5 years of training had taught me many things.
How to clean mail until my fingers stank of oil for days. How to saddle a horse in the dark while half-asleep and being insulted by a stablemaster with only four teeth and the soul of a demon. How to read, write, count, and, more importantly, how not to look like a complete fool doing any of those things in front of a maester. How to take a beating in the yard, return one with interest, and bow politely afterward. How to pour wine for nobles without staring when they discussed treason as casually as weather. And, most importantly of all, how to tell from one look whether Damon was in a mood to tolerate my nonsense or murder me with a spoon.
At twelve years old, I considered that a respectable education.
I was a squire now—officially and properly, not merely an inn boy with a stick and too much confidence. I had grown taller, though not as much as I would have liked, and years of hauling armor, carrying shields, training with sword and spear, and being worked half to death in Fairmarket's yard had put muscle on me that I hadn't possessed as a child. My face had sharpened with age, my hair had grown longer before being hacked back by my own hand with a knife and questionable judgment, and my hands had roughened enough that I no longer looked like I belonged behind an inn counter.
I still had black hair, blue eyes, the sort of features my mother claimed would make girls foolish one day, but now there was less softness to it. More sun, more bruises, more experience. More Westeros.
Damon said I still talked too much. Elyane, before her marriage, had informed me that my greatest flaw was confidence unsupported by proper rank, which sounded insulting until I realized she'd said it with a smile and therefore probably meant something much worse.
She had married Jon Wylde a year before and gone south to House Wylde. Damon had sulked for a week afterward and denied it every time I brought it up.
Now, at 22, he was a knight in truth.
Ser Damon Vypren had earned his spurs two years ago after putting down a band of river brigands with considerably more competence than they deserved. He was taller than ever, broader through the shoulders, and somehow even more offensively composed than he had been at 17. Knighthood suited him in the same way a sword suited a good hand. He had his father's steadiness, his mother's sharpness, and just enough of my bad influence to occasionally say something improper when no one important was listening.
He was also, unfortunately, very good at tournaments.
Not win the whole thing and become the wonder of the realm, good, but good enough that Lord Lucias had decided it was worth sending him to King's Landing for the nameday tourney of Prince Joffrey Baratheon.
And because the gods hated me personally, that meant I was going too.
The road to King's Landing was long, hot, crowded, and smelled progressively worse the closer one got to the city.
We had ridden south with a small Vypren party: Damon, myself, two men-at-arms, a wagon carrying armor and supplies, and one chest Lady Lythene had personally packed with enough clean clothes to outfit a minor court. Damon said she had little faith in his ability to represent House Vypren respectably without supervision. I said she was probably right.
King's Landing announced itself long before its walls appeared. The roads thickened first, clogged with merchants, hedge knights, beggars, mules, nobles with bright banners, and enough carts to start a small war over road space alone. Then came the smell.
Gods.
Even with the breeze off the Blackwater, the city stank like too many people had been packed into too little space and then left to stew beneath the summer sun. Fish, dung, smoke, piss, mud, roasting meat, river rot, and humanity in all its glory came together in one foul cloud that rolled over the road like a personal insult.
I wrinkled my nose. "How many people live here?"
Damon, riding ahead of me, didn't turn around. "Too many."
One of the men-at-arms laughed from behind us. Damon merely shook his head and kept riding.
Then we crested the rise in the road, and King's Landing spread before us.
No matter how bad it smelled, no matter how much filth and noise and misery clung to it, the city was impressive in a way Fairmarket and even Riverrun could never quite be. It sprawled across the hills beside Blackwater Bay like something too large to be sensible, a great huddled mass of walls, towers, septs, hovels, markets, manors, and smoke. Ships crowded the harbor in numbers that made my head spin. The city walls rose thick and pale around it all, and above the jumble of rooftops, dominating everything, stood the Red Keep atop Aegon's High Hill.
Even from a distance it looked like power.
