Pre-Chapter A/N: Here we go with another chapter, coming in right on time. Next three chapters on my patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga)— same username as here and link in bio.
The solution was showy, but it was effective. A massive wooden container made with thick frames and wrapped with rope all the way around that came out in two harnesses. I wrapped one around where Igneel's left wing met the rest of his body, and the second around his right. We were outside Bloodstone Castle. I'd stayed as long as I could, but I had people waiting for me, and I had things to do. Even looking at my children could not keep me here.
The reminder from two days ago of what Braavos and Volantis were getting up to had me focused once again. Dorne coming into the fold would give us access to people, land, and raw materials for industries. It gave us a useful ally as well. I could not count on Westeros to step in if I was attacked, but Dorne could be forced to. Especially with Parvella's plan, which I had been able to see the beginnings of before I left.
I turned back to look at my wife. Mother stood with the children under a hastily assembled platform that shielded their delicate skin from the sun. A picnic mat had been spread out for them, and they played with their little toys, giving each other more mind than they gave me. I memorised every bit I could, burning it into my mind and sure that it would never leave, before I met Laena where she stood.
Her fingers arced upwards, pressing on my face, and her forehead met mine.
"I love you," I told her. She nodded, making me feel it with my own head, as she chuckled.
"I'll miss you."
"I can't explain how much I will ache for you in the months to come," I told her.
"You know my view of things."
"You know Dorne is essential," I said.
"Essential to this dream that you have. But not essential for us to love each other, or be happy, or have a good life," she said.
"We can. We can have a good life, but is that what we leave our children? We have four now. They will have children of their own. Is this what we will leave them with? These stormwashed rocks?" I asked.
"You are fashioning the Stepstones into a kingdom to rival any other," she said, her eyes meeting mine. They were pleading.
"I am. And she will be the jewel of an empire. Our children will inherit an empire, and they will be grateful for it. For this sacrifice I make now," I said.
"I wonder which matters more. Them receiving an empire, or the fact that you are the one to give it to them. I know you, my heart. I know just how much you obsess over the idea of your legacy. Of what you leave behind. And I fear that this will never end. The children would rather a father than an empire. I would rather a husband as well," she said.
"Good. You will get both, my love. In a matter of moons, I will return. I will impress on Icarus the need to hurry about things. And this will be the longest campaign for a long time. I will return to you, my love. I will... I swear it on the gods, old, new, and Valyrian," I said. She chuckled at that before finally separating her head from mine.
"I love you," I said again, and then finally moved to Mother and my children. The Queen Who Never Was looked as regal as ever as she sat there. She had spent moons here, and no matter how much she claimed to love Driftmark and the time she spent there, I was not seeing things when I noticed just how much better she looked here. Refreshed, energised, and beautiful.
"You remind me so much of your father," she said when I reached her. I took her outstretched hands in my own.
"I don't think he was ever so handsome. That much I got from you," I said to her. She chuckled.
"Corlys won the attention of many a maiden in his younger years, my son. Age was not kind to him, but I assure you that he had his days," she said.
"I'm sorry, Mother, but you will have to stay longer. Just a bit," I said.
"I do not mind it. I miss the halls of my husband, but there is peace here as well. And here there is my daughter and my grandchildren. Watching them grow is a pleasure. My daughter is experiencing what it is like to have a husband off at war for reasons you can't entirely understand, and I must be here when she needs me," she said.
"Take care of her. Take care of them," I said when she rose and pulled me into a hug. I whispered the words into her ears, and she nodded against my shoulder.
"I swear it, Laenor my love. I will keep them in good health and the best spirits I possibly can until you return," she said, and then it was now time for the final group.
I didn't know what to expect from the children, but I bent to my knees and tried to draw their attention, but they were too busy playing their game.
"Children," Mother spoke in that tone that it felt like only experienced parents could call upon. Their heads arced up to her.
"Say goodbye to your father," she said, and I got a wave or two before they went back to their game. I couldn't stop myself from smiling as I pushed myself back to my feet. This was better than a teary departure. Much better. Because if Romulus looked at me with those eyes so much like Laena's and asked for me to stay, then I didn't think I'd be able to manage to leave, men waiting for me or not.
"Don't worry," I told mother when she seemed likely to repeat the request to them. Just watching them play was enough for me. I gave her a kiss on the forehead before I went back to Laena. We kissed hungrily, like we were trying to cram months of affection into one kiss and one kiss only.
