GOT: I Plunder Skills — Chapter 406 - Dragonbinder

Jaime lay in the cold snow and let the biting wind move over his blood-stained body.

The wound was still bleeding. He couldn't feel it.

His cheek burned where Brienne had marked him, and that burn was the only clear thing left in a mind that had nearly torn itself apart.

Break his oath again?

No.

He was done playing the helpless pawn on someone else's board.

He sat up slowly. He looked at his hands , slick with blood, both of them. In his green eyes, something that had gone dark began, inch by inch, to come back.

He returned to his room. He didn't treat the wounds. He didn't bother changing out of the ruined clothes.

He went to the desk, spread a fresh piece of parchment flat, and picked up the quill.

No hesitation. No deliberation. He dipped it deep in ink and wrote a single line across the clean white page.

Then he folded it, pressed the wax seal, and left it bare , no Lannister lion, no house sigil of any kind.

He opened the door and handed it to the servant waiting outside.

"Fastest raven to Casterly Rock."

"Now."

The servant took one look at the blood and the wreckage of him and asked nothing. He snatched the letter and ran for the Maester's Tower.

Jaime closed the door. He leaned back against the cold wood and slid down until he was sitting on the floor.

He watched the fire move in the hearth and smiled , a real one, the kind that came from somewhere deep.

...

The Westerlands. Casterly Rock.

Lord Tywin Lannister sat behind his great oak desk, working through dispatches from the front.

Robb Stark. The little bastard was using Lynn's backing to make a nuisance of himself along the Riverlands and Westerlands borders, darting here and there like a fly that couldn't be swatted.

It was tiresome.

But Tywin was not worried.

The moment Jaime's sword found that Northern boy's heart, everything would settle back into its proper place.

He had absolute faith in Jaime. His most perfect creation. The sharpest instrument of his will.

A black raven came through the window and landed on the desk.

A thin smile crossed Tywin's face.

He untied the message tube from the bird's leg. He could already guess the contents. Jaime offering some limp excuse for the oath-breaking he was about to commit , or perhaps angling for a reward once the deed was done.

It didn't matter which. Neither would change anything.

He tore it open and unrolled the parchment from Winterfell.

The smile died on his face.

No excuses. No claims of merit. No lengthy explanation.

One line. Written in Jaime's bold, slashing hand.

A Lannister always pays his debts.

I owe Lynn a life, and a body of honor.

My debt is not yet paid.

Tywin stared at the words as if he could burn through the parchment if he looked hard enough.

The composure he had maintained his entire life cracked, just slightly , and behind it was something he rarely allowed himself to feel.

Disbelief.

The debt isn't paid yet.

He wouldn't act. He was saying he wouldn't act. He was telling his father, the Lord of Casterly Rock, that because some Northern boy had handed him a sword and called it honor, he would betray his own house. Betray the Lannisters.

Fury came up from somewhere deep in Tywin's chest , fast, total, like a fire catching dry wood , and swept through him all at once.

The hand holding the letter went white at the knuckles, the veins standing up beneath the skin, trembling faintly.

CRACK!

A clean, bright sound.

The white jade cup — priceless, irreplaceable , came down on the edge of the desk and exploded into fragments. The sharp pieces opened his palm. Blood ran between his fingers and dripped onto the Myrish carpet. He didn't notice.

The room felt like the air before a thunderstorm.

Outside the door, his guards felt it. Every one of them went still and stopped breathing.

A long silence passed.

Tywin opened his hand and let the bloody shards fall.

He didn't roar. He didn't make a sound at all.

He simply returned to his chair. His face settled back into its usual stillness , unreadable, composed, a wall with nothing behind it.

Except his eyes. Cold as ever, but burning now. Burning with something that could reduce the whole world to ash, if he chose to let it.

Jaime.

His most perfect son. His only true heir. His sharpest sword.

Had betrayed him for an outsider.

Very well.

...

The silence of the Westerlands had nothing in common with what was happening in the Iron Islands.

Pyke , that castle stacked on sea-stacks and cliff edges , howled under the ocean wind, a sound like something caught between grief and rage.

Since Balon Greyjoy had died under strange circumstances, his head gone without a trace, the Iron Islands had been leaderless. The power had nowhere to land.

Today was the Kingsmoot.

Captains and chiefs from every island had made the crossing to Old Wyk, climbing the hill to name a new king.

Theon Greyjoy stood somewhere in the crowd, shoulders hunched inside a leather coat that didn't fit him right, trying to disappear.

He had dreamed of coming home for years. What he'd found was something else entirely.

His father had looked at him like something the North had ruined. His sister Yara had not bothered to hide her contempt for even a moment.

Here, he was no one.

"I — Yara Greyjoy! Blood of Balon the Great! I will lead you, with fire and sword, to take back everything that is ours!"

Yara stood on a boulder with her axe raised and her voice carrying over the crowd. A portion of the captains roared back at her.

"A woman on the Salt Throne? Go back to your ship and take up weaving!"