Not good power. Not noble power. Just power—old, dangerous, and very sure of itself.
"Well," I muttered, "that seems healthy."
Damon glanced back at me. "Nervous?"
"No," I lied. "Just trying to decide which part of the city looks most likely to murder us."
"That would be Flea Bottom."
"Comforting."
"You'll stay away from Flea Bottom."
"I heard the women there are very friendly."
"You're twelve."
"I'm preparing for the future."
"You're preparing for me to break your jaw."
I grinned. "There's the Damon I know."
He looked as though he regretted bringing me.
We entered the city through the River Gate after a miserable wait in line behind three wagons, two mounted knights arguing over precedence, and a merchant who insisted his salted cod was being unfairly searched by men too ignorant to appreciate fine fish. By the time we were through the gates I was sweaty, dusty, and one loud noise away from stabbing someone with a spoon.
King's Landing swallowed us whole.
Fairmarket had been busy. King's Landing was madness.
The streets surged with people so thickly packed that it sometimes seemed the horses moved only because the crowd had no choice but to part. Sellers shouted from every side. Bells rang in the distance. Children darted between wagons with the suicidal confidence of city-born vermin. Gold cloaks in yellow cloaks and black mail patrolled the streets in pairs, clubs and spears in hand, looking equally prepared to stop a riot or join one depending on the day.
Everywhere I looked there was something new. Silk from the east hanging in market stalls. Dornishmen in bright colors walking beside septons in drab robes. Sailors from half the known world. Beggars with stumps where hands should have been. Fine ladies carried in litters while naked little children splashed in gutters not ten feet away.
The city was a wound covered in gold leaf.
And I could not stop staring.
"Talion," Damon said without looking back, "close your mouth."
"I'm taking in the grandeur."
"You look like a trout."
"An appreciative trout."
He sighed, but there was no real bite in it.
We were lodged not in the Red Keep—House Vypren was respectable, not exalted—but in a large inn near the Street of Flour that had been rented out almost entirely to visiting tournament competitors and their retinues. It was crowded, expensive, and somehow still cleaner than half the streets we'd ridden through, which made it a miracle by King's Landing standards.
The moment we arrived, Damon's life stopped being his own.
That was the thing about tournaments no songs bothered to mention: before the glory and cheering and ladies throwing flowers came the endless labor. Armor had to be cleaned and checked. Saddles fitted. Lances inspected. Blades sharpened. Clothing laid out. Messages delivered. Meals fetched. Horses walked, fed, watered, calmed, and groomed. Every knight who wanted to look magnificent on the field required at least one exhausted squire making sure he did not forget his gauntlets.
So naturally I spent the next day buried under tasks.
By the time the morning of the opening events arrived, I had slept perhaps six hours total and was beginning to understand why squires in songs were always so eager to become knights. Not for honor. Not for glory. For the chance to finally order some other poor bastard around instead.
The tourney grounds had been raised outside the city walls in a broad field north of the Mud Gate, all pavilions, bright banners, lists, and temporary wooden stands packed with lords, ladies, merchants, and every fool with enough coin to buy entry. The sight of it hit me like a hammer the first time Damon and I rode out there.
Banners snapped in the wind from every corner of the realm. Crowned stags, direwolves, lions, trout, towers, flowers, suns, krakens, and sigils I couldn't name without a herald at my elbow. Knights in polished plate rode through the camp with squires and servants trailing behind them like ducklings. Armor gleamed in the sun. Horses stamped and tossed their heads. Somewhere a blacksmith cursed loud enough to wake the dead.
It was magnificent.
It was also one spark away from collapsing into vanity, debt, and broken bones.
"Try not to look so pleased," Damon said as we made our way through the rows of tents toward House Vypren's assigned pavilion. "People will think you've never seen a tourney before."
"I've never seen a tourney like this before."
"Yes, but there's no reason to advertise it."