"Come back to me," she said when we separated.
"I will," I said, and then I went to Igneel. He snorted in my face.
"Yeah, I know the rope is itchy. Just a few hours more," I said, a consolation that he didn't seem to appreciate all that much, his head turning around to try to pick at the rope where it lay around his body. I pushed his head back a bit and then began to climb the saddle. With me on top of him, he turned his attention away from the rope finally. I was confident that we had tied it in a way that ensured he wouldn't be able to reach it with his head, but Igneel could be very innovative when the situation called for it.
"Let's get going, brother. Soves, Igneel," I whispered to him, pushing what I wanted him to do into his head. He snorted again, but he did obediently rise into the air slowly with flaps of his wings. We rose in a straight line up until we were almost at cloud level, and when I was sure we were high enough that we didn't have to worry about the crate of food hitting anything, we began to fly forwards.
Neither the rope nor the crate was necessarily durable enough to deal with being dragged at our full speed, so Igneel kept to a cruising speed. It was still fast, but not so fast that I worried for the crate beneath us.
While we flew, I began to plan. I needed to wrap things up in Dorne sooner rather than later. Whatever plan Icarus had was going to take a back seat here. He had yielded the food issue to me, so I had all the justification I needed to step in with my own plan for dealing with the rest of Dorne. I would accelerate things. We would leverage Igneel even more to bring this war to an end before the year came to an end, and that would give me time to deal with Tyrosh.
Tyrosh was the city in the Triarchy that hated us the most. They were proving to have long memories and not a drop of the self-preservation that the Lyseni and the Myrish did. I would take advantage of that. First, I would hasten the fall of the Triarchy, if not a full fall then at least a wedge. I needed the cities to be at each other's throats. And thankfully, we were already close to getting there. Tyrosh didn't like how friendly Lys was with us, and Myr didn't like how the two other cities had begun buying Velaryon glass almost exclusively in the last year after we'd slashed prices even further. Parvella's reports made it clear that of all the cities, Myr had the most complex relationship with us.
We undercut their flagship glass trade, which made quite a few of their richest magisters a lot poorer, but then we also provided cheap shipping, cheap food, and access to Yi-Ti for their other products, which had made a lot of other people a lot richer. On the whole, we came out net neutral with them. With the Lyseni, things were more positive. Our shipping services were popular there, and without much of an existing industry for us to compete with—Lys' greatest exports were its bedslaves and their services, which our sailors patronised more than they probably should have—they were happy for a live-and-let-live relationship with my kingdom. Tyrosh could have stood to gain much from my presence in the Stepstones.
The only problem was that the most powerful of their merchants had too much national pride and not enough common sense. My plan leveraged that. Well, it was more Parvella's plan than my own, as she had come up with the seeds of it and the reports on sentiment from the other cities towards us. We would fake an attack or something by the Tyroshi. If we could get them to actually attempt an attack, then it would be even better. But we could fake something if they weren't forthcoming. Some evidence that the pirates in the Stepstones were sponsored by them would work just fine. And then from there, no one could fault us for retaliating.
If we wanted to take the city, we had to do it quickly, though. We had to do it quickly enough that neither Myr nor Lys could even think of stirring. By the time the news reached them, it should already state that we had taken over the city. And with the city in our hands, we would negotiate some sort of agreement with Lys and Myr. Parvella felt we'd just have to pay them off from Tyrosh's coffers, and while I hoped things came out so simply, I wouldn't hold my breath for it. They would demand some concessions of some sort, we would push back on them, and then we would get some middle ground that no one was fully happy about.
And from there, well, Lys was next. And after that, Myr. Hopefully I would be able to wait for Viserys to kick the bucket and for the Westerosi to be too busy killing each other over the throne to turn their attention to me. If it all went to plan, I would form all the three cities, Dorne and the Stepstones into a single unified kingdom and announce my secession in the middle of the Dance of the Dragons. And for everything else I wanted, I just had to wait. How did Baelish put it again? Chaos is a ladder?
My thinking of plans and counterplans carried me for most of the journey, and when my attention returned to the world around me, I could see the sea of yellow that was Dorne's desert in the far distance. Just a bit more now. Dorne first, and then the world, I told myself in a whisper.
