Chapter 16: The Blood Cloak
ULF
Mira found me three days later on the Velaryon wharf, while I was walking a crate of Myrish glass down a gangplank.
She came at me sideways, half behind a coil of rope, hands open and empty like any beggar child working the ships. Nobody looked twice. That was the point of her.
"Got confirmation," she said, keeping her voice low. "The man meeting Cheese. His name's Harren. Former Gold Cloak, dismissed two years back for beating a prisoner to death during questioning."
I set the crate down on the boards.
"Where's he work now?"
"Butcher's shop. Flea Bottom, the one you followed him to. Lives in a room above it." She pushed a scrap of parchment into my palm. An address in a child's careful letters. "Drinks at the Pissing Goat most nights. Gets mean when he's drunk. Broke a fiddler's jaw in Maiden's Lane and nobody said a word about it after."
"Good work." I gave her three silver stags.
She looked at them lying in her hand instead of pocketing them. "Last time it was one."
"Last time I didn't need you to keep going."
"What did he do?" she asked. "The big one. What did he do to you?"
I picked the crate back up. She waited a while for an answer she wasn't going to get, then shrugged like it cost her nothing.
"They're meeting again tonight," she said. "Silk Street. After the bells."
Then she was gone into the crowd.
I got to the tavern two hours early and bought an ale I had no intention of drinking.
Corner table under the stairs, back to the wall. Hood down, because a hooded man in a corner draws every eye in a room like that. I sat with my sleeves rolled and my hands dirty from the docks and let the place forget me.
Harren came in near midnight. Up close he took up more of the doorway than he had any right to. Scars ridged the backs of his knuckles, white and overlapping. He didn't push through the crowd. The crowd opened.
He stood inside the door and read the room, slow, corner by corner. Old Gold Cloak habit that dismissal hadn't beaten out of him. When his eyes came across my table I was already turned toward the dice game at the next bench, groaning with the losers.
Cheese scurried in twenty minutes later. Nervous. Twitchy, shoulders hunched to his ears.
They put their heads close together.
I'd spent weeks on my hearing. Sitting in the fish market picking one voice out of forty. Not a trick. Just work.
I let the tavern noise fall away and pulled their table out of it.
"Passages are clear," Cheese was saying. "Checked them myself. Ratcatchers go through all the time. Guards don't even notice. Man with a sack and a stink on him, they look at the wall instead."
"And the layout?" Harren's voice was a low rumble under everything else.
"Got it all." Parchment slid across the table, folded in quarters. "Nursery here. Two exits. Servants' quarters next door. Guards patrol every hour, but there's a gap where the outer man walks the yard and the inner man goes for the stair—"
"How much time in the gap?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen if we're lucky."
Harren unfolded the parchment. Turned it. Held it low against his knee, out of the candlelight, and read it over twice with one thick finger tracking the lines.
"This is good. Real good."
A drunk sprawled onto my table.
He came off the dice bench backward with his arms wide and half his ale went across my forearm, and every instinct I had said put him on the floor. I let my hands stay clumsy. Shoved him off with a dockhand's shove, no more, and swore at him in the flat Flea Bottom vowels I'd been practising since I woke up in this body.
Harren's head came up. His eyes found me and stayed there while I could have counted three.
I called the drunk a name involving his mother and turned back to my cup.
The rumble started again across the room.
"So we're doing it?" Cheese said.
"Not yet. Need the word from—" His voice went down under the noise, and I only got pieces after that. Daemon's gold. When the time's right. What royal brats pay for.
Daemon. So he was in it already, this early. Not a rumour. A man's mouth in a tavern, saying the name for money.
Cheese giggled. Actually giggled, high and wet.
"Imagine. Us. Killing princes."
"Princess too, if the orders come through." Harren folded the parchment along its old creases and put it inside his shirt. "But we wait. No moving until we're paid and the signal's given."
Princess too.
My hand was flat on the table. I made myself lift it, slowly, and set it around the cup.
They stood. Harren dropped coins beside the candle and went out through the back. Cheese stayed, ordered more ale, and got steadily, happily drunk on it.
I counted to twenty and followed.
Three nights taught me the rest.
Dawn to dusk he worked the shop in Flea Bottom. He took a hog's spine apart in single strokes, no sawing, and the customers stood back from the block. He liked that they stood back.
Evenings, the Pissing Goat. He drank steady and never went past the edge of it. Knife on his belt, always.
Around midnight he'd come out the back door with a stagger in him. The stagger was a lie. He walked home through the darkest alleys in Flea Bottom, alone, no friends, no guards, because he'd decided a long time ago that nothing in those alleys could touch him.
Three nights, three identical routes. A careful man would have varied them.
Harren wasn't careful. He was cruel and he was certain, and those aren't the same thing.
My room, late. Candle burning down to a stub in its own grease.
I sat with the knife in front of me on the table. Freshly stoned. Light enough to hide under a shirt, heavy enough to finish what it started.
I was going to murder a man for something he hadn't done yet.
Marcus Cole had killed. In war, with orders. In the cage, with a referee and a doctor at the ropes. Always inside something that would tell me afterward that I'd been right.
No ring here. Harren had hurt nobody in this life but a fiddler in Maiden's Lane, and taken coin against murders he hadn't committed yet.
Kill him and I'm a murderer. Leave him and Jaehaerys dies screaming while his mother is made to choose which child it is.
I took Jaehaera's pebble out of my pocket and stood it on the table beside the blade. Dark veins through the grey. It won't break, she'd said.
*Don't die for them*, Helaena had whispered under the weirwood, gripping my hand hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
I'd told her I'd live for them. Living for them meant seeing to it that they got to live at all.
I fetched the pork shoulder I'd bought for this and set it on the chair back. Stiffened my fingers. Shigan. My hand went through meat and bone and out the other side, clean, no snag, no hesitation in the wrist.
Then Tekkai, sitting, hardening until my breath had nowhere to go. Two full minutes now. Long enough to take a butcher's cleaver on the forearm if the first strike missed.
The first strike wouldn't miss. Throat or heart. One thrust, no noise, no suffering, and Cheese inside the week by the same road. Nobody counts two dead men in Flea Bottom. People die there every night, and the Gold Cloaks don't write the names down unless somebody who matters complains.
This war is going to make monsters out of all of them. Daemon. Aemond. Men who'll burn a town and sleep well after.
Fine. I'd be first, and I'd be one on purpose, and not for a throne.
I slid the knife into the sheath under my shirt and pinched the candle out. Tomorrow night he'd leave the Pissing Goat at midnight and take the same three alleys he'd taken for three nights running.
I went down the stairs into the dark to walk them once more myself, counting paces.