleet, what was left of it. Aemon counted around a hundred sails still standing in the Gullet, more than half of those still burning. The Redwyne ships had broken and fled south with the Arbor Queen dragging smoke behind her. Fury was nearest, her stern charred, a crowned stag hanging from her masthead. A longboat came off her side and pulled for the shore.
Stannis Baratheon stepped out of it into the surf up to his knees and did not seem to notice. Two of his men followed with a woman between them.
Stannis stopped in front of Aemon. He looked at Meleys and the dragon's neck she chewed on merrily, and at the burned arm, and his jaw worked.
"Davos is dead, your grace." he said. "This black one was the one who took him. The Black Betha went down with every man aboard."
Aemon closed his eyes for a moment. He had liked Davos Seaworth in both his lives. Everyone who met him had. "I'm sorry, my lord."
"He asked me this morning to tell his wife myself." Stannis looked toward the Hook side of the Gullet. "I told him he would tell her himself."
He said nothing more. He did not need to.
The men brought the woman forward. Daenerys Targaryen's silks were soaked black and clung to her, and her silver hair hung in wet ropes over her shoulders, and she was shaking. She did not look at Aemon at first, but at Drogon, who had become Meleys's feast.
"Where is Aegon?"
"In the sea," Aemon said. "With Rhaegal."
She did not question more after that. He had expected her to weep, or scream, or come at him with her bare hands. She did none of it. She lifted her face instead, toward the sound above them, and Aemon looked up too.
Viserion had taken to the air again. He circled low over the shingle, cream and gold against the grey, crying. He passed over Daenerys once, so close that the wind of his wings lifted her wet hair from her shoulders.
"Viserion," she said. Her voice was almost gone. "Viserion. Come."
He circled once more over the water where his brothers had gone down. Then he landed beside Shiera, and folded his wings, and would not look at her.
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