We had left Bloodstone when the sun was just about rising. And we joined the rest of the army in Dorne when the sun was setting. A full day had been spent on a journey that should only have been a few hours. But care for the cargo we carried in this form of transport that hadn't been used since the days of the Freehold had restrained us heavily. It was not all bad news, though. I landed with a clarity that I had not had in a while. Hours of thinking and planning would do that to a man, I reckoned.
It would take me some time to bring my plans to fruition, but there would come a time before my death when the sun would never set on the Velaryon Empire. Metaphorically, of course. Everything I'd found so far told me that we all lived in roughly the same time zone even despite the size of the continents involved. Somehow planetary shenanigans made it so that sunrise in Vaes Dothrak was the same time as sunrise in Lannisport. Never mind the massive amount of distance between them.
We were careful to drop the crate first, lowering our altitude until the massive crate hit the ground with a light thud. Physics would have made all of this completely impossible. But dragons were bullshit magic either way. Igneel landed a few feet away, his landing scaring off the few curious souls who had wandered out of the camp to look at the crate. I drew Riptide, and with two quick cuts freed him from the rope that joined him with the crate. I checked for any marking, scarring, or injury, but there was nothing. Of course there wasn't. These scales could make steel bounce off them. What was a bit of rope going to do—no matter how thick?
Igneel remained to guard the food, and I walked into the camp. Eyes followed me, but for the most part things were in good order.
"That was you, then," Icarus Jordayne mumbled out, head on his desk. The tent reeked of wine. I wondered how, in a camp running out of food, the man somehow managed to find enough wine for this non-stop drinking, but then I repeated the question to myself again and just scoffed. This man had probably filled a baggage train with wine and wine alone.
Speaking of wine, though, I was thirsty. And I'd emptied my waterskin a while ago. I marched forward, snatching the goblet from his slack grip and filling a cup for myself. I chugged it down, and it was good wine. It made my displeasure with the man lessen somewhat. Characters who were drunk all the time could be charming when you read them in a book or saw them in a movie, but living with people who needed to be drunk for every little thing, no matter how capable they were under the influence, could get tiring after a while.
I left in search of Oberon when I was done, leaving this man to his struggles.
----
"So we march today, and your ships will resupply us at Salt Shore," Oberon repeated the plan I'd given him. I nodded. There was enough dried and cured food in that crate to last the army a week or two in the desert. We would fill our water stores and make the hard march to Vaith first. Hopefully, Lord Gargalen was foolish enough to ride to his neighbour's defence, and then we would deal with both birds with a single stone. If not, then we would deal with them one at a time.
"I will tell Icarus of the plan," he said, also sounding far from pleased with his brother so far. I nodded and gestured for him to get on with it.
On my end, I went towards the sellswords. The companies that had come from Essos to join this war had done it not just for gold. Icarus had been liberal with his promises to them. Knighthoods and knightly houses and castles in the new Dorne were not cheap things to be given out. But then he probably anticipated a situation where there were castles aplenty to be distributed.
XXXX- VAITH, Late 120 AC
The castle was empty. It was actually impressive. They had emptied it out and taken everything not nailed down to the ground when they left. It must have been the work of weeks if not moons. But then it wasn't like they'd had much else to do. The fishing village that sat next to the castle said the Lord and Lady, along with those who were willing to join them, had fled into the deep desert. Considering that was where we had just come from, it wasn't likely that things were going to go all that well for them.
They thought they were still fighting a Targaryen army. A shame. This one was just as Dornish as they were. Icarus distributed gold and grain from our stores to the people of the village—the Vaiths had taxed them heavily before leaving. He bought their loyalty, and then he appointed one of his men as the Steward of the Castle, and left a thousand men to garrison it. A hundred of them would be outriders that would search the desert for the fled household, while the rest remained behind to deny them a place to return. Word was that they had never bothered to call their banners, and Icarus struck down every knightly house and tower in the vicinity for a sennight searching for them, and when that failed, we turned our gaze to Salt Shore.
Vaith had fewer than a thousand in his full household, and most of them would probably peel away when they realised that the village was still standing just fine. They were dead; they just didn't know it yet.
A/N: Should be done with the war in Dorne by the end of next chapter. Next chapter comes on here by Wednesday night next week (taking a small break as a new story comes up on Sunday). Next three chapters up on patreon(https://www.patreon.com/c/Oghenevwogaga) (same username as here and link in bio), you can support me there and read them early.