Volantis was a furnace, and the midday sun sat directly above the Black Walls like a great, blinding brass kettle. It baked the white marble of the palace loggia until the stone glowed with a suffocating heat, shivering in visible waves that blurred the distant domes and red brick towers of the city. Down below, beyond the high walls of the Triarch's estate, the stink of the Rhoyne hung heavy in the air—a stagnant, foul mixture of river silt, rotting fish, baked horse dung, and the cloying sweetness of orange blossoms wilting in the garden.
Sela's fingers were shaking as she pulled the leather laces tight across Daemon's chest. She was a slender Lysene girl of ten name days, flaxen-haired and soft-spoken, her breath smelling of honeyed wine as she hovered over the boy. Every time her small, cool hands pulled at a brass buckle, her breath came out as a faint, tight gasp, her eyes wide with quiet dismay.
"It is too heavy, My Prince," she whispered in her liquid, musical Lysene-Valyrian, dabbing a wet linen cloth gently against his flushed forehead. "You are only eleven name days grown. The heat will bake you inside this leather before you ever raise a blade. Lady Daena should not allow that great ox from the sunset lands to cage you in hides and wool."
"Pull it tight, Sela," Daemon said.
His voice was a soft, cool murmur, smooth as river silk and unhurried despite the leaden weight settling over his small shoulders. The gambeson was a heavy, awkward thing—two layers of thick linen stuffed with horsehair and boiled cowhide, smelling of old tallow, goose fat, and the sour tang of dried sweat. It was made for a squire three years his elder, but Daemon did not complain. He stood motionless upon the burning marble, his broad feet planted firm in his leather boots, allowing the girl to bind him into his padded cage.
"Daemon."
The command cut through the shimmering heat like the sharp crack of a whip.
Daena Blackfyre stood beneath the shade of the marble arcade, her violet eyes hard as cut flint. She wore no silk slippers today, nor the flowing gowns of a Volantene noblewoman. She was dressed in high riding boots of dark, oiled leather and a high-collared gown of slate-grey wool, standing rigid with her hands folded tightly across her chest. Beside her, Sela bowed her head low and shrank back into the deep shade, clutching her silver basin of scented water like a shield.
"Do not coddle him, girl," Daena said, her voice dry and cold as a winter wind. "If he cannot bear double-padded leather in Volantis, he will choke on his own blood when he marches on King's Landing. Step away."
"Yes, My Lady," Sela murmured, her eyes dark as she darted back into the shadows.
Daemon stood alone in the center of the white stone courtyard. Near the edge of the terrace, lying half-forgotten in the dust, were the slender wooden foils and silver-hilted practice rapiers he had used for three years under Ser Vario. The Tyroshi master was gone now, sent away with a purse of silver and a curt dismissal. His graceful footwork, his elegant parries, his talk of light steps and subtle pricks—all of it had been discarded in a single morning.
Ser Jonett Peake stepped into the blinding glare of the courtyard.
The Reachman had stripped off his heavy steel plate and chainmail harness, which lay piled in a dark, gleaming heap near the arcade pillars like the shell of a dead beetle. He wore only a grey wool tunic, dark with sweat under the armpits and across the chest, a pair of grease-stained leather breeches, and heavy, scuffed riding boots that clanked with dull iron spurs. His face was a map of old scars, his beard thick and salted with grey, his dark eyes squinting against the harsh Essosi light.
In his broad, calloused hands, Jonett carried two practice longswords. They were not the light, willow-thin foils of the water-dancers. They were heavy, brutal things carved from dense, oiled ash and bound in hoops of hammered iron, with thick leather grips and broad, square pommels. They were weapons forged to build muscle and break bones—far longer, thicker, and top-heavy compared to anything Daemon had ever held.
Jonett tossed one down. It hit the gravel with a dull, heavy crunch.
"Pick it up, Your Grace," Jonett growled, rolling his wide, thick shoulders. "Ser Vario taught you how to dance with a toothpick and prick at silk shirts. I am going to teach you how to hold a longsword."