"I'm a squire from the Riverlands, Damon, not a prince in disguise."
"You'd make a terrible prince."
"I'd make an excellent prince. I already have the arrogance for it."
"Only the arrogance."
I grinned and ducked into the pavilion before he could say more.
House Vypren's tent stood among the lesser riverlords, respectable if not grand, with green-and-blue fabric trimmed neatly and the Vypren sigil stitched above the entrance. Our neighbors were a pair of hedge knights on one side and a landed knight sworn to House Bracken on the other, which Damon considered unfortunate for reasons involving horse theft, border grudges, and "Brackens being Brackens."
The lists began just before noon.
I had expected excitement. Roaring crowds. Trumpets. The thrill of seeing knights thunder toward one another in clouds of dust and glory.
What I had not expected was terror.
Not my own, though there was some of that. Damon mounted in full armor looked suddenly less like the boy who had dragged me out of bed for training and more like a man who could die in front of me before sunset. Steel changed things. So did the lance couched beneath his arm and the way his horse danced beneath him, armored and restless, as if it too understood that this was not a game.
The first tilt passed in a blur of hooves and splintering wood.
Damon and the Tarly knight thundered toward each other so fast my heart stopped halfway through the charge. Their lances struck almost together. The Tarly boy's exploded against Damon's shield in a burst of splinters, but Damon's hit cleaner—high on the shoulder, enough to twist the other rider half out of the saddle.
The crowd roared.
I realized only then that I had been holding my breath.
"Seven hells," I muttered.
The second pass was worse. Damon's lance shattered on impact, but the Tarly knight managed to stay seated, and for one awful moment both horses swerved too close and I thought one of them would go down in a tangle of legs and steel. They didn't. They wheeled apart, lances were changed, and the herald shouted for the third and final tilt.
Damon won that one cleanly, knocking the other knight backward out of the saddle hard enough to send him sprawling in the dirt.
I shouted before I remembered squires were supposed to maintain some kind of dignity.
Damon advanced through the next round as well, though not without taking a hit hard enough to bruise his shield arm through steel. By the time he finally lost in the third match—to a knight from the Reach with a horse the size of a siege engine and a lance that hit like divine judgment—I was so wound up with nerves that I could barely get his helm off without fumbling the straps.
"You still have your head," I said
"Thank you, Talion. I hadn't noticed."
"You're bleeding."
"It's a split lip."
Damon pulled off one glove with his teeth and took the waterskin I shoved at him. Sweat plastered dark hair to his temples. His lip was indeed split, and there was a dent in the edge of his breastplate that made me feel faint just looking at it.
And yet he was smiling.
"You did well," I said.
Damon drank, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gave me a look. "That almost sounded sincere."
"I'm capable of sincerity."
"Rarely."
"Only because you make it difficult."
He laughed softly, and something in my chest eased.
That night the city seemed different.
Not safer, exactly. King's Landing would never be safe, not really. But as I walked behind Damon through the torchlit streets on the way back to the inn, carrying his helm beneath one arm while the noise of the city rolled around us, I felt the shape of my life more clearly than I ever had before.
5 years ago I had been a child at an inn by the crossroads, stealing moments by the river and wondering whether I'd survive long enough to matter.
Now I was here. In King's Landing. Squire to a knight of House Vypren. Carrying tournament armor through the capital of the Seven Kingdoms while Prince Joffrey celebrated his name day somewhere in the Red Keep above us.
The city still smelled awful. The nobles were still dangerous. The future was still a dark road full of war, madness, and enough political stupidity to choke a dragon.
But for the first time in a long while, I didn't feel as though I was waiting for my life to begin.
It already had.
And if Damon kept riding like that, I was going to need stronger hands, quicker feet, and perhaps a prayer or two for whichever fool expected me to remain calm while he hurled himself at armored men with a stick.
King's Landing, I decided, was a terrible place.
I could not wait to see what happened next.