A big captain shouted her down. Others laughed.

Then came the rest of them , Aeron, Euron's brother, the one they called the Damphair, and Victarion, Euron's elder brother, stepping up in turn, promising gold and women and glory.

The Kingsmoot dissolved into noise.

Then ,

WOOOO,

A horn call, long and wrong, like nothing a man should be able to make. It came without warning, and it didn't sound like it came from this world at all. The noise carried something inside it, something that pressed against the chest and wouldn't let go, and it silenced the hill the way a hammer silences a bell.

Everyone went still.

Everyone looked.

A man walked out of the crowd.

He wore Valyrian steel armor, black as a starless sky, with a strange red light playing across the surface, twisted runes carved into every plate.

His left eye was hidden behind a black leather patch.

His right eye was alive with something that had no business being called sanity.

His mouth held a smile, the kind that never quite meant what it seemed to mean.

Euron Greyjoy.

The Crow's Eye.

Theon's uncle. A legend, a madman, a man his father had exiled years ago and never spoken of if he could avoid it.

He was back.

"My dear brothers." He looked across the crowd, unhurried. "And my ambitious niece."

He walked to the center of the ground.

"Your promises are laughable."

"Gold? Land?" He let the words hang there, light with contempt. "Ironborn were never meant to want such small things."

He spread his arms wide, like a man welcoming something enormous.

"I have sailed to the edge of the Smoking Sea. I watched Valyria die."

"I walked the Shadow Lands of Asshai. I drank with Faceless Men and red priests."

He touched the patch over his left eye.

"What this eye has seen , gods and demons, playing their game — none of you could imagine it."

The silence on the hill was absolute.

This madman.

"The North has a new king," Euron said. "He has two dragons." Something bright and feverish moved across his face. "The whole world shakes under his dragonfire."

"Are you afraid of him?"

"I!" Victarion's voice came up like a hammer blow. "I'll sail the Iron Fleet north and tear those fire-breathing lizards apart with my own hands!"

"No." Euron shook his head slowly. The smile shifted into something harder. "You won't."

"Because those dragons are going to be ours."

He turned and waved behind him.

Two warlocks from Qarth , bound to him, owned by him , came forward carrying a long wooden chest between them.

Euron opened it himself.

What came out was not a smell exactly. It was something older than smell, something that pressed against the back of the teeth and behind the eyes. Ancient. Cold. Wrong.

A horn.

Half the height of a man. Black all the way through, banded with red gold and Valyrian steel, every surface carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly.

Theon's breath stopped in his chest.

He could feel it from here , whatever was packed inside that thing, whatever it had been made to hold. A force that did not belong to any natural order.

"What is that?" Yara asked, her brow drawn tight.

Euron ran his hand along the length of it, slow and deliberate, the way a man touches something he loves.

"Its name," he said, "is Dragonbinder."

"The legends say its sound can bring dragons to heel."

"Blow it — and every beast flying in that sky becomes a slave of the ironborn."

The hill erupted.

Control dragons.

The thought moved through the crowd like fire through dry grass. If it was real , if it worked , they wouldn't be raiders anymore. They wouldn't be pirates scrabbling at the edges of a world that didn't care about them.

They would own it.

"Blow it now! Show us!" A captain was screaming. Others took it up. Every face in the crowd burned with want.

"Of course," Euron said.

He glanced at the warlock standing beside him, who was shaking badly.

"You."

The warlock's head went back and forth, some broken plea falling out of him in a language no one there spoke.

Euron didn't even look again. The mute warrior at his back shoved the horn into the warlock's arms.

The warlock had no choice. He lifted it to his mouth, pulled in a breath, and blew with everything he had.

WOOOO,

The sound that came out was worse than before. Louder, sharper, with something underneath it that had no name , a frequency that found the eardrums and didn't stop there, that went straight into something deeper, something closer to the soul. Every person on the hill flinched. Several stumbled.

Theon watched the ancient Valyrian runes on the horn's surface light up, one after another, a crawling red glow that pulsed like something alive.

The warlock who held it was shrinking.

Not slowly. You could see it happening , his body collapsing in on itself, the flesh going tight and dry, the life draining out of him the way water drains through sand.

Then the hole appeared in his chest: a scorched black cavity, smoking, burned clean through from the inside.

A black crow sat on the ruin of his chest, present as if it had always been there.

The horn sound cut off.

The warlock , what was left of him , a desiccated husk trailing black smoke , toppled forward and hit the ground.

The red glow faded from the horn's surface. It looked the same as before. Somehow it looked worse.

The hill was silent.

No one moved. No one breathed loud enough to be heard. The spectacle had reached somewhere past fear and into something that didn't have a word for it.

Only Euron was smiling , wider now, brighter, absolutely delighted.

He picked up the horn. He raised it over his head, turning so every stunned, ash-faced ironborn could see him.

"I can control Lynn's dragons."

His eye swept the crowd.

"Now — who still wants to question my throne?"

➤ Next: Theon's Choice — Tears Unshed