Daemon stepped forward, his boots crunching in the loose white gravel, and bent to take the leather grip. He placed his right hand near the crossguard and his left over the broad iron pommel. He was broad-built for eleven name days, thick across the chest and sturdy of bone, yet the sword was long and awkward in his young hands. The rough ash bit into his unhealed, blistered palms, and when he dragged the point up into a high guard, his shoulder muscles began to ache and quiver before three beats had passed.
"Too high," Jonett said, his voice flat.
The old knight stepped in without warning and swung. It was a low, flat sweep aimed at the boy's ribs.
Daemon tried to slip the blow using the light, fluid sidestep Ser Vario had drilled into him for years, but the heavy, horsehair-stuffed gambeson bound his shoulders and dulled his speed. The thick ash blade took him full in the side.
The impact knocked the breath clean out of his lungs with a dull, sickening thwack. Daemon stumbled sideways, his boots skidding through the loose gravel, and went down hard on one knee. Pain bloomed red and bright across his ribcage, blinding him for a heartbeat as the white courtyard spun in dizzying circles.
Deep in his belly, something dark and hot tore at its chains. It was a black, terrible storm—the wild, volatile rage that lived in his marrow, a blood-fury he spent every waking hour hiding beneath a prince's smooth, silver manners. His blood sang with sudden, blinding fury. His jaw clenched so hard his back teeth creaked, and his fingers bruised the leather grip of the ash sword until his knuckles turned bone-white.
I will tear his throat out, the black storm whispered in his head, hot and suffocating. I will take his blade and crush his skull against the marble.
Daemon forced air back into his starved lungs. He squeezed his eyes shut for half a beat, swallowing the heat, forcing the screaming fire down, down, down into a cold, dense iron stone at the bottom of his stomach. Slowly, deliberately, he pushed himself up from the gravel. He wiped a smudge of dust from his chin with the back of his sleeve. His face remained smooth as milk, his dark indigo eyes as quiet and unreadable as a frozen mountain pool.
"Again," Daemon said softly. His silver voice was light, gentle, and utterly untroubled.
Jonett's grey eyes narrowed. The veteran knight looked for tears, or the petulant, screaming snarl of a highborn boy who had never known a blow in his life. He found neither. He found only that strange, eerie, frozen quiet.
"Again," the knight muttered, and swung a second time.
The second blow caught Daemon on the point of the right shoulder, ringing through his collarbone and numbing his arm down to the fingertips. The third cracked hard across his left thigh, sending him down into the dirt once more. Jonett did not hit like a duelist scoring points in a courtyard tournament; he hit like a soldier in a chaotic melée, heavy, brutal, and relentless.
"Set your feet, lad!" the knight barked, his voice echoing off the high stone walls. "In mail and plate, you do not hop around like a frog! You take the strike on the strong of your steel, you turn the flat of the blade, and you drive your weight straight into his chest! Use your leverage! A knight in full harness who tries to dodge a longsword is a knight who dies with an axe in his spine!"
Daemon dragged himself up from the dust once more. Sweat soaked through his gambeson, sticking the heavy wool to his skin like hot, wet mud. His arms felt like waterlogged straw, the ash longsword twice as heavy as it had been moments before. The sun burned down upon his bare silver-gold hair, making his head throb with every ragged breath. Yet he raised the heavy wooden point again, setting his feet wide in the gravel, dropping his hips, and centering his weight.
When Jonett brought the heavy ash blade down in a wood-splitting overhead strike, Daemon did not try to leap backward. He braced his legs, dropped his left shoulder, and brought his own blade up at a sharp, rising angle to catch the strike near the iron-bound crossguard.
The shock of wood slamming on wood traveled down his arms, rattling through his wrists, his elbows, and his jaw with a bone-deep vibration. But the angle held. Jonett's strike slid harmlessly down the flat of the wood. Daemon stepped into the collision, driving the heavy iron-bound pommel of his sword upward with all the strength in his broad eleven-year-old frame.
The pommel struck Jonett's padded tunic full in the chest with a heavy thud.
The veteran knight let out a grunt of surprise, forced back half a pace to keep his footing in the loose stone.
Jonett stood there in the blistering glare, staring down at the boy through a thick sheen of sweat, his breath raspy in his chest. A dark, ugly bruise was already forming on the boy's cheek where a stray elbow had grazed him earlier, but Daemon stood his ground, his two-handed grip firm upon the leather hilt, the point of his heavy ash blade wavering only slightly in the heat.
"Better," the knight grunted, wiping a mouth full of salt sweat with the back of a hairy forearm. "Much better, Your Grace. Again."
They fought until the sun began its long descent toward the western horizon, casting long, bruised-purple shadows from the marble pillars across the courtyard. They fought until Daemon's legs were shaking like reed-stems in a summer gale, until his lungs burned like dry brush on fire, and until the blood from his split palms soaked through his linen wraps to stain the dark leather of his sword grip.
When Jonett finally dropped his weapon into the dust and called a halt, Daemon did not fall. He remained standing in the center of the ring, his chest heaving, his face pale beneath the layers of dirt, sweat, and dried blood, his dark indigo eyes staring straight ahead into the blinding red glare of the sunset.
"That will serve for today, Your Grace," Jonett said, his rough Reach accent dropping into a low, quiet cadence. He wiped his grey beard with a towel tossed to him by a slave. "You take a blow like a Reachman born. Better than most, if truth be told."
The bath was drawn in a copper tub shaped like a coiled sea-serpent, the water scented with crushed mint, dried rose leaves, and steepings of poppy to deaden the ache in his bones.
Sela worked in tense, tight-lipped silence as she scrubbed the red dirt and dried blood from Daemon's skin. Her small hands were careful as she applied a dark, stinging salve of tallow, vinegar, and boiled mustard seed to the purple bruises mottling his shoulders, ribs, and thighs. Every touch was an agony, a sharp fire that made the muscles in his back twitch, yet Daemon sat motionless in the steaming water, his head rested against the copper rim, his eyes fixed on the flickering oil lamps mounted along the plastered wall.
"He will break you, My Prince," Sela murmured, her Lysene accent tight with quiet disapproval as she bound his split palms in clean, lard-soaked linen. "He is a wild dog from the sunset lands. His heart is made of iron and dirt."
"A dog guards the door, Sela," Daemon said quietly. His voice was as soft and melodious as a lutenist's song, lacking even a tremor of pain. "And iron cuts through silk."
When the girl had finished dressing his wounds and wrapped him in a robe of pale purple wool, she bowed low and slipped out into the gallery, leaving him alone in the quiet gloom of his bedchamber.
The door groaned on its bronze hinges, and Daena stepped into the room. She carried no lamp, framed only by the silver moonlight spilling through the high arched balcony. In her hands she carried a rolled parchment—a map of the Westerosi Marches, yellowed at the edges and stained with old sea-salt.
She sat at the foot of his featherbed, laying the parchment across his linen-wrapped knees.
"Look at this, Daemon," she commanded softly, her long silver-gold hair gleaming like polished steel in the moonfall. She pressed a slender finger onto the dark ink of the Reach. "Here is Starpike. Here is Dunstonbury, and here is Whitegrove. These are the lands we promised Ser Jonett today. Three castles lost to House Peake because they stood by our blood when the rest of the realm wavered."
Daemon looked down at the faded ink. His body burned with a deep, throbbing ache that reached all the way to his marrow, but his dark indigo eyes remained sharp.
"Ser Jonett does not fight for gold," Daemon murmured, his silver cadence quiet in the still room. "He fights because his brother bent the knee."
Daena's mouth curved into a hard, proud line. "He fights because he needs a king to make his treason righteous. Remember that, my son. Lords do not follow children because they are sweet or kind. They follow them because they carry the power to turn traitors into heroes and beggars into lords."
She reached out, her cool fingers cupping his jaw, turning his face toward her. Her thumb brushed over the dark bruise on his cheekbone, her eyes catching the cold silver of the moon.
"Let Peake think every drop of blood you spilled today is for his lost castles," she whispered, her voice barely a breath against the dark. "So long as he sees his king in you, he will break his own bones to put you on that chair."
She pressed a warm kiss to his brow, a soft, tender touch that felt to Daemon like the purest proof of a mother's love, anchoring him against the cold, burning ache in his bones.
"Rest now," she said softly, standing up and sweeping toward the door. "You have earned your night."
Sleep would not come.
Whenever Daemon closed his eyes, the sensation of the ash longsword vibrating through his bones returned to haunt him, his muscles locking in sudden, involuntary spasms.
Silently, his bare feet making no sound against the cool marble tiles, Daemon slipped out of his bedchamber and walked down the open arcade. The Volantene night was cooler now, a damp river breeze blowing off the Rhoyne, carrying the distant sound of slave-galleys groaning at their moorings and the faint chiming of temple bells behind the Black Walls.
He found Ser Jonett on the lower terrace, seated on a stone bench under a trellis of night-blooming jasmine.
The old knight had a small oil lantern resting on the flags between his boots. In his lap lay a shirt of dark steel mail, missing a dozen rings along the shoulder hem. Jonett worked in silence, a pair of heavy iron pliers in his calloused hands, fitting tiny, riveted iron links into place with slow, methodical pinches.
The knight did not look up as Daemon approached, though his ears picked up the whisper of the boy's wool robe.
"You should be sleeping, Your Grace," Jonett growled, the pliers clicking sharply against the steel links. "A knight who doesn't sleep in his bed sleeps on his shield in the mud."
"My hands burn," Daemon replied softly, stepping closer to watch the knight work. "And my shoulders will not rest."
Jonett paused, setting the pliers down across his thigh. He looked up at the boy, taking in the pale, moonlit face, the dark bruises, and the clean white bandages wrapping his knuckles.
"That's the iron talking," Jonett said, his voice low and raspy. "It stays in your muscles long after you put the blade down. First week, you think your arms will rot and fall off. Second week, you curse my name every time you try to lift a spoon to your mouth. By the third month, you don't feel the weight at all. It just becomes part of your ribs."
Daemon reached out with a bandaged hand, his fingers lightly touching the cold, oiled steel rings of the mail shirt. "How heavy is it?"
"Thirty pounds of wire," Jonett said. "Over a thick leather coat, it will turn a dagger's point and split a sword's edge. But it traps the heat like a bakery oven, and if you fall in a river, you sink like a stone." He looked Daemon dead in the eye. "Tomorrow, you put it on. We'll start with footwork in the gravel. Two hours of stepping, two hours of thrusting, two hours of the guard."
Daemon looked down at the iron shirt, then met the old knight's weary grey eyes.
"Ser Jonett," Daemon asked, his voice a soft, silver whisper against the rustle of the jasmine leaves. "When you fought in the sunset lands... did you ever fight a lord of the Marcher houses?"
Jonett let out a short, bitter snort that sounded like dry gravel shifting. "Aye. I've fought Carons, Dondarrions, and Swanns. Marcher lords are bred in the rocks, lad. They feed their sons sour wine and iron filings before they can walk. They don't give an inch of ground, and they don't ask for mercy."
The knight leaned forward, his rough face illuminated from below by the yellow lantern light.
"If you want to win back the Iron Throne, Your Grace, you won't be fighting Lysene mercenaries or Volantene pit-fighters who turn and run when their captain dies. You'll be fighting men who have held their castles for a thousand years, men who would rather drown in their own blood than see a Black Dragon banner raised over their halls."
Daemon stood quiet in the moonlight, the wind catching his silver hair and whipping it across his brow. He felt the cold stone in his belly—the dark, heavy storm—stirring quietly, answering the knight's words with an unyielding stillness.
"Let them hold their castles," Daemon said softly, his prince's voice smooth as ice and sharp as a newly ground edge. "I will learn to break them."
Ser Jonett stared at the eleven-year-old boy for a long moment, the faint rustle of the river wind filling the silence between them. Then, slowly, a grim, toothy grin broke through the knight's salted grey beard.
He picked up his pliers once more.
"Go to bed, Your Grace," Jonett growled, his tone rougher than before, yet devoid of its earlier bite. "The sun comes up in four hours. And the mail won't carry